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The Future of MREs
jonerik writes: "MSNBC features this article today about scientists at Washington State University who are attempting to perfect a way to add two staples of American cuisine - eggs and macaroni & cheese - to the US military's MRE ration packs. The problem has been that MREs need to have a shelf life of three years. The scientists have focused on microwaving the rations during the packaging process instead of the traditional method of boiling the contents (which alters the smell and color of eggs and cheese and makes pasta soggy)."
MREs
They look nice. I'll have a #3 please.
Our company works with the military quite a bit, and I've had an occasion to try an MRE. They're actually kind of cool. They come with their own (chemical) heat source and re-heat the foods pretty rapidly-- It uses technology similiar to those little handwarmers I use to have when I was a paperboy. As I recall, you'd boil em to "reset" em.. (I think the MRE heatsources are one-use)
In any case-- it's okay-- better than freeze dried anything-- but I still wouldn't like one of them falling on my head from the skies above-- it's not *that* delicious.
Didn't these scientists ever go to college?
You open the eggs, macaroni and cheese. A capsule inside explodes, instantly cooking the meal to perfection.
Mmmmm... incinerated gruel.
-Jeepthang
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High-Res Beer Bottle Collection
It's a conscious decision to spend money on our soldier's comfort and happiness. I can advocate that.
I mean, it's not any more wasteful than spending money designing and creating newer and bigger SUVs or creating and marketing XBoxes.
GPL Deconstructed
Look at menus 10, 11 14 and especially 13.
How come Cheese Tortellini doesn't suffer from the same problems as Mac&Cheese as described in the article (pasta goes mushy, cheese tastes burnt) ?
Macaroni and cheese?
What next?
Peanut butter and jelly?
I can see it now.
"Hey, soldier. Get up at the crack of dawn, lug around a hundred pound pack through all kinds of terrain, in all kinds of weather.
Maybe get shot at. Maybe have to shoot back.
Maybe get your sorry butt killed.
But if you manage to make it back to camp, you can have three year old mac and cheese."
Bet the recruiting lines are a mile long.
...is that there's actually a vegetarian MRE.
:-)
You don't win wars with sal-ad! You don't win wars with sal-ad! You don't win wars with sal-ad!
~Philly
MRE's a great for camping in bear country. The bears are smart. They learn to knock down bear bags. They'll suck your maple syrup dry, eat your oreos, tear the tent apart, even break the latrine down if you try to put food in it. But they can't smell the MREs and don't touch them. Good thing too, we had a diabetic with us.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Anyone ever wonder why the military, with its tomes of regulations and procedures succumed to the "Rock or something" on an MRE?
... so on the instructions there is a picture of a rock with an MRE leaning on it, and the caption for the rock is "Rock or something"
The little heater thingies (mmm, smell like acid), need to lean at an angle to work good
I may sound like a complete moron, but man, in the middle of the desert with no sleep, some dude brings up "Rock or something" and I keel over in laughter.
We may critisize the yanks for the americanisation of our world especially for spreading their crap tv, fast food and pop music to all 'corners of the globe', but i'm just SO glad they haven't contaminated Australia with that.... yet.
1) When they ate Rations on the last Enterprise I thought "Gee that seems impraticle." But after reading about the MRE's, it seems like its entirely possible.
2) These menus seem far more varied than that of the meals I remember eating in my college dorm. So maybe that's why people liked being in ROTC... (j/k)
This is another situation where military technology is not just useful to the military. While I agree that way to much money is spent on the military, MREs are usefull to a lot of other folk as well. The firefighters that put out forest/range-land/wild fires during the summer make great use of MREs. I have, on occasion, taken them out into the field with me for several night trips. MREs provide a good number of calories (something like 5-6k per package) at a reasonable cost in mass. On MRE is generally enough for two meals, though only the first one is hot.
Rhapsody in Numbers
my brother used to bring a sampling home with him after a few weeks of training or what not while in the army. A little sampling of what he had to sustain himself on when in the field for weeks @ a time. Good stuff.
There's still one that sticks out in my memory, Chicken and Rice. Man, that chicken and rice was tasty. Basically came in a nice vacuum sealed heavy-duty plastic baggie. You cut off a corner and squeezed it like toothpaste to eat. (Or, if you had a mini-set of folding pans, you could heat it up in a little aluminum cup and chow down)
But the dehydrated fruit, a little 2.5x2.5x.25 inch square of styrofoam looking fruit was n-a-s-t-y. So was the grape drink mix that came with some of the MRE's..The orange powder however, mmm, now that was nice, almost like Tang.
LBCs - Lazy Boy in a Can, for the soldier out on the battlefield that needs to relax for a while. Can be used with the ...
SBCCs - Superbowl Commericals in a Can, for the soldier caught out in battle and unable to tune into the superbowl. After all, who cares who wins or loses, the commercials are what count!
BJCs - Blowjob in a can. This was created by the sex toy industry, and was licensed by Uncle Sam for the "protection" of our boys overseas. (Has been tested under battlefield conditions.)
OBLCs - Osama Bin Laden in a Can, developed by army engineers with help from the "Dolly" project, this secret device will be used if we are unable to locate the real Osama Bin Laden. Everyday soldiers can have fun with their Osama in a Can by making him do silly stunts, and recording the insane hijinks on....
CCC - CamCorder in a Can. Send in your funny battlefield tapes to America's funniest Battlefield videos, and win an MRE!
I just had waaay too much fun with this ;)
-- Dan
Actually, the Chili Macaroni went great with the Jalapeno cheese, except that they were in two different MRE's, so you either had to trade your poundcake for the cheese or steal another MRE.
I became an artist for putting together the perfect MRE. Some things trade for higher value, and eventually I would end up with something completely different than what I first grabbed, or with twice as much. It's like currency, only you that you can not only trade it and trade it again, you can also eat it.
As far as the freezedried items, the freezedried peaches are supposed to go with water, but they taste better crispy. They literally melt in you mouth!
MRE's are great in the field, because, unlike the hot food served in the field, you can eat them without having to imagine and pretend you are eating food at every chew. The only thing is that a regular diet of MRE's will leave you a little, well, plugged.
Bascially it is like this:
Temp - Shelf Life (months)
120 - 1
110 - 5
100 - 18
90 - 30
80 - 48
70 - 66
60 - 84
= 50 - 96
In my other, non geek, life, I am a National Guard officer, with a fair amount of time on Active Duty. The first MREs were absolutely awful. Anybody else remember the dehydrated pork or beef patties? YUCKKKK! They were uniformly horrible ( BBQ beef, ham slice, wieners), until a few years ago they started adding ones with actual taste, like jamaican jerk pork, and so forth. Now they want to go back to the inedible bland menus, because the percieve it to be "comforting"? Are they high? If you are cold, lonely, and a long way from home, a plastic envelope of several year old eggs will not make you feel any better. I want more spicy foods in the field, not less. ( At least they do include a tiny bottle of hot sauce.)
MMM... There nothing quite like Fresh MRE's! :)
In my previous life as a defense contractor, some reservists brought some MREs in to the lab... This was right when they came out, replacing the K-Rations (C-Rations?). They were totally nasty. Including the Spaghetti&Meatballs...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The three great tastes that go great together!
Hmmm How about Reese's Eggs&Macaroni&Cheese Cups?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Back in the day, before flavor was engineered to survive a 3 year shelf life, MREs were fondly referred to as "Meals Rejected by Ethiopians."
Anyone know other trivia?
I hate the fact that most Army units get screwed and are only given MREs for long periods of time.
I served as an OPFOR Support Platoon Leader at the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, CA. Unfortuantely for guys like you, the chains-of-command of visiting units (especially Guard units) were too lazy to bother to get hot food, and would just go for an entire 3-4 weeks on MRE-only for their soldiers because its an easy out. Don't take this as an accusation or anything against you and your unit, I just think its a shame that the Army has spent millions of dollars working on ways to get fresh food for Joe, and most leaders choose to just use MREs.
The US Army has mobile kitchens, and tons of creative ways of getting hot chow to soldiers, unfortunately most of the officers are too lazy to coordinate that kind of support.
Now there is a difference when training for war and just being stupid, but after an extended period of time, the nutrition of troops becomes highly important. MREs are meant as a supplement to regular meals - we usually went Hot-MRE-Hot for Break/Lunch/Dinner, for normal missions, and used that as a baseline.
Naturally that changes according to the mission, but you'd be suprised at how many REMFS (Rear-echelon motherfuckes) would rather say "We'll go all-MRE" because they are too lazy to plan hot food for their soldiers.
Not everyone eats meat, and not everyone eats every kind of meat. The MREs that were being dropped to Afghans were vegetarian MREs. There are also vegetarian soldiers in the US Army, and Muslim/Jews who cannot eat Pork and Hindus who cannot eat Beef.
In Basic Training, we called them the three-way lie:
They were not edible
They were not ready
They were not a full meal
Mine, Canadian Army, hers, American Navy. Cousin who is a marine, another a helicopter pilot, and a third a technician.
The cousin who is a marine is also a vegan. Yah - hilarious - the vegan marine. She is in Afghanistan right now - wonder what the hell she eats. No dairy, no eggs, no seafood, no poultry, and no meat.
I was a vegan for a few years - pretty tough to find food in a supermarket that has no dairy. Imagine what it's like when your food comes in a grey plastic bag.
Does anybody else remember C-Rations? They were the predecessor of MREs. They came in a cardboard box, full of little OD green cans. You haven't lived until you have eaten Ham and Eggs, cold, out of a can. See Army Chow and Other War Atrocities by David Thayer, for a look at Army chow in the pre-MRE era.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
In canada we typically call them REM's (Ready to eat meals) or Individual Meal Packs (IMPs) however it is a similar idea.
The difference however, is that the Canadian ones taste GOOD. You usually get:
1. Your main meal. (things like mac and cheese, stew, salsbary steak, chicken, chili etc)
2. Tea.
3. Coffee
4. Hot Choclate
5. Choclate Bar
6. Some kinda fruit based destert
7. A little bread loaf
8. Peanut butter, jam, salt/pepper and sometimes spices
9. Some bonus items like instant mashed potatoes, instant dressing..
I remember really enjoying these things. I believe they had a shelf life of about 4-5 years.
*mmms just thinking about them*
Smilee
BTW. I think I enjoyed them more then the hot food we sometimes got shipped while were in the bush.
The breakfast versions of the Canadian Forces IMP (Individual Meal Pack) has contained Macaroni and cheese since at least the 1980s, and although it is no longer available now they also served a mean "ham & egg omlette". For anyone who has seen this notorious "omlette" it was like a compressed rubber sponge in a foil packet with ham floating at the bottom. Some people despised it, I thought it was rather good. I also know that the shelf life of these meals was 3 years. Maybe the cold up here helps them keep longer.
If you want to get a good idea of what the Canadian meals are like, check out the bottom of this page. MREs and the number each soldier gets a day vary greatly from country to country. No shitting but the French get pate de fois gras and a little wine in their rations, although they only get one box of rations for the whole day.
Canucks get 3 packs a day, each worth between 2500 and 3000 calories (soldiering takes a lot of energy), similar to the Americans they are rather formulaic in there content but much more substantial: the first foil pouch contains a main course (chili con carne, chicken breast, even cabbage rolls to please the Albertans), the dessert pouch (sliced peaches, pinapple spears, or the nasty cherry cake) follows, but the best part shall always remain the "goodie pack". Not only will it include the strangest brick of bread you've ever seen, it is also guaranteed to contain various condiments, juice crystals, soup, coffee, tea sugar and whitener, lifesavers (oh the irony), an after dinner mint (yes, really), a toothpick and either a candy bar or cookies. You can also expect to find matches, an industrial strength napkin, a long neck spoon (so your fingers don't get dirty) and best of all, a moist towlet (field shower is the other term that comes to mind). Much more substantial than the Americans but still lacking both the infamous bottle of tobasco sauce and the self heating pouch.
IMPs also include a survey as to how you liked your meal, a great bit of fun to fill out when your bored in the field. I can proudly say that because of my input they added mini-Ritz crackers and mini-Oreo cookies to the array of snacks that come with any ration pack. Whenever a Canadian soldier stuck in the mud or snow of the ubiquitous "field" looks into his/her ration pack and smiles to see they got mini-ritz cheese sandwiches rather than the instant (and useless) chocolate pudding that I helped contribute to that smile.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
If you put an MRE heater in a snapple bottle full of water and screw the lid back on the snapple bottle will explode.
Several years back, my school decided to get rid of this Civil Defense Postapocalyptic Nuclear Shelter/Hospital that they had in the basement.
Apparently, if the Commies ever dropped the Big One on NYC, the survivors were supposed to live on water, crackers, and hard candies. The water was all gone by the time we went in there, along with the Geiger Counters (which I really wanted - apparently at some point some public agency came and took them back), but there were still maybe an 8' high 6' wide 18' long stack of all these boxes of candy and crackers, packed with various dates around 1963. There were big cardboard boxes with a Civil Defense logo on the side, the words SURVIVAL CRACKERS or CARBOHYDRATE SUPPLEMENT on the side, and inside were either 6 tins of crackers (~40 pounds total) or 2 45 pound tins of red and yellow hard candies.
Both were still good in '99 when we cut open the tins and tried. Crackers tasted pretty nasty and dry, but the candy was delicious. I still have stored in an airtight container some candy that was dated October 1963, I'm waiting for October next year so I can eat 40 year old sour balls.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
I'm not a military man, so I may just be talking out of my ass here, but what's wrong, exactly, with rice? I mean, it packs light, lots of carbohydrates and vitamins, easy and quick to cook, and can be flavored (and taste good to boot) with anything from plain old salt to spicy cajun jambalaya and chinese mixes (and of course meats and veggies when they are available). How long does an MRE take to heat up? A tin can full of water, and handfull of rice, dump in a few spices, shred a few sticks of beek jerky and in under seven minutes I've made myself a high energy, hot meal that tastes great.
Maybe I just don't understand the logistics of it, but I would think if I was given a choice of carrying around a 5 lbs package of MRE's that will last me a couple of days vs. a 5 lbs bag of rice that will last me weeks, I would have to go with the rice...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
As far as the freezedried items, the freezedried peaches are supposed to go with water, but they taste better crispy. They literally melt in you mouth!
*saliva beings to flow*
man its been too long. those peaches were so good =)
I ate my sig.
So this is probably a recruiting pitch. Can you see it now?
Definatly inspires me to want to join and get shot at in some foreign country...
Read the other comments on this story and you'll find that there are a hell of a lot of vets here, and a fair number of active-duty as well. My experience of war was up close and personal (I was a medic in Desert Storm) and I don't think I'm the only one. Maybe you'd like to look beyond the stereotyping -- "geek" and "soldier" are not only not mutually exclusive, they're actually correlated.
As for why -- technology for killing is still technology, and therefore interesting to geeks. And sometimes that technology, regardless of its original intended purpose, turns out to be pretty damn cool all around. Everyone knows how DARPANet became the Internet; do you also know that modern emergency medicine is almost entirely based on battlefield experience in Korea and Vietnam, or that modern commercial air travel grew directly out of the WW2 bomber industry?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I voted Browne, Libertarian. I just think that I value the food and happiness of my soldiers out in the field.
GPL Deconstructed
[T]he military is often on the bleeding edge of technology.
Personally, I always liked to think of my time in the military as being on the "leave-the-other-guy-bleeding" edge of technology.
They that would sacrifice their
WHAT?! You dare denigrate the dehydrated pork patty, mister? There was a "#1" on that package for a reason!
Admittedly, you couldn't eat it dry and like it (tasted like cardboard and chalk-dust). (But it was still better than the slime-encrusted weiners).
Like most of the first generation MREs, the blessed pork patty required preparation...fill the little plastic baggy about a third full with water and let it rehydrate...throw in some of your cheese-spread, a crumbled up cracker, and some tobasco. UMMM, good! The best MRE of all time (at least until I got out in '97).
Of course, in those days, we weren't lucky enough to get individual bottle of tobasco...it was just one big bottle to the case of MREs. Then they started putting individual bottles in *some* MREs. It wasn't until generation three or four that all MREs came with hot sauce.
(And does anyone remember the short-lived dehydrated strawberries? They were even better than the dehydrated pears. Sadly, they were only packed in chicken a la king and chicken stew for a short time in generation two).
If you have to talk about BAD MREs, let's talk about omelette with ham...or maybe tuna with noodles (the only saving grace was that it came with the chocolate nut cake -- the absolute finest piece of MRE cuisine ever).
I'd better stop now before I get all worked up.
I was wounded for life during my 1st NTC rotation. I was with a mechanized infantry battalion. We brought bunches of T-rats (think really big family-size metal boxes of food).
After our first week, the only T-rats that we had left were (1) barbecue pork and (2) rice. For the next two weeks it was BBQ and rice for lunch and dinner. It was literally years before I would eat barbecued anything.
There are two major problems with this story. "The problem has been that MREs need to have a shelf life of three years. The scientists have focused on microwaving the rations during the packaging process instead of the traditional method of boiling the contents (which alters the smell and color of eggs and cheese and makes pasta soggy)." What?!?! As one who has suffered through "Omlette With Ham" too many times, I can assure you that eggs have been on the menu. Even today there's "Buttered Noodles" and "Pasta With Alfredo Sauce." A quick check of the menu linked to shows even more pasta dishes. What it doesn't show is "Pork Chow Mein." What am I going to eat when my unit runs out of those? I still miss the "Spicy Meatballs And Rice In Tomato Sauce." Now that was a meal.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
This is the same WSU that invented a cheese canning process during WWII for military purposes. You can still order it from their creamery in assorted flavors. The Cougar Gold in particular is good; it's the only cheddar-type cheese I know of that is aged for a full year.
-- Jeff Paulsen
I bought some MREs off a survivalist website just to see what they were like. Most of the stuff was tasteless/bland/pure sugar, but edible. The main course in each case, however, was utterly rancid and inedible. I tried one bite of the "teriyaki beef" and nearly lost everything else I'd already eaten. That was the worst. I feel truly sorry for the armed forces having to eat this crap. No wonder the Afghanis wouldn't eat the MREs the US dropped on them.
It seems like a joke for them to try to figure out how to include eggs and such when it seems clear they have quite a bit of work to do to even make the current MREs better than dog food.
Because many people in the military are geeks.
:] ). Navy personnel, in order to keep from going bored out of their minds, master 3 or 4 jobs as well as their primary MOS, and they are good at all of them. Talk to a Air Force or Navy tech guy sometime that works on radar or AWACS type of technologies. They have to go to military training school (In the AF its Keesler AFB Miss.) for over a *year*. IE they dont take classes like humanities, and the classes are 8 hours a day, and it does deal with theory and real *hands on* experience working on the equipment.
Especially in the Air Force & Navy -- if you are in a Comm unit, you essentially have a "white collar" job. Air Force personnel dont get up at oh dark hundred hours in the morning to run, they wait until 3 weeks before the yearly fitness test to get in shape. (I can speak from personal experience here
In short, dont forget the first computers where designed for military purposes, the first PC (Altair) was designed by an Air Force engineer.
These military guys and gals know there stuff and take *pride* in what they do (ideas that may be to old-fashioned to many on this site, but it works in the military, trust me)
So yeah military postings do have a hell of alot of relevance to this site.
The "Humanitarian Daily Ration" is vegan. "The components are designed to provide a full day's sustenance to a moderately malnourished individual. In order to provide the widest possible acceptance from the variety of potential consumers with diverse religious and dietary restrictions from around the world, the HDR contains no animal products or animal by-products, except that minimal amounts of dairy products are permitted."
Yep. During my nine years in the Air Force (1978-87) and three years trotting around Army bases as a contractor, MRE's were the second worst "meal" I ever encountered. Basically, these were plastic bags of mystery goo, which had been reheated in a pot of boiling water.
...), so I do have sympathy for those WWII soldiers that got C-rats or worse (K-rats, like a candy bar designed by a sadistic drill sergeant) for months at a time. But overall, I'd rather eat cold C-rats than warm MRE's, unless they've considerably improved the process since then.
The worst food: Air Force mess hall food, trucked out to a firing range 30 miles of bouncy gravel road away. Apparently there was a steam table or something in the truck to keep it hot, but after being kept hot for over an hour, we weren't sure whether the green goo had once been peas or green beans...
OTOH, the old C-rations (Korean War surplus, I think) weren't bad, if you didn't have to eat them too often. These were little boxes of canned foods ("tins" if you're British). Even the cake for desert was canned, and pretty good, at least compared to the freshly and badly cooked stuff at the mess hall... The selection was rather limited, and in particular, there aren't very many ways canned meat can come out (spam, spam, spam, spam,
And no way could rats gnaw through a C-rat can...
Accomodating troops' nutritional needs and providing a semblance of gastronomic comfort has been a problem even further back than the C rations in Vietnam. For example, here is a site describing the K rations used in the field.
For what it's worth, some Army cooks were able to work wonders with not much more than this kind of stuff. Dad, an Ordnance Corps guy, one day came across an infantry outfit in a not-all-that-rear area that was getting fed from a field kitchen that definitely had its act together -- Dad was awed that the cooks had even made soup and baked some fresh bread. It had to have been the first real meal these dogfaces had eaten since they'd gone into the line in France.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->