Food Choice of the Military

Meals of the Military

Some time ago, a man who my father works with returned from deployment. When he returned, he brought back some of the food packages that soldiers receive while they are on duty. I have often wondered how our soldiers prepare cooked meals and exactly what they eat. I always thought it must be difficult to prepare food for them, considering that it has to withstand different temperatures and has to be non-perishable, yet provide them with the necessary amount of energy and nutrition, and that the food must be pretty gross.

For the most part, the food turned out to be OK, but tasted like chemicals. The lack of variety was also somewhat disappointing. 

These food packages, called Meals Ready to Eat (MRE), typically contained two meals, a condiment like jelly or peanut butter, a large white cracker, some sort of fruit preserves or sauce, fruit flavored carbohydrate powder for a drink, a cookie or small cake of some sort, and cutlery. 

Image from mreinfo.com

This package had a bit more in the package than we had, but the same flat brown cardboard boxes and green and brown bags are the same. 

For the meals, I saw flavors like pork sausage with gravy, pork ribs, and beef stew. I had a bite of the beef stew, and it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. It was definitely stewy, but it didn't taste as chemically as I was anticipating.

If you are interested to see how to actually cook the meals, click here. 

 I personally liked the white crackers and the cookies and cakes the best. The same large white cracker was the same in every package, accompanied with jelly. The jelly tasted like it was almost certainly purple sugar chemicals, and I doubt they ever saw a grape. The cookies and cakes were actually quite good. I had an M&M cookie and an oatmeal cookie and carrot cake in the rest of them. The cookies looked like and tasted like a regular, yet rather large, off the shelf crumbly cookies. The carrot cake was hard, but it tasted OK. I never actually tried any of the fruit preserves or sauce, but my grandmother liked them well enough. The only things I really couldn't stand were the carbohydrate drinks. The only flavor they had in any of the packages was orange, yet if it hadn't been labeled on the package as so, I wouldn't have been able to tell what the flavor was. It was simply orange chemical water. 

Image from theepicenter.com

The crackers were actually pretty good. They tasted alright on their own or with peanut butter or a better jelly than the one provided.

Here is the jelly packet. I never saw any peanut butter in any of the packages, but I have seen some in pictures online. The crackers actually tasted pretty good with peanut butter as opposed to the jelly.

Here are the different fruit preserves or sauces that were in the package. 

After opening the package of pineapple, there is a thick grey plastic bag that holds the actual fruit.

When I opened the bag and smelled the fruit, it also smelled like chemicals. I never tried any of the fruit, but apparently it isn't that bad.

When I made the orange drink, it basically looked like orange Gatorade. Nothing too fancy.