When European governments plan for larger armed forces and longer deployments, food can look like the least demanding part of the problem: food production appears abundant, and a combat ration can seem little more than a packaged day of meals. Yet the military value of food lies less in its existence than in its condition at the moment of use. A ration counts only if it meets a nutritional and safety standard, has been tested and accepted, has survived storage, has been assembled into the format soldiers carry, and has reached them together with the means to heat and eat it when no kitchen exists. Each of those steps has its own capacity, its own suppliers and its own legal and contractual basis, and none grows automatically when a budget line grows. The question that matters for an expanding force is therefore narrower than the size of the food market and broader than the purchase of rations: under what documented conditions does additional purchasing become additional usable field-feeding capacity, and how much of that can actually be established from the public record of two European states that have organised the problem in different ways?