I went for a cruise, once, on a cruise line called Holland America. Although Alaska was everything it was cracked up to be, cruising was not and I doubt I'll ever do it again voluntarily.
The free food on the lido deck was of extremely poor quality: greasy, cold, starchy, and overseasoned. The cooks were so tired from the 18-hour work days that they were dead on their feet. They moved at a snail's pace and you had to wait while someone laboriously made a sandwich for one person, then the next, then the next. Unless you spoke Tagalog (I had enough to get by) it was very difficult to communicate with the servers. The lines were very long and you had to stand in line separately for every individual course. There were no trays. So people were constantly milling around, bumping into each other, and there were kids running around or being stood by their parents on the service areas because there was nowhere else to put them and the parents were busy shuttling back and forth like robins trying to bring food and drinks back to their broods, who were preoccupied with the fun game of throwing the food on the floor. There was a children's program that kept the little darlings well entertained, but there was no system for feeding them meals so they were released on the unsuspecting public. Imagine, if you will, a school cafeteria with piped in Muzak, in which Mariah Carey is hooting and warbling constantly about how she needs her dream lover to come rescue her, and Celine Dion is bellowing about how her heart will go on and on, but you kind of wish it wouldn't. That's the lido deck.
There were a few other places to eat on the ship, such as a kiosk next to the pool, but the food was mostly crusty, old, or at the wrong temperature. Visualize a mall food court without the benefit of a health department inspector and you've mostly got the idea. The ice cream stands ran out of chocolate and vanilla on the second day of a 7-day cruise and there seemed to be no means for reprovisioning. Food was not actually available 24 hours a day; eventually someone came and scraped up the room-temperature glutinous slabs of what was probably supposed to be pizza.
In the main restaurant it took two or more hours to eat a single meal. People were coming and going and being seated at all different times, and the tables accommodated eight to twelve people. So if you arrived at your scheduled meal time, you could expect to stand in line for twenty minutes until space became free and then wait half an hour until they filled up your table and started serving. But the meals came out at different times, so there wasn't really a lot of opportunity to talk especially at dinner which was very noisy. Imagine, if you will, a 2-storey cavernous room with reflective acoustics decorated to resemble something from Louis XIV's aesthetic nightmare.
If you ordered off the menu you wouldn't necessarily get what you ordered, because they were out of a lot of things and because the servers genuinely couldn't understand you and didn't write anything down. The food was invariably delivered at room temperature because the dining area was critically understaffed. I learned, therefore, to order things that were supposed to be served cold: gazpacho soup and the like. The only things the servers understood were the different ways to cook steak: if you asked for anything such as dressing on the side, you were out of luck because of the language barrier. My Tagalog got me by to a point but my vocabulary was not sophisticated enough. The servers did the best they could, limping around from one station to the next in shoes held together by pieces dirty string. I regard their restaurant as a management problem.
There was so much human misery aboard that ship I'm surprised there wasn't a mutiny. You could overhear little bits of conversation among the staff, especially late at night, about how this one's sister or that one's nephew was getting to go to university because of the work done by one of the cruise ship staff.
We ate once in a "paid" dining area, which as a show of exclusivity was separated from the lido cafeteria by some painted particle board that did not go all the way to the ceiling. The sound from the lido cafeteria was not as loud but still too noisy to make conversation easy. It was supposed to be an Italian place but the pasta was overcooked and mushy, the salads were wilted, the green beans were clearly from a can, and the average Olive Garden would have put them to shame. For this, we paid the princely sum of $25 a head extra. So we decided that if the food was going to be mediocre anyway, we might as well eat the free stuff. We lived on fruit, fresh vegetables, coffee, salad, and things that were supposed to be served cold, greasy, and salty (such as salmon lox or maybe eggs Benedict).
Despite having very little opportunity to exercise I lost weight on that trip. That's how bad cruise food is.