Do you have any good and humorous chow line disaster stories?

In a Marine chow hall, every meal was a disaster. Funny how they can cook chicken a dozen different ways. If its baked, its raw in the center and everything else looks like a product of 1945 Hiroshima (and all ways taste like it)

I did a few weeks on mess duty. One time we got lettuce in. They came in big crates. HUGE heads of lettuce. They were so rotten they looked like the were covered in molasses. The mess NCO just said peal it back until you reach good product. Well, they were the size of base balls by time we did.

boot camp. one of my fellow recruits was so nervous that his stomach violently rejected the food that he had ingested...all the way across the table. We sat there in stunned silence having just been projectile vomited on & waiting for the hell that was sure to be unleashed upon him.

Imagine our relief when we heard the TI chuckle & walk up to the table. "Go wash off, Mt Vesuvius" was all he said as he tried so hard to suppress the laughter.

MAJ Robert (Bob) Petrarca, this story appeared on the who should eat last thread, but it also qualifies as a disaster in my opinion.
Once, I served as an HHC Commander (much to my dislike). I had a mess section capable of serving the entire battalion, but most of the time, they prepared and served chow just for the headquarters and headquarters company. The mess sergeant was a gourmet chef (I exercised my official duty of sampling with frequency!), and his mess section was a finalist for the Philip A. Connelly Award more than once. Not long after I assumed command, we headed down to chow for lunch. Who was the first person in line; the BATALLION COMMANDER! I've never been more embarrassed for the officer corps in my entire life than I was that day! Needless to say, I waited 'til the very last to eat, but I don't think he ever figured it out. I wasn't going to tell him!

Would referring to the fried rabbit on Easter Sunday as the Easter Bunny count?

I saw a guy on the mess decks of the USS Nimitz walking past the salad bar carrying his tray. He turned his head to sneeze since he couldn't cover his mouth, right at the salad bar. He would have just kept walking had many of us who saw it hadn't said anything.

Found Aphids in the broccoli once.....eating a salad one day before watch and was just looking at my food and found this grey thing in the broccoli. After examining it for a few minutes, found that it was an aphid....freeze dried to the broccoli. I got a hold of a first class (who is a good friend of mine) and he looked at it and went up the salad line and grabbed the vat of broccoli and toss it into the trash, went to Master Chief and I saw his face turn green after 5 seconds. Yeah, don't eat broccoli on deployment.

The real joke is that today's hamburgers were last week's meat ball surprise, which was the prior week's meat sauce that covered your spaghetti.

Or....

A friend of mine told me he was in the deep freeze on the ship with a friend of his who was a MSSN (Mess Specialist - Seaman). The MSSN was in the middle of breaking out some food when the MS1 comes by and does a chopping motion, slaps his hands together, and then makes a motion like he's using a manual mixing bowl. Well.... MSSN goes from talking food out of the deep freeze to throwing it out. My friend asks what's wrong. MSSN says, "You see what MS1 just did?" My friend says yes, not understanding the significance. MSSN says, "He just told me.... chop, chop, bitch... make me a cake!" LOL

I am Preventive Medicine, so my going thru chow lines can be pretty interesting since DFACs are one of the things I inspect. When I was going thru WLC, you could see the entire prep and cooking area from the serving line. Me, and another Preventive Medicine Specialist would make a game every meal time, to see how many violations we could see during the 1 minute walk thru of the line. I usually stopped at 10. But, one of our last meals before grad was a choice of steak and lobster or shrimp. I just went with the steak to be cautious. And rightly so I did. One of my SGL classmates was sitting across from me and he had gotten the lobster. He took one bite, spit it out, then asked me to smell the lobster. It had a very distinct ammonia smell. Told him that is not how its supposed to be, that the lobster is bad and he should inform the DFAC NCOIC. He came back 3 minutes later and said the NCOIC informed him that is how lobster is supposed to smell. To this day, I wonder what the school CSM was thinking when he read my end of course critique

The location was Fort Benning where I was for my BCT (loved it...but thats another story). We just got back from doing something out in the field and formed up in the CQ area to enjoy our lunch. As I'm sure everyone here can remember, there are at least a handful of guys who realize they made a mistake by joining the Military and look for any possible way to get out. Well, the individual I'm about to speak of tried numerous times only to fail......on this particular day his failed attempt was countered by some TLC of the Drill Sergeants.

He was in the last platoon that went through the line of chow. On his way back the guy faked a heart attack....we know he faked the heart attack because he started screaming he was having a heart attack. During this medical emergency he dropped his plate of food. At this point, we were a few weeks in and the DS (all five or six of them, I can't recall...but there was enough to not only surround him, but make it louder than a rock concert) were tired of him.....so with that, they decided, for this individuals safety, they would check his core temperature. Needless to say, that is the only meal I have ever ate where I was only a few meters from a guy having a thermometer shoved unwillingly up his ass.