I do hope this thread has made its way into the Air Command Ivory Towers. Whilst we can chuckle about paper plates and reminisce about washing mess tins, it is frankly sympotmatic of the general decline in standards across all the Services.
I have no doubt that someone will bang on about value for money and flexibility along with a whole raft of other crap management speak being used to dress up a decline in standards as being a good thing, but that is what this is - as MRAF pointed out. On what planet do we now think that a baguette, a packet of crisps and a bottle of fizzy chemicals is deemed to be an acceptable standard for routine catering? That's the sort of thing you used to get on exercise if you were lucky because it was easy to do from a logs point of view; it's not the sort of thing you get on a daily basis because some contractor thinks it's an easy way to make a quick profit.
Unless somebody does something drastic and does it quick, the rot will be irreversible - if it isn't already. This is an Officers' Mess FFS, not some motorway cafe.