The Gundecker

When I joined the Navy, one of the first things I was told was that “at least the food is good.” Whoever tells you that does not have your best interests in mind, and they are not your friend.

There are many things to hate about the Navy’s food, but one of the most contentious meals you’ll ever get from a Navy galley is Taco Tuesday. I’ve lost friends because they’ve said in private that they didn’t mind Taco Tuesday, and I can’t trust you if you don’t have any kind of moral compass.

It’s a requirement onboard every surface ship that I’m aware of, mandated by Big Navy to be in the rotation, which is the most firm proof that the higher ups hate us and don’t want us to be happy. Whoever made that decision deserves for their ID to be wrapped in duct tape and hidden in the overhead.

Why is Taco Tuesday such a reviled meal, fit for consumption only by the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Khan in hell? Let’s talk about your options:

Ground Beef Tacos

The ground beef tacos, that most Caucasian of Mexican foods, consist of either a hard shell taco or a soft tortilla, ground “beef,” and a buffet bar kind of setup with wilted lettuce, soggy tomatoes, shredded American cheese, and if you’re lucky, pickled jalapenos.

The “beef” is almost certainly not beef. It’s a grey, textureless concoction that tastes like almost nothing at best, and rancid at worst. My running theory is that it’s cadaver meat. Maybe not human (but maybe), but absolutely whatever it was died of natural causes and spent time in the sun before being ground up for consumption by Sailors.

It’s seasoned with some kind of mixture that tastes like someone had only ever heard of Taco Bell, and they figured they could whip up something that kind of tastes like that in about 3 minutes and without reading the label on the seasoning bottles.

They taste like shit, but if you want to make it taste a little better, crush everything up into a jailhouse taco salad and try and put other shit on top. You won’t make it taste better, but it’ll make it taste just neutral enough that you won’t immediately throw up.

Chicken Fajitas

Always served with tortillas that have been frozen, defrosted, then re-frozen, then defrosted, then lost underneath a couch for six months and served.

The chicken itself is a noxious combination of old, tough chicken, soggy vegetables, “red” seasoning (which tastes like nothing but the color red), covered in tapwater then served.

This is generally one of the worst options. It’s even a stretch to call it healthy, because it absolutely does taste like carcinogens, but it will help you lose weight by virtue of not being able to digest an ounce of it before it explodes at high velocity out of your ass.

Refried Beans

Have you ever had really good refried beans, the ones that are warm, moist, greasy, and pleasantly salty that you get from good taco shops?

Okay, imagine that, but instead they’re dry, devoid of seasoning, and generally served at whatever temperature the can they came out of was sitting at.

When I say “dry,” I mean scientifically dry. So dry they can be studied in a lab for being entirely absent of moisture. When you take a bite of this crap, you feel like a dog with peanut butter in its mouth. You have to chase it with water as a safety measure, because otherwise it’ll turn into a golfball-sized mass in your throat, and you’ll choke and die.

It tastes like I imagine construction adhesives in old Victorian homes would taste like. It doesn’t taste like beans, although it is ostensibly made from beans. It tastes like how paper mache looks.

Asparagus con Queso

Fuck this. Nobody is sure if it’s supposed to be a soup or a dip. It’s literally just government-brand Velveeta cheese, water, and canned asparagus.

It tastes exactly how you expect. It’s too watery to use as a dip or a condiment, but it’s too thick to be eaten as a soup, and if you try to eat it like a soup you’re a piece of shit. It literally feels like you’re shoveling gobs of lukewarm Velveeta into your mouth, with the texture only being broken up by sporadic pieces of asparagus stalks that taste like aluminum for some reason.

Nachos

Thank GOD that at least this exists. Nachos on Taco Tuesday is, in my opinion, the GOAT. Slow down, though, because being the GOAT of the Navy’s Taco Tuesday is like being the best quarterback at Applebee’s. It’s only in high regard because the other options are worse than bad.

It’s probably the only thing on the menu that turns the dial tentatively towards “decent.” The nachos aren’t good, but of all the other foods you might get on Taco Tuesday in the Navy, this one at least turns one eye warily towards thinking about being okay.

It’s just canned nacho cheese and stale tortilla chips. If you can tolerate canned nacho cheese, even enjoy it, you might be in good shape when they offer nachos. It’s served lukewarm, so when the cooks serve it to you it comes off the ladle in blobs and not a stream like the machine at 7/11, but take the little blessings as they come.

The chips are straight dogshit, because regardless of when the shipment arrived, they’re stale like cereal box cardboard. Aside from that, though, they’re not super different than the ones you’d get from a convenience store nacho bar, if the convenience store suddenly closed twenty years ago and nobody cleaned out the nacho bar since then.

The reason this is the lord’s chosen Taco Tuesday menu item is because it provides a vehicle for the worse food. If you have that ground cadaver meat, it’s not as bad if you put it on top of your nachos and then cover them in hot sauce and sour cream. If you get the chicken fajitas, you can throw them directly in the trash and get the nachos by themselves.

Spanish Rice

The Spanish Rice is a wild ride.

It looks like it has some seasoning in it, because it’s red, and you can see pieces of grey peppers in it, and some sad, dry pieces of tomato.

It tastes like plain white rice. It’s absolutely insane. It’s like you’re eating a hologram of Spanish Rice, but behind the hologram is just crunchy, undercooked white rice.

So if you enjoy white rice, this is fine. It doesn’t go with anything else. It would pair well with chicken fajitas, but you can’t get those because they taste like wet farts in your mouth.

Cheese or Chicken Quesadilla

This one could, to some people, take the title from nachos for being the best option on Taco Tuesday. It’s a stale, crappy tortilla heated to lukewarm, then stuffed with partially melted shredded American cheese, sometimes with pieces of canned chicken.

It tastes about how you imagine, it’s not good, it gets stuck to your teeth because the cheese is partially made from Elmer’s school glue, and the chicken was already geriatric when it was slaughtered and canned in the 80’s. It is, however, a marked improvement over the other options because it’s not completely offensive to the senses, and you can put a bunch of shit on it from the taco bar that makes it taste like something else.

Cholula/Tapatio/Texas Pete Hot Sauce

I’m going to include the hot sauce as a mention because even though it’s always available on the mess decks regardless of the meal, it is doing some HEAVY lifting on Taco Tuesday to make anything you get taste less like whatever the dish is pretending to be.

God bless you, hot sauce. You’re the hero we needed.

Final Verdict

Taco Tuesday is a very good reason to legitimately hate Tuesdays. If you store old sawdust in a used gym sock for months on end, that’s still an upgrade over Taco Tuesday.

There’s almost no upside. The only thing that eyeballs being palatable is either the nachos or the quesadilla, and that’s only because you have the opportunity to top it and throw enough flavor profiles at your face fast enough that you don’t immediately register that the other crap you put on it tastes like shit too.

It’s also worth noting that not all of these options are available every Tuesday. There will be Tuesdays where there aren’t nachos or quesadillas, and you’d be better served trying to catch a seagull and eating it raw, if you’re blessed to be close enough to shore that they might happen by.

If you’re underway during Taco Tuesday, beg and plead with one of the gym rats to give you a can of tuna or something. If you want to be a hero, be one of the first people in the mess line and throw yourself headlong onto the serving area, then roll around in the food so they have to throw it out.

What was your least favorite thing from the galley? Did you have cooks that convened some dark magicks to make Taco Tuesday taste better than hot dogshit? Let us know!