Coffee and Civil War

The word coffee appeared more times in soldier’s diaries than rifle, cannons, and bullets. Soldiers during the civil war were given the duty to cook for eachother. “Thrust into the bleak reality of war, soldiers were forced to adjust to a new way of life—and eating—on the battlefield”. To almost all the soldiers, cooking was new to them. The men always let their wives cook the food for them. The food the soldiers cooked wasn’t all that good. It was actually terrible in my opinion. According to a diary entry from Charles Not, a 16 year old Union soldier, they ate hard bread, raw pork and drank coffee. They used salty water from nearby bays, from their canteens, and water that not even their horses would drink but the soldiers had no choice but to use it. The eating condition were very terrible, so the soldiers were supervised by The Sanitary, the group’s job was to make the soldiers’ health and nutrition a top priority, according to “Civil War Cooking: What the Union Soldiers Ate”. This didn’t help much because their were millions of soldiers, so food servings were small and they didnt taste very good. They just cared about filling the soldiers up and keeping them from starving to death. I can’t imagine myself living like the soldiers did. I need to have good food in my stomach. A food I can’t live without is Chicken Parmesan. Heres a picture of the food. http://www.skinnytaste.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/skinny-chicken-parmigiana-550×733.jpg