OK dallas, I will have to spell this out using really small words for you... your experiences of flitting off to the states on jaunts of fancy spending a fortune are long gone. As an ascot operator, I have not had a westbound route in three years. I have operated to 5 airfields which were not in the AOR in the past 4. It very much sounds like you havent been around the pointy end for some while now.
You haven't explained how crew members, often tasked at short notice for compassionate and medevac taskings, sometimes authed to 24 hour augmented crew duty ops, are supposed to prepare a safe foodstuff to take with them for the flight. Callout at 2 AM, where are they supposed to by their food from, and safely? You cant. I cant guarantee the sandwiches Mrs Vin Rouge prepared at home are safe to consume, once they have spent an age in the heat on the way to work and then refrigirated, and neither can you. Inflight, on long-duration trips IS a cost of the mission! As I have said above, it is necessary to have correctly prepared and refrigerated food available to the crew, unless you want your pilots going down with Delhi belly half way home from Nairobi. Where do you suggest we get our inflight from there? Or how about Kabul? Baku? Although the HLRs are getting smaller, I would still prefer to eat this than some crap from Cris Kebabs in akrotiri. Get real, are you really expecting three man flightdecks to prepare a full meal for themselves during a hectic crew duty day? Dont you think they are busy doing other stuff, like operating? How about the guys in theatre that are operating upwards of 8 sectors per day, typically engines-running half of it? How are they supposed to eat unless inflight is provided?
You mention the supermarket sweep. There are numerous regs which do not allow this to take place unless inflight cannot be provided at the airport. Have you seen the price of crew inflight at airports? I am guessing you havent. It often costs as I have said before, upswards of $200 per crew member, and I aint talking about lobster thermador. I am talking about a few kebab skewers and a chicken curry. Its often much cheaper to grab what you can at the supermarket, even in your limited experience that this is not the case. I bet what they bought in supermarket, whilst that could be considered excessive by yourself (ever heard of a crew duty extention or airbourne retask?) would have still cost less than a single lay-up from a big international.
I suggest we have enough on our minds, fatigue is one of the biggest enemies we face at the mo, degrading performance further often at the most critical stage, at the far end of extended crew duty days. I cant believe we are even having this argument. And as I have said before, unless it was a medivac/comp A, I have no qualms of refusing to fly if im not in a fit state to do so. feeling hungry is well covered by 550, I plan to stick to the regs like glue if they force this in.