From experience working on a modern square rigged ship... Thats a perfectly reasonable amount of food..... Sail handling is hard work. Although i was eating noticeably more bread and pasta than 18th century sailors. Probably cause we had a modern kitchen.

A sailors ration would almost always be handed over to the ships cook en masse for the preperation of large communal meals. You didn't get 2 pounds of beef, you and your mess mates were issued X * 2 pounds of beef to share in a stew. I've heard theories that Britains love of curries also came from sailors copying indian curries for thier communal meals instead of more european style stews.

Then the watch schedule made your eating patterns noticeably different to a modern breakfast, lunch, dinner routine. In this modern schedule you could easily go 10-12 hours without eating overnight and atleast for me my breakfast is always lighter than lunch and dinner.

Common watch schedules were 4 on 4 off, 6 on, 6 off, and god help you if you were on swedish watches. Depending on your watch schedules you might never get more than 4 hours sleep in a row, for months at a time, lack of sleep will make you hungrier on land and on sea. The watch system also makes the day of the week sorta irrelevant, if its 3am wednesday and the beef stew from "yesterday" is still warm then who cares? You're hungry.

Finally the cheese issued back then probably isn't the cheese you are buying in the supermarket today. That hard cheese and butter would last months at sea just fine. While the pork and beef were likely heavily salted, kept in barrels of brine that made it almost inedible until you washed it in fresh water. Something an individual sailor couldn't do, but a ships cook could easily handle in bulk.