An interesting article, but I'm not sure that the food was all that great, judging by the literature.
Two of my great uncles were on the Western Front (a third was killed and my grandfather joined up twice under age), and the general view was that Army cooks tended to ruin even good ingredients (something my Dad said had not changed when he did National Service in the fifities), and that food was cold by the time it reached the front line, and was often boring at best. And of course what the Army said you should have and what you actually got, and how you got it, were two entirely different things
'Maconochie' stew was generally disliked, and of course it was only behind the front line that they got proper hot food, so the stew would be eated cold. If you add the high fat content of much of the tinned food, the chlorine in the water and the general conditions, many soldiers suffered from the runs. Packages from home must have been great, if only to have something different. Its true that officers ate the same thing as their men, but officers had the funds to allow them to order tinned and preserved foods that their men could not, and if you read officers accounts of the Western Front, they often get hampers from Fortnums, etc sent to them.
Having said that, the British faired better than the French - one of the demands of the mutineers in 1917 was for better food, and the supply of hot food to frontline units was often chaotic. Apparently it was often little different from Napoleon's time.
Did the Army feed its troops better than the food they might have had in civvie street? In lots of cases, yes. The Boer War had shown just how undernourished so many potential recruits were, and in 1913-14 there was a great deal of unemployment amoungst agricultural workers. My two great-uncles ultimately joined up in part because there were no jobs to be had on the land, and they had families to feed - at least in the Army you got fed, and paid. Their younger brother, Billy, went to Australia while in his teens, again to find work, because there was none at home.
