TODAY'S MENU: MRE: Sloppy Joe's.
The brave men and women who serve at home and abroad do a job that many of us would not be willing to risk our lives over, and they do it very well. I can't vouch about the difficulty of these jobs, but I am sure they're very difficult, tiring, often times frustrating, boring, and probably even ridiculously petty. But they do it. And they do it with 200% of their effort.
The problem is, just like in any other occupational field, if you don't eat well, you won't work well; your performance takes a massive hit. You need something around the ballpark of 2,000 calories-3,000 calories to maintain optimal function, otherwise you're prone to irritable fits, sluggishness, lethargy, and hyperactivity. This thing provides you around 1,800 calories, and claims to be a 'good performance food' item. But is it really?
Well, that's according to this cardboard box from the Sloppy Joe's packet anyway. I doubt your average desk jockey needs this kind of energy. Why settle for something thats probably been sitting around a warehouse for close to a decade (or more), when you can easily get an equally filling (and overladen serving of calories) from a local Wendy's?
In fact, why WOULD you bother? Why AM I bothering?
Because I'm really good at wasting my money. And I really want to find out exactly what kind of crap they're serving to the troops out of country. And 'OK' does not cut it. Not unless you're stuck somewhere in field, with no Drive-Thru or Starbucks to get your calorie laden nonsense, and you really don't have much of a choice, except for what 's in your bag. Until they make a portable armored Starbucks Coffee food truck and deploy it, our troops aren't getting that 40 step tall-grande-venti vanilla soy-latter cappuccino macchiato-vague-italiano-mario-luigi coffee potion any time soon. You don't give the troops anything decent to eat, that gives bad morale Bad morale makes for bad soldiering, and bad soldiering makes us lose the war. That's why we ought to at least try what the troops are eating. Maybe then we'd all at least get an appreciation of the countless drive-thru restaurants we take for granted. Then we'd probably push for better combat rations for the troops. They deserve better.
Let's get started. When you open the bag, you get this:
Unpacked and 'Ready to Eat'. A meal fit for a peasant.
These things are packed in both plastic and cardboard, and I'm guessing they're probably around from 2010, since they added the Garlic Mashed Potatoes in that year, according to MREInfo (a site, dedicated to reviewing and eating military & survival rations, go figure). The main courses are packed in plastic bags and repacked inside the cardboard boxes. The jelly, coffee, fruit punch mix, salt & sugar, pound cake and vegetable crackers are packed just in vacuum packed plastic. I got this particular one from an Army/Navy shop nearby. (Source: http://www.mreinfo.com/us/mre/mre-improvements.html)
1. Vegetable Crackers
These crackers are not as crispy as the stuff you buy in the supermarket. These take a little more effort to break, they're probably meant to be that way. These crackers were baked for WAR, not for you to snack on at 2 AM while browsing Gawker and Facebook. I couldn't really taste anything 'vegetably' or anything particularly flavorful on these crackers, but Cheez-Its, or Vegetable Thins, they most certainly are not!
2. Garlic Mashed Potatoes
This was by far the most disappointing thing on the menu. It actually ruined my impression of MREs. As soon as I opened the packet, this whitish watery liquid started leaking out onto my plate, and somehow stubborn 'potatoes' would not come out (I know what you're thinking, shut up). I ended up having to squeeze the bag with my fingers like stuck toothpaste on a nearly empty tube.
The 'Garlic Mashed Potatoes' weren't really potatoes at all, more like overly caked powdery 'potato' flavored 'stuff', with the texture of those foamy things UPS and FedEx use in their packaging to reduce impact when shipping goods. I could not taste any garlic at all (not that I would want to, it would probably make everything worse). The flavor was absolutely bland, and no amount of salt could possibly save it (I used both the included salt packets but this didn't help). The 'potatoes' were not mushy; they were hard and crumbly, and you needed to break the 'mashed potato' square with a spoon. Terrible. This needs to get checked out of the menu, ASAP.
It has the texture and consistency of baby food.
3. Sloppy Joe Filling
I have to say this was actually pretty decent. Sure, it doesn't look very good, and I woldn't post it on Pinterest anytime soon, but the flavour and consistency are pretty decent. The beef is chunky, has a good chew and texture, and has the right amount of moisture for something that's been sitting in storage for a couple of years! I squirted some on the vegetable crackers, and ate the remaining stew with the plastic spoon. At least R&D got this right. I ended up finishing the packet.
4. Vanilla Pound Cake & Coffee Mix
Pretty good.
Not that good.
This is by far the best part of the MRE. The pound cake, despite sitting in the packet for god knows how long, actually tastes pretty good! It's sweet, and is filled with vanilla flavor, it has a fluffy texture when you chew it down, and it is moist to the tongue. If I were away out of country, in some miserable hot sweaty compound in Afghanistan and wanted to pretend I was in a coffeeshop pretending to be a starving artist writing a novel while in the middle of a firefight, with ricochets and supersonic whizz-bangs and cracking nearby, this would do the trick.
I can't say the same thing about the coffee and creamer though. The creamer didn't fully dissolve, and I'd end up having creamer flakes floating on my light brown coffee. Not really a big issue, coffee tastes just as rich and sweet as any cup of Folgers or Chock Full O nuts. So no complaints here.
I'm not going to review the Grape Jelly, and the sanitary wipe, because I had already finisehd the crackers, and figured that would be pointless anyway. It's just grape jelly. Big whoop.
All in all, I have to say that the MRE, in total, is......well, OK. Like I said, OK dosen't cut it. The troops need better quality rations. If we expect to put them anywhere for any length of time, they should be eating something at least more than halfway decent. At least the government is still trying to find better ways of food preservation, and improving logistics to make fresh food available to them. I hear irradiated food is the next big thing for rations, where they make fresh food 'fresh' without any sort of refrigeration or chemical preservation, by using radiation. I hear the newer military rations are much better in quality, and that they actually have better military rations in the UK and France, but I don't think I'm going to be seeing those in the supermarket anytime soon, if they ever make it to the aisles at all!
I don't doubt that MREs do indeed provide the nutritional requirements needed to operate on the field, but I'm sure if you were in service and had to eat this stuff day in and day out, you may consider just going AWOL. I also hear this stuff can cause constipation for weeks on end, and heard many humorous stories regarding them, hence, when I checked a website dedicated to military rations, they suggested drinking plenty of water before and after consuming an MRE. Otherwise, you'd just have this stuff sitting in your colon for days.
Score: 3 out of 5
Score: 3 out of 5
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