Gulf Air's crew meals out of Bahrain have been virtually the SAME for the past 5 years. Greasy rice with various protein bits in it, "Indian style" vegetarian curry (that makes you fart beautifully), overcooket fettucini with -bizzarely- sweet-and-sour vegetable-something.
Hardly any bread is provided for crew.
Sandwiches on the other hand are usually a dig, soft (and of course sugar loaded) hunk of white bread roll with minescule filling. Again, the same selection for the past 5 years.
Crew, from the drivers to the most junior FA, are constantly asking for SOUP and salad from F-class.
Management take note! Surely a few jugs of soup are the easiest and cheapest meal to provide!!
Out of stations such as FRA, CDG, LHR, BKK, MNL etc we get to select from a 9-item menu. The wish-list gets handed to the catering guys on arrival and will be hopefully provided on the way home.
Recently, 12 out of 13 crew choose the same item. Fortunately someone in catering had the good sense to put the foot down and change a few orders. Imagine there was something wrong with the food. The entire crew would have been down and out.
As for buying your own meals, I think that Lufthansa lets their crew purchase/place orders on-line for their crew meals. Nice, big meals for a few Euros. I don't know if this is still going on, but they seemed to be happy.