Food Know what this delicacy is?

"Good" is a relative term. The Kool-Aid will still taste like fake cherries. The rest? I'd only eat it if I was starving. I'm sure you can eat the rest of it but it'll be stale as hell, brother. MRE shelf live is advertised as 3.5 years. Assume double that for acceptable if kept in a cool, dry area. Your stuff? Ancient.

 

I kinda love how all MREs come with a bottle of hot sauce.

 

If you ever get the chance to eat one, you'll quickly realize why.

Granted, the military has really improved the taste lately.

 

I have eaten them...and I definitely used the hot sauce.

 

Oh, that's right... you played military wife for a long weekend once. God, what a horrible experience, I'd imagine.

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The important thing about MREs is that when you have a whole box, you can mix and match to create new meals.

"Ratfucking MREs" (opening several meals to get choice components) was popular before going out on missions.

Combining mashed potatoes with jalapeno cheese, making a PBJ, etc. Getting M&Ms was a major priority, too.

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The funniest part about MREs is how, after being in field without food for 36-48 hours, that you can actually smell when someone opens a peanut butter tube. You can smell that shit like 100 meters away in the woods in the dark. Then the hatred kicks in. "You're not supposed to have food!"

 

My father told me all about delicious cans of sustenance issued during the Vietnam era.

You'd be surprised at the pure delicious luxury of having a couple of MREs in your rucksack.

These military kids today... lightweight rifles and awesome rations. They don't know the suck.

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Anyway, several MRE entrees became legendary. Most notably, the "Fingers of Death."

That ration series was before my time, but as urban legend suggests, not a delicacy.

 

American mil rations really are pretty goddamn good. Rations from other countries--such as Canada--are novel but require adding hot water or other preparation that makes them less than ideal during the go-go-go operations that take place during "modern warfare" (god, I hate using those words together). I think I actually ate a hot MRE twice the entire time I was in uniform. You can eat them cold and, really, it saves a lot of time to just eat each of the cold components individually than trying to heat up the entree and "have dinner" off a paper plate (?) like you're at a fucking picnic.

That? That's for pussies.

 

Yep, there sure is huge source of harvest-ready flora and fauna in Afghanistan and Iraq for thousands and thousands of GIs to eat between endless patrols and the general operations tempo of life in a combat theater. No, wait... they're countries where the starving-ass locals have a hard time finding food. Hah, 3000-calorie-a-day soldiers. Soldiers today aren't mountain men. They're off-the-street kids, some who have never seen a body of water before, that are expected to carry a rifle and 100 pounds of bullshit on their back. Skill set includes how to shoot a rifle like you're still back in Vietnam, jumping out of perfectly ancient aircraft, the proper use of M118 sheet explosive and how to lay in a hole in the rain for 3 days straight.

/diatribe

Oddly enough, MREs were preferred over some of the dining hall options available from the infamous KBR in 2003.

"Those aren't eggs, man. That's spackle." You wanna talk about fraud... it was KBR calling that shit food.

 

maybe they need to carry around some hummus and a couple of coloured olives. that'd do the trick...well at least it'd taste better than the shit they give the soldiers.