I’m pretty sure you’re remembering David Gerrold’s military-SF novel that has been published under several different titles:

• Yesterday’s Children (Ballantine, 1972, hardback & paperback)
• Star Hunt (Ballantine/Del Rey, 1977)
• Starhunt (Pocket Books, 1985 – the edition most people saw in the mid-’80s)

Gerrold later expanded the same material into the first volume of his “Star Wolf” series (Voyage of the Star Wolf, 1990), but the episode you describe is already present – almost word-for-word – in the earlier books listed above.

Why it matches:

• Setting – The whole story takes place aboard a large Terran Alliance warship (the destroyer-carrier LS-1187, nick-named the Star Wolf) that carries hundreds of crewmen and is hunting an alien raider during an interstellar war.
• Multiple viewpoints – Gerrold tells the tale through a rotating cast of bridge, gunnery, and engineering personnel.
• The “spaghetti and meat-balls” scene – Roughly halfway through the novel petty officer (engineering tech) Miguel Lopez comes off a long watch, heads for the mess deck, and decides to spend some of his accumulated “incentive points” on real food instead of standard synth-rations. He punches in an order for spaghetti and meatballs (the example used in the text). The autochef flashes:

“REQUEST DENIED – SPECIALS SUSPENDED. EMERGENCY RATIONING NOW IN EFFECT.”

Lopez explodes, insisting he has the points and earned the right to the meal. A lieutenant has to calm him down while other enlisted crew grumble.
• Cause of the rationing – Only a few hours earlier the captain had ordered cut-backs on power and on stocks of premium food because the ship might have to fight or make a long, high-energy run. Most of the lower-deck sailors hadn’t yet heard the announcement, so the complaints pour in just as you remember.
• Tone – The book is straightforward, fairly gritty naval SF, without parody or satire.
• Timeframe / format – First issued in hardback in the early ’70s, re-released in mass-market hardback and paperback several times; plenty of public-library copies were circulating in the early-to-mid-1980s.

So the novel you’re after is David Gerrold’s Yesterday’s Children / Star Hunt / Starhunt (all the same book; the 1985 “Starhunt” reprint is the one most likely to have been on a library shelf when you read it).