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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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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
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.
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.
Does that also mean the military shouldn't provide Jewish, Muslim, and other minority religion chaplains for soldiers who follow those faiths? You can take "you are not special" too far. As long as it doesn't interfere with accomplishing the mission, taking care of GI's as individuals as well as part of a team is a very good idea.
Happy soldiers are better soldiers. The idea that enforced misery makes better soldiers has historically been a popular one in a lot of armies, but every time the US military has come up against one of those armies, we've beaten the hell out of them (e.g., the Iraqis. The Iraqi POW's I took care of lived better under our care than they ever had in their own army in peacetime. Probably one reason they were so eager to surrender.)
-- US Army infantryman 1987-1989, US Air Force medic 1989-1997
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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."