March 17, 2020 • 51 mins
It's often said that an army marches on its stomach, and for thousands of years the world's militaries tried to feed their forces on the march (often with mixed success). Join the guys and Jacqueline Raposo, creator of Service: Veteran Stories of Hunger and War, as they explore the strange story of army food, from its ancient origins to the modern day.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you so much for
tuning in. My name is Ben, and as usual, I
am starving. My name is Nolan. Ben. I have one
question for you. Shoot, are you down with m R? E?
You know me? Do you know you? You already said that, Yeah,
and you're I said that as well. Okay, so we're
we're all caught up. We know each other, we are ourselves,
(00:49):
We know each other, and we also know our super producer,
Casey Pegrham. That's true, but we have an unknown quantity
in the room in spirit sort of to day. Yeah,
it's true. That's true. No, we are not diving into
today's episode on our trio Lonesome. Yeah. We are joined
(01:12):
today by a friend of ours, a pure podcaster of ours,
Jacqueline ropos So, the host of one of the most
exciting podcast we've had come out recently, which is Service
Veteran Stories of Hunger and War Now. Jacqueline is a
freelance food writer, and when you and I were talking
(01:34):
about how we could team up and collaborate, we thought
who better to help us explore today's episode than a
real life expert. So, Jacqueline, thank you so much for
joining us today. Well, I am so glad to be here.
I'm very enthusiastic about this MRI topic, so I'm excited
to nerd out about it for a bit. Well, I
(01:56):
will a little bit behind the curtain. Ben has long
been and an m R E enthusiasts himself. It's a
bit of a bit of a collection. If I'm not mistaken.
I think you acquired a couple of new ones recently
that you were a little bummed about because they were
of the breakfast variety. Yeah, that's correct. You can't wait
them all. I got a deal on some Mr E
(02:18):
like at the Army StarPlus store where do you even?
I got him online and there were random pools and
I actually have one for you that have got to
give you what. Yeah, And you know there there's several
different menus as as you know, Jacqueline, and uh. You
can get a deal where you'll say, okay, I'll get
a low price on like three or four of these,
(02:39):
but you don't get to choose. The man don't get
to pick. You get what you get. Yeah, are you
just anti breakfast or just anti m R E. Breakfast.
I'm just I'm skeptical of eggs that don't need refrigeration.
Oh that is a good point, you know what I mean. Well,
we'll get into more of that and the whole idea
of food preservation and you know, making things last long,
(03:00):
longer than they should than the normal shelf life. But
to start off, obviously, today we are talking about m
r E s which stands for meals ready to eat.
Why do they leave the tea out the uh? Oh?
Because he has implied yeah, yeah, and also, uh it
just sounds better m r E. But they went through
(03:21):
a couple couple of different lines, and um, you know, Jacqueline,
when you set off to create the podcast service, it
feels like you tapped into this rich, fertile soil of
stories that are unfamiliar to a lot of people. And
just speaking for myself, a lot of these stories were
(03:42):
unfamiliar to me before we started preparing for this episode.
Could you tell us a little bit about what inspired
you to create this podcast? Yeah, well, actually directly, this
breakfast m r E issue was sort of it. I
was I was dating a guy who did two tours
in Iraq as an army captain, and he started telling
(04:03):
me stories about doctoring his m r. E s up,
especially the instant coffee, the uh, the powdered eggs, the
powdered milk products they had, the breakfast ones. I'm excited
to hear what you got in your breakfast Emory's I've
never got I've never seen those, but talking about how
horrible they are to eat out in the field when
you're hungry and you're tired. And he started talking about
mixing them up and trying to make them taste better.
(04:26):
And I told the story to my grandfather who was
in the army in World War Two, and he sort
of started laughing and nodding his head and saying, how
oh yeah, the instant coffee and how horrible it was
back then, and started telling me sort of similar stories
about how bad their k rations were. And that made
me think about this whole world that I just didn't
(04:47):
as a food writer and as someone who knows that
you know, who's every generation of my family has served
going back to the Civil War, Yet I did not
know this stuff. And so I was like, oh, wow,
this is a whole element of food history that we
have not sort of gotten down. Um. So hearing hearing
just that sort of umbrella of how bad the food
(05:07):
was and and in some ways still is, is a
very sort of exciting thing to get to delve into
with every episode. Yeah, yeah, this is Uh, this is
funny because we also have a lot of people our
audience who are veterans or they have family members in
the military, and so a lot of people, I think
it's safe to say, at least here in the US,
(05:28):
have grown up maybe seen in m R. E as
a kid, and you know, it's a cool thing. It's
packaged at lasts forever. Uh. And if you if you
like Noel and I are a fan of kits, then
you know, you open it up and you have so
much cool stuff to play with, at least as a kid.
You know, when you're out in the field and it's
your job, you're just trying to eat something that doesn't
(05:49):
taste terrible. Right. Uh. We we delved into, uh, the
history of army food because one thing, what we've got
to say to anybody who's thought I had a terrible
m R E. Uh, you're the worst. At mar E
today is still way way better than what armies eight
(06:09):
for the like majority of human history. Right, Well, because
they have such a bad rap it's insane. Like I mean,
you think about, uh, the idea of these you know,
m R E packages and it's army food in general
is always kind of notoriously had this really terrible rap.
And like you said, if it's made leaps and bounds, um,
(06:30):
you know, by today's standards, there a whole lot better.
But uh, it's often said that, um, you know, an
army this is a quote uh in in Uh some
of the research we found an army marches on its stomach.
And so these things are not only I mean obviously
first and foremost, they're about survival. So the idea of
of flavor and taste probably you know, a third fourth
(06:52):
kind of priority there. Um. But the history of of
m R. E s in general is a really really
fascinating one kind of goes hand in hand with the
history of food preservation and things like canning and like
salted meats and all of that. Why don't we start there,
go into a little of the backstory. Yeah, Well, I
think the first thing we have to think about is
(07:13):
just how armies are moving across time. So if we think,
you know, way back, if we think back to the
Sumerians and the ancient Egyptians. You know, if if you're
if you're battling sort of other tribes that are a
couple of miles away, then you're just bringing the equivalent
of like snacks with you, right, and then you're going
home and you're cooking, so thinking of bringing with you
(07:36):
starchy things like bread, which way back when would have
been something made from barley or rye, not wheat, because
they weren't cultivating wheat. Um. Then it became hard tack,
which is basically a cracker version. It's sort of like
a hard bread because we're not thinking these like, you know,
fluffy yeasted breads that we have today, which would eventually
become a problem for the military of how to make
you know, light and fluffy bread that would not get moldy.
(07:57):
And last, these are like crackers and hard beds. And
then one thing that I don't know exactly why this was,
but these ancient militaries usually carried onions with them. I
don't know if onions are a thing against scurvy, maybe
because I don't know if they actually like put two
and two together with needing vegetables until until much later,
until we get more towards our revolutionary and civil wars.
(08:19):
But a lot of them, the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians,
they usually carried an onion with them, or it could
have been because a lot of times when they did
have to go a little bit further when they were
traveling for a couple of days at a time, these
guys were also cooking for themselves. Sometimes they would be
carrying twenty pound bags of grain on their shoulders as
well and actually cooking. There's also nothing more of a
(08:42):
badass flex than just taking a giant bite of a
raw onion. Yeah. I think that might have had something
to do with it. That's just conjecture on my part.
It's like, if they treat themselves that way, what are
they going to do to us? Run exactly onion to
your belt as was the style of the time for
the Simpsons fans. Yeah, this is This is fascinating because
(09:03):
I love that you're pointing out the soldiers, especially when
we look at empires where they were moving across the
great distances. They did have to cook, and they did
have to haul their supplies. Uh. Supply chain is something
that's still bedevils modern militaries today. Uh we found that
in the West, at least in ancient Rome, Uh, soldiers
(09:26):
did have a ration of food that was supplied to them. Uh.
And one thing that might interest a lot of people
is that, as we'll find, militaries would frequently have alcoholic
beverages as part of their ration. But it wasn't like
a huge you know, ancient Greco Roman party time. Uh.
(09:48):
The wine was often safer than the groundwater. Right. So
so now we have these guys were carrying like twenty
pounds sacks of grain and then you know they're lucky
on in and maybe a sack of wine. It's just
it's bizarre. Well, and like as far as the wine piece, again,
that was part of that was a functional thing more
than I just wanted to get slashed every step of
(10:10):
the way. It was a lot easier and more predictable
to to drink wine than it was the questionable quality
of water that you might get. Right. And then even
back in the days of your all military options were
not created equally. So, Uh, Jacqueline, could you tell us
a little bit about how people ate in the navy, Right,
(10:33):
that's something that we we know was even more of
a difficult proposition. Well, the navy was sort of like
a double edged sword because in a way in the
Navy's you've got some space on chips to be transporting
things with you, but then you've got you know, moisture
and humidity issues. You've got things that are rotting and
going bad. So you've got yeah, more room to be
(10:54):
transporting you know, wine, which you know is is great
and all that, and the beer and the rum and
that kind of stuff. But then on top of that,
you've got problems with grains going bad. You've got a
lot of fish, so we're talking about salted fish, cod
and whatever is going to be native to whatever part
(11:14):
of the world. This this navy is sort of moving
within and then a lot of things going just bad
on on navy ships. There's not a lot of space
to cook. There's not It's not like our modern navy
where they've got these amazing kitchens, right um, And so again,
hard biscuits, salted meat, salted fish, not fresh water to
(11:36):
wash it down with. You're gonna get a little bit
of like the sugar from the wine or the beer
to give you a little bit of energy. But you know,
when you talk about your digestive system and marching on
your stomach. It's not exactly like this nice clean energy
we we think of nowadays when we're talking about working
out or going hiking. It's a lot of a lot
of grumpy men. Absolutely, And when we're talking about salted
(11:57):
fish and salted meat, we're not talking about a nice
lock or like a charcootery tray, right, Like, this is
pretty kind of rudimentary, not particularly tasty stuff, right yeah.
And this is way before we know about you know,
bacteria growing and what that is. So these are also
like things hanging in the open air, you know, as
they're being moved about, and this is the way it's
(12:17):
done for you know, hundreds of years before we get
to the idea of actually even how we move meat
and fish from place to place and like cut it
off the carcasses and transport it in different ways. So
this is literally like carcasses hanging and and just drying out,
which in some ways can make amazing presciuto and stuff
like that, but in other ways can just be like,
you know, things are eating away from the insides of
(12:39):
animals and coming to the surface before you're hopefully cooking
the bacteria out of them. Um. So a lot of
a lot of inconsistency and you know then put that
on men and a ship. So not not not delicious,
but they were cooking their food, right, I mean, they
would have some sort of like olive oil for example,
where they could use that as a as a cooking implement. Yeah,
(12:59):
that's why. Lot of times they're carrying some sort of
cured meat product that actually has like fat in it too.
So they'd either be carrying lardo or carrying sausages, or
carrying like cured pork. Especially for for the ancient Roman Empire,
the Romans actually comparatively had like really good pork products
because they were you know, Romans, you have some sort
of fat to cook with you, you've got the onion,
(13:21):
you've got some sort of grain, you've got a cured meat.
So there there is a semblance of being able to
make something with you know, whatever liquid you can find
and fire. And this is where too, you know, compared
to complanning about our m rs today, this is a
very you go and fight and then you got to
cook for yourself. A lot of the time it's not
(13:41):
it's you know, it's it's either pillaging and finding food
from the villages you're going into and just taking their
food or stopping on the side of the road and
cooking your own food with your rations. And a lot
of times the rations were, oh, it's this amount of
bread to cook into some to make a stew with
your with your meat and whatever else you can find,
(14:01):
or you know, finding vegetables on the side of the
road on these farms, or you know, using the grain
that you're given as a ration. It's not they're not
snack packs, you know, like you're that you're just eating
as you go, right. This is way before the culinary
revolution of the lunchable, uh. And that's also that's one
of the reasons why civilian populations often hated or feared armies,
(14:26):
even friendly armies, because you know, if you've got an
army going through the country to the border, they're still
going to have to eat whatever they can find. So
even if it's quote unquote your army or you're part
of the same empire, it could it could pose a
real threat to your livestock and your crops, right exactly.
And that's like one of I mean, that's one of
(14:48):
the main reasons why we have all of these just
constant land wars. In ancient history. You can't sort of
take over other people's land with your military if you're
not a are being their resources. And there are some
really weird things that I love about uh different civilizations
and how they would do that as they went on.
My favorite or is actually the Mongols, and they would
(15:11):
this is to me by far the weirdest. They were
these fierce riders and they so they would you know,
be riding one horse with two trailing behind them, so
then then they could switch horses and be riding, you know,
further than other armies had ridden. And while they're doing that,
they're taking meat and curing it like underneath their saddles,
like letting like the heat of their bodies and the
(15:32):
friction like beat up this meat on their saddles, or
the same thing with milk. They're like taking this like
milk and letting it become cheese in their saddle bags
as they're going along. So it becomes this sort of
like weird. Yeah, I know, right, it's it sounds disgusting
to be like curing cheese and and pounding meat from
(15:52):
the heat of your horse. And then they I don't
know how true this is. I read enough that makes
me think that this was definitely true that they would
also because they could not just you know, pull up
grass and get nutrients from grass, but that's what horses do.
They would now and then just like slice a little
vein in their horse and drink some blood to get
those nutrients, knowing that it wasn't going to kill the horse.
(16:13):
And that's not too crazy. I think we're burying the
lead here a little bit. You just coined a really
incredible catchphrase, pounding meat by the heat of their horse.
Pounding meat by the heat of their horse. Yeah, that
is a very evocative expression there. Um. One thing that
came up that in this research that I thought was
fascinating I don't think we've talked about yet is in
the Byzantine Empire, they were super resourceful. Um they had
(16:35):
these little like hand kind of mills, I guess, yeah,
but they would yeahs so and and the and they
would kind of, uh, you know, make their own bread
on the go, which seems insane to me, Like what
a commitment that is. Can you talk a little b
about what that process might have been, like, like how
do you get it to rise? Like how do you
(16:55):
do all this? I don't understand. That's the thing. We're
not talking about risen breads at the point. Like that's
why when we say hard tack, it's called hard tack,
you know, and which is essentially that's that's a cracker.
But these are not um, these again are not like
the light fluffy breads. They're more they're I'm trying to
think of like the equivalent of today, but they're they're
flatbreads essentially comparatively, So, yeah, you're grind, you're grinding flower,
(17:18):
which because it does have you know, some of these
flowers do have a good amount of gluten, and then
they are going to sort of develop um, you can
sort of add salt if they're fermenting them to like
you can ferment a flower for a while. So some
of these flowers are going to ferment. And if you
stick that on a hot pan, that's going to give
a sense of rise to it too. You're gonna have
enough reaction there that you're gonna get a little rise there.
(17:41):
But again, they're not we're not thinking about ovens here.
We're not thinking about like big camps necessarily where they're
having these big stone ovens and they're coming out with
these big loaves of bread like they would have that
in you know what we would consider maybe these base
camps of these forts and things like that, but that's
where other people would be cooking for them with properly
ground flowers. These are going to be like rudimentary ground,
(18:04):
coarsely ground flowers, almost like a moza, like an unleavened
bread kind of situation. Exactly. Yeah, so it's it's different.
It's it's definitely survival bread, not you know, it's not
luxurious comparatively, it's sorrowful bread for sure. For hundreds, if
(18:28):
not thousands of years, this kind of stuff was more
the rule than the exception until a revolutionary moment in
food storage history, which is a weird sentence, you know,
out of context. That is a the invention of a
Parisian chef named Nicholas A Pair a P P e
(18:48):
R t all the way in like the late eighteen century,
so seventeen nineties. Uh he is, he is ultimately right
the reason that we figured out canning. But that's not
exactly what he did, right, Yeah, he figured out our
basic like our basic means of why things that are
preserved in glass jars, why, like if we were making
(19:11):
at home nowadays, if we're making apple sauce or pickles
or jam, you know, when we take our mason jars
and you know, take our the hot jam that we're
making and put it in mason jars and boil it
to seal it. That's what he came up with, essentially,
and it was in a direct result of Napoleon having
(19:33):
one point five million men to feed, and he had
tried this sort of like pillage thing. We're like, okay,
we're gonna bring some food with us and then we're
going to pillage for it, and found out that that
wasn't gonna work with one and a half million men,
and so said, okay, we're gonna give a prize to
whoever can figure this out for us, and a pair
of being a chocolate maker at the time, he was
(19:54):
a chef and then went into candy, and so he
was already working with things like um, using a Marie
too slowly, you know, cooke down candies to melt chocolate,
to figure out ratios of of sugar, and jams and
jellies to have them set correctly. He was already working
on that kind of stuff and he really jumped into
(20:14):
this contest to figure out how they could preserve foods
like they did wine. Like they already knew that if
you took wine and put it in a bottle and
corked it, it was going to last for a long time. Um,
it wasn't going to explode. It's different than champagne, you know,
So they figured he figured there had to be a
way to do that with food, and that's sort of
what he set out to figure out. Well. And it's
(20:34):
interesting because a lot of this was just sort of
trial and air observational stuff, Like he didn't understand the
science behind it at all. He was just sort of like, Okay,
this works, I've experimented, this is the best method for
getting this done. Let's just keep doing it this way.
And then it was it was a good ways later
before the actual science of it was figured out. Right. Yeah,
what he figured out was essentially taking air out because
(20:58):
air is going to do a bunch of different things
to food as it breaks down. It's gonna, you know,
air oxidize a certain things. It draws sugars out, you've
got fat oxidation, It breaks down the cell structure of things.
So as food ages, a lot happens essentially because primarily
because of air. You've got heat and light and other things.
But he found out that, oh, if I just take
(21:19):
the air out, and that's why like sealing something in
a jar and then boiling it to you know, get
as much air out as possible. That was one part
of it, and then the other was essentially getting the
in the boiling process, getting that sort of at at
a certain point where okay, this is cooked to the
point that we wanted to a lot of the things
(21:39):
already had sugar and salt, which we know again pull
moisture out. Um, so we're getting as much of sort
of bacteria accidentally killed it's already transformed Byteria. He didn't
know this, but those things are sort of cooked out
to a point. So we're pulling as much water out
of the food substance as possible, using sugar or salt
to kell bacteria as much as we can, and eliminating air,
(22:01):
which is going to then reduce the food from decomposing
more until it's eat And that's basically what he figured
out right right, without even knowing the concept of aerobic bacteria. Uh,
he was he was fighting, you know, one of the
main antagonists in the story of preserving food. And I
always love to picture all of the misses that he
(22:23):
made along the way, you know what I mean. We
don't know too much about all like to your point,
and all about all the things he got wrong along
the way. But but shout out to him for winning
that prize of I think it was twelve thousand gold
francs in eighteen ten, uh, and even getting a book
deal out of it in his work the Book for
(22:46):
All Households or The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances.
For many years, really really creative title titles were longer
back then. People have more time to read. I mean,
at least you you know, it spells it out for
you know exactly you're getting attention spans. I guess they
had more They had more time for that kind of stuff.
But that's like a book right there is that title nowadays.
(23:07):
So you know, one thing that's very important that you
hit on Jacqueline is that we can't quite call him,
you know, the quote unquote father of canning or anything,
because he was working with glass. And it's not until
a few years later, Uh, Peter durand In in England decides, hey,
(23:29):
let's switch from glass to these tin containers or technically
tin coated iron containers, and soon enough he's off to
the races. And this means that the English Royal Navy,
the British Royal Navy, is the first military to have
what we would call canned food today. Correct. Yeah, and
(23:51):
it's it's funny like we don't we don't think about
them at all now, but to think about what a
novel invention at tin cans. They'd only had glass up
until then, and now you have another container that The
key is that they're cooking food in these containers. It's
not that they're taking food, putting it in a jar
and then cooking it. So you're actually cooking the food
(24:14):
in the can, and that's sort of the big deal there.
Or sometimes you're cooking the food first and then putting
in the cannon, then cooking it again. But the fact
that you can actually cook a food item in its
container and seal it and have it then be pretty durable,
that it's not going to I mean, they had problems
with this, but it's it's generally that the hope is
(24:35):
that it's not going to explode on you because of
breakdowns of things inside that it's going to be a
really durable container. Like that's that's pretty huge when that
has never existed before. And we know that from that point,
cans became, you know, the hot new thing. There's still
a hot new thing, right, Most people have cans of
(24:56):
something in their pantry, even if it's just like souper
some black beans, because they keep forever. And the US
military figured this out too, right, I think that what
we would consider the predecessor, the m R. E, was
actually a tin container, right, Yeah, So the first time
they started trying this out for the military, before they
(25:18):
even figured the actual ration part was just trying to
ship meet in tin cans, which they did for the
Spanish American War at the end of the nineteenth century.
And they were also generally just trying to find a
better way to ship meet in general, because meat is
the most expensive part of any menu in a restaurant.
For the military, it's always meat. And this is before
(25:41):
they had even figured out how to break meat down
from like this is when they were still shipping whole
carcass animals on train cars. They had refrigerator train cars
by this point, but this was literally like meat dangling,
you know, whole animal, and they weren't breaking it down
or freezing it. This is just meat going from you know,
(26:02):
Wisconsin or whatever to Florida to then get on boats
to go to Cuba or to Puerto Rico or over
to Guam or whatever. So they were trying to put
meat in cans. And what ended up happening is because
they didn't have this food science just as far as
how food breaks down, just like as food breaks down
with heat. Um, Now you're taking meat in a can
(26:24):
and putting it in a very hot climate. And so
it didn't work out very well in the Spanish American War. Um,
it just sort of went bad. Not in a bad
way that it got like what we'd think of as
bad bacteria like like salmonilla or eat col i or
anything like that, but in a way that people got sick.
They already were, they were already having problems with yellow
(26:47):
fever and typhoid and things like that. But for American troops,
only three eighty five died in combat and two thousand,
four d and eighty five died of illness. And so
everybody assumed it was the meat, that it was a
bad meat. It ended up not being the bad meat.
The meat did go bad. It looked They called it
embalmed meat, basically embalmed beef because it got it looked gross,
(27:09):
it got you know, it had a film on top,
and it smelled horrible, just like you know, you leave
beef in the refrigerator a little bit too long, it's
gonna look brown, and it's gonna smell a little a
little tinny, a little like a little minerally, but you
can still cook it and then it's fine. Um, think
about that times, like you know, twenty that all of
a sudden, like the meat is gonna look bad and
smell bad, but technically it's still safe if you just
(27:30):
cook it. This was a lot worse than it was
slimy and smelled horrible, and nobody wanted to eat it.
And on top of that, these guys are already sick,
and it really sort of put the military off before
World War One of wanting to use canned meat for
a little while. So it's sort of a little hiccup, um,
which they got over, but it wasn't It wasn't the
best way to start. Yeah, yeah, we do at least
(27:54):
see that. Um. There was there was a move to
organize things into kits towards I guess toward the last
half or towards the end of World War One, where
they would get a ration that was uh, let's say
we actually got the numbers here, uh jacqueline for background,
here are ridiculous history. One thing that often bedevils us
(28:16):
is will learn about historic dinners or meals of importance,
and we can never find the menu. So this is
big for us to actually know what these what these
folks were eating, Uh that twelve ounces of bacon or
some kind of some kind of meat, uh to eight
ounce cans of again hardtack. Uh. They had some preground coffee,
some sugar, a salt pack. Interestingly enough, at the time
(28:40):
they were also given a tobacco ration, which I guess
just speaks to how common smoking was at the time.
But but they went back, the Uncle Sam went back
and continually tried to improve this. Um. I believe it
was in nineteen thirty six they got some aviation of menus,
(29:01):
so you weren't always eating the same thing. And then
at the very top of the show you mentioned something
called I believe the k ration. It's it comes after
the rise of something called the Sea ration in nineteen
thirty eight. Now, while these are military food they don't
look anything like the m R. E S of today
(29:24):
right there. They're kind of, I guess a box. Yeah.
So so in the in World War One, they basically
used the can like you had a lunch box, you know.
They put all these dried sort of foods in the
can so that they were generally waterproof and you could
carry them around and it just made it easier. Essentially.
That's sort of what the k Ration was in World
(29:44):
War Two, which they had just taken this idea of
all of these military foods throughout history, and what were
they They were basically, again, something sort of crackery, something dried.
Now we have instant coffee, which came out in World
War One, which again is not the same type of
coffee that we have now. It was different type of
drying process, so it doesn't taste quite the same. Um.
(30:04):
But still now they have dried coffee versus like in
the Civil War they were actually taking coffee and grinding
it and making coffee you know, on the road. Now
they've got instant coffee and they're just putting that in
the can. By World War Two, they switch up the
use of the can with the sea rations and the
k rations sort of became that grazing mentality. And so
depending on if it was your snack ration, these your
(30:27):
field rations. So it's either your snack ration, which could
have biscuits, jerky, cigarettes, instant coffee, or your breakfast one,
which could have um, again would have usually cigarettes instant coffee. Um,
you might like this because it's the breakfast one. They
I heard of guys. Uh, they called them poop bars.
(30:47):
They were fig bars, um, which in my mind are
like fig Newton's, but I guess not nearly as good
because they call them poop bars. Well, and it's actually
it's it's it's a it's fruited cake. Just for the record,
so of course I'm I was sorry. I'm sorry the
fruited cake bars that the fruited poop bars of World
War two. Um, but they which they didn't like, to
(31:07):
the point that when one of my one of my
veterans told me that after the liberation of Paris, they
went back into Paris and kids were begging for they'd
be like cigarette, Papa cigarette, and they would give them
the poop bars instead, you know, which was still I
guess a treat. But that's how willing they were to
give away the poop bars. Um. And then powdered eggs,
which you mentioned eggs. Yeah, powdered eggs were by number
(31:30):
one out of every complaint that I've heard from World
War two veterans are were number one and evidently are
still number one. I've read about guy, I've heard and
read about people today complaining about the omelets in m
RI e s. Today. Powdered eggs are still pretty horrible.
But the k rations were sort of would lend to
our civilian snacking habits too, because they were biscuits, jerky,
(31:52):
you know, sometimes chocolate, which has changed over time. Um,
sometimes they've had good chocolate. They've had you know, eminem
or chocolate. The taste like chocolate. Sometimes it's not great.
They have the d bar, which was intentionally created not
to taste good. Um. It was fortified with oats with
the sugar was sort of rebalanced. It's it's bitter chocolate,
(32:15):
milk powder, oat flour, um and some vitamins added to
it so that it intentionally is not something they'd want
to eat, but that it's six hundred calories of square.
You'd get three of them together so you'd have enough
calories and an emergency so those could be in them too.
So they were. They changed as World War Two went on,
but they were, um, you know, they were sort of
the the snack pack version of the rations versus the
(32:38):
sea rations, which were the first real meal in a can.
Uh So, first off, I love that you mentioned the
powdered egg far because I've had some some interactions world
War two veterans, and it's weird that they all mentioned
the same specific thing. I know, right, Yeah, that was
(32:58):
a big swing and a miss. We know now that
this evolution see ration k ration all the way like
all the way through various different conflicts around the world
and in various different missions. We know they ultimately lead
to what armies eat today. Here in the United States,
(33:22):
we call this the m r E. The meal ready
to eat. I believe the first m r E s
came out pretty recently in the span of history, right
in the nineteen eighties or so. Yeah, that's when we
officially changed the name and put them in this sort
of new packaging. Um, because up until the late seventies,
(33:42):
we didn't really have the pouch technology that we have now,
so from World War Two forward, we had cans and
then we had dehydrated foods, and that was sort of
what we had up until now. So the powdered foods
um in World War Two, it wasn't a powdered eggs um.
Talk about menus. I love looking at these old menus
(34:04):
you can find. And potatoes were another thing that were
powdered in World War Two. They were called flaked potatoes.
If they were trying to make them fancy, um, they
would use these rehydrated potato flakes. Milk was powdered, Cheese
could be powdered. Most of the time. Those were used
more in the garrison camps to to feed people, um,
not necessarily in the field, but they basically tried to
(34:26):
just to save space, right because again you're moving in
World War two. We had six over sixteen million people
working in World War two, which is why we have
all of this innovation that came out of World War Two.
But to save space, you dehydrate things. That's the fastest
and easiest way to to shrink something down. So they
dehydrate milk, they dehydrate eggs, they dehydrate potatoes and then
(34:48):
reconstitute them. In regular just dehydration, you just pull the
water molecules out some things, and the food stuffs are
gonna oxidize, they're going to deteriorate, You're gonna lose some flavor,
you're gonna lose some aroma when you rehydrate them. And
so those things like the instant coffee weren't gonna smell
as good the powdered eggs. You're never going to get
the texture of powdered eggs or fluffy, fatty mashed potatoes.
(35:12):
And so what they figured out later was freeze dehydrating
under pressurized conditions, which is what we use now, which
is completely different. Um, So you bring the materials to
below the freezing point, you shock those molecules into immobilization.
So the water is still going to freeze and sort
of separate, but everything else stays intact, or as much
as possible, stays intact. So fat molecules, sugar molecules, they're
(35:35):
not sort of breaking down. And then with you know,
immense pressure, then you vacuum out the frozen water and
so everything's okay comparatively. So that form of dehydration just
really changed how we have dehydrated foods and led to
what the army wanted to sort of do with m
ras in the future, or will with what would become
(35:55):
the m RAS of the future, with just dehydrating foods
like we all know grew up with having astronaut ice cream,
you know, for fun as kids, and that essentially is
what they thought that they could actually do for military
food like but with both sweet and savory foods, just
freeze dehydrating food and um, I have not heard this
yet because I have not started interviewing Vietnam veterans, but
(36:17):
I've been told that I might be hearing some freeze
dehydrated foods dropped into those veterans, because again, they're incredibly light,
and they can be you know packed, you know, immense
amounts of food can be sent in into very remote locations.
But then you have the problem of a reconstituted you know,
think about like reconstituting freeze dried ice cream. It's not
(36:37):
gonna have the texture of ice cream at all. Um.
And then on top of that, you know, you've got
petrid water conditions, and then imagine doing that like with
roast beef or something. It's just not going to be
a satisfying food. So that was a huge failure in
that way, but that does give us the better coffee,
the better coco. Now in m R E's we have,
(36:57):
you know, mocacino versus just in sdank coffee, and that
comes from a better way of powdering coffee and powder
and different and powdering different types of f or like
you know, like a nice sanka, like a sanking. Yeah,
thank it was. That was another step to you know,
we had instant coffee and then head sanka. I still
don't really know what it is. I don't understand what
(37:18):
senka now they do, I but they make it look
really cool on teles right, you made a really good point.
We had a little computer glitch and and we're off
offline for a second. We were just chatting about how,
like so much of the prepackaged food we eat today,
(37:39):
it follows a lot of these same rules, but it's
just like a better, kind of bougier version of these
m R E s. Um I wonder if we could
maybe take things to the present and talk about how
m R E s have kind of improved h and
maybe while they're still not as good as like, you know,
our kid cuisines, or whatever. They're a hell of a
lot better than they used to be in the early days. Yeah,
(38:02):
there's two things I sort of geek out about for
this that are not really sexy. But the biggest thing
to me is the container. Again, the container itself is
this retort pouch, which are the it's the same plastic
pouches that now you know give us uh go girt.
And are those little squeeze tubes that you know we
have peas in and stuff like that. And again they
(38:24):
seem pretty innocent, but these things are amazing because they
are different layers of material that allow us to cook
food inside of them at slightly higher temperatures than you
need to in a can. But because there's a greater
surface area for a shorter amount of time, and so
the food just is going to taste fresher. You're gonna
(38:44):
have less of a breakdown of the actual food. So
if you put chunks of beef in there, they're going
to actually be chunks of beef or beans like the
m R e s that I have just to have
them are a black beans, you know, so you're going
to have the texture of beans not like being mush.
And then you can heat them up faster as well
in the field, so you don't need to It's not
a can that you're heating up to eat. Uh. You
(39:06):
know the corned beef and potatoes that are World War
two veterans were eating. Now you can have a much
wider variety of foods, pastas and things like that that
are going to have a better mouth feel. You can
heat them up faster. Um. So it's this whole new
world because of these specifically made plastic pouches, which plastic
was we can complain about it a lot now, but
(39:27):
starting in the fifties, the military invested in this finding,
you know, in developing with all these private companies developing
plastic and what we could do with it, So making
a seal that you could it's essentially vacuum seal these pouches.
You could pressure cook them and then they they do
well in extreme conditions, in heat, in pressure, in human climates,
(39:50):
dry climates. Um. They can hold up better than cans did. Uh.
So that I think is particularly exciting that these pouches
sort of really changed they game when it comes to
how our emery's taste today. And we also know that
there is a lot of research that goes into this
The foods uh science here is fascinating because despite what
(40:15):
uh many people in the military may believe, the researchers
do actually run extensive taste test and extended you know,
feeding tests, both in the field and in the lab,
which I feel like sounds like a cool lab ratte job,
you know, because it's not all going to be the
infamously terrible veggie omelet of two thousand seven or uh,
(40:38):
what's that other really creepy captain Country Captain Chicken? Did
you ever hear that one? Normal that's still around. We've
got a full list here from how stuff works. We've
got stuff like beefsteak with mushrooms and Western beans. I'm
more of a Northern beans kind of guy myself. We've
got this very odd combination of pork rib and clammed
showder who asked for that? I don't understand. We've got
(41:00):
beef ravioli and potato sticks. Sure, Country Captain Chicken, which
is an inherently bad ben I mean, oh, it's like
famously bad. This one is famously the dishes, it's like
an Indian thing. I think I believe you're correct, and
and buttered noodles, um then we have chicken breast and
minnestrone stew, chicken with Thai sauce, just generic Thaie sauce.
(41:22):
They don't give us any more with it. Well it's
yellow slash wild rice peel off. That's a lot of
rice combos. You want to give us some more there
twenty four and all so, uh, you can favorites. Yeah,
you can see the you can see the full list,
and you know they want to have this variety. So
for every meatloaf with gravy, you might get a chicken
tetrazini or so on. Uh. And what we see is
(41:45):
that the food science has also verged into psychology. They
found that varying the menu means that people will eat
more because there's a lot of varieties. So you're getting
you know, Country Captain chicken or even manicotti every day.
And this is this is something that got that was
(42:06):
interesting to me. They found that if they gave things
commercial or civilian graphics, people tended to like them more.
So that's why hot sauce is a huge commodity in
Mr East today. And that's why you know you'll get
uh side items like candies and stuff that will have
a brand name because I don't know, maybe it reminds
(42:27):
people a home, maybe there's familiarity. Maybe you just you
don't feel like you're eating out of a drab all
of bag, right like like like you said, I think
you mentioned this. Um they even have like, you know,
kind of sexed up the packaging a little bit where
it might have like a cool logo or more of
like a snazzy graphic design kind of concept to it.
Which you know, I'm a big fan of brightly colored sodas.
(42:50):
Don't know why. It doesn't matter what they taste like.
I also like things that are green, like I like
pistachio ice cream. I like the flavor, but I also
love the fact that it's green, or like blue power
aid yea or or one of my personal favorites Superman
ice cream, which is really just vanilla ice cream, but
it's just like multicolored and that makes me I don't know,
and I'm just really into it for some reason. Freaks
me out. Man, I'm a real sheep. Oh no, no,
(43:14):
what is life if not to be lived? We also
know that m R e s. In addition to inspiring
so much civilian food, they're also used in civilian emergency
situations like natural disasters, so we can get a lot
of food to people very quickly. But m R E
s are not the only example of modern military food.
(43:34):
There are tons of other militaries in the world right
and they they often have their own kind of thing.
I read somewhere that for a number of years, the
French version of the m R E, the R C
I R, was considered the best, and people would you know,
different soldiers from different militaries would meet and they would
kind of trade these back and forth. Uh and and
(43:57):
even now, if you have listened to this and you
are interested in trying an m R E, you can
find them online. I think you can. Actually you can
pick them up from Amazon even or of course eBay,
but buy or beware because you know they may not
be as recent as you would like. Learn from my mistakes, folks,
don't get stuck with that two thousand seven veggie omelet,
(44:20):
which I just want to point out. Apparently the street
name for that thing, you guys, is the vomblet. Yeah,
what is in the breakfast one that you have been currently?
It's the Veggie's several of them. I thought you had
a few, know, I have one breakfast one and then
I have a m I think a Hollapano chicken dish
(44:42):
that I gave to our rider guy pal Matt Frederick.
Something I want you to know. Good for for all
this coronavirus prepping. Yeah, yeah, oh no, no, I was
doing that anyway because I had to build a new
bike out back. Coronavirus not with me, and no know
you you you had a doomsday prepper shelter before it
was invoke? Quick question though, how do you what's this
(45:03):
omelet situation? Like you literally just add water and stirred
around and it's basically just like weird egg putting kind
of or what they come with a flameless heater. I
believe so because they also we also found out people
want to eat food hot. Uh And this this is
where we're at now. We don't know, well I guess
I don't know, and I don't think either of us
(45:25):
know what the future of m R ease is. But Jacqueline,
do you think that the technology involved is kind of
at a I don't want to say at a plateau,
but at a stable point. Is there anything that people
are trying to change with MRS in the future or
have we arrived at the perfect army food. Well, I
think right now that what they are seeking they've sort
(45:48):
of hit as far as making these rations for men
and women who are functioning at a very high energy level.
They are they are packed with sodium, they're packed with carbohydrates,
they're packed with calories. They're jacking them with caffeine, with vitamins.
I think that's sort of where they are continuing to
try to excel is figuring out how to get all
(46:09):
this stuff in the foods and actually making them still
palatable and taste good. There are a lot of jokes
about m R E. S UM. You mentioned the bomblet.
They're called meals ready to Exit. There's a lot of
jokes about how bad they are because they're so high
in sodium. You know, they're really not great for the
body after a couple of days or the digestion literally,
(46:32):
but they technically have all the nutrients that people wanted them. Um.
I'm particularly curious about getting fresher foods and vegetables into them,
because that's still going to be the biggest problem is
how you get something other than you know, zapple sauce,
which has a lot of sugar and carbs and sometimes
caffeine in it. But the difference between m R e's
(46:53):
for civilians and soldiers is that they are burning their bodies,
you know, and that's really what these foods are intended
to do. So I think it's continuing to figure out
how to make them durable, portable, you know, consistent, and
so that people will want to eat them. And we
have a very multi ethnic, multicultural military, and I think
that's that awesome thing about the variety of m r
(47:15):
as we have now versus when we were in Vietnam,
versus the Korean War, World War two. So that to
me is the exciting thing to see continue to develop.
Just how you know, being American soldiers, how that is
just encompassed and this menu, uh so, who knows where
that is? How that's going to continue and keep going.
Why do you think there isn't more like vacuum seal
(47:36):
technology being used. I wonder if that would be an
alternative or a way to have like fresher foods that
that could last a little longer. That might just be
Americans resisting that. I believe that that is already much
more commonly used for both militaries and civilians. UM in
Asia and in Europe. I forget exactly where, but I
(47:57):
believe that that we've just been slower to acquire that. Um,
I think that's that might be happening more and more,
but I think we've just been slower to acquire even
just foods and pouches, has been slower on our ends
than it has been in other countries. My last question,
and then I will I will throw it to my
co host to to to ask any final wrap up questions.
Did you guys ever have those milks that came in
(48:19):
a bag when you were in when you were in school. Yeah,
it's weird milk in a bag. Milk in a bag. Yeah,
it's like the same um, it's the same amount of
milk as you would get in the typical paper carton
that lunch kids get, but it's in this weird bag
that looks like some kind of um, like a breast
implant or something. Yeah. Yeah, I was trying to think
(48:41):
of a different way too. I'm intrigued. You get a
little straw stab it in there. You have to stab it,
which which made it a hot commodity. It seemed like
a bit of a flash in the pan because I
only remember it for like one year in elementary school,
and then it was back to Carton's. I wonder what
the thinking was behind that easier to shift. Maybe you
could just PLoP them all into a box and didn't
(49:02):
have to stack them take around in other places. But
uh milk in a bag, milk in a bag. Aside,
I do also want to point out that you can
buy uh mr E's from all over the world online.
I'm particularly excited about this Korean apparently bulgogi flavored rice
I've got on the way. Yeah, and I'm going to
(49:25):
check out the technology there. But while we're waiting for that,
I want to say, Jacqueline, thank you so much for
joining us today and giving us this strange and fascinating
journey through the history of food and the history of militaries.
For anyone who would like to learn more about service
(49:47):
veteran stories of hunger and war, where should they go?
Where can they find the show? What? You can find
us streaming on all podcasting platforms of course, I heart radio, Apple, etcetera.
And you can learn more at of this podcast dot org.
And we are also always sharing a lot of extra
nerdy food history and outtakes from our veterans on Facebook
(50:08):
and Instagram. We are at Service Podcast and you by
this point the time this episode comes out, you will
have wrapped your first season. Yeah, we just wrapped our
first season. So we featured um, a number of World
War two veterans themselves and then also some historians to
help us sort of recap how World War to change
the world. Yeah, and that not only is it a
(50:28):
really fascinating podcast where you learn a lot, it's really
well produced and and very moving, great storytelling. Really really
props for a wonderful show. And congratulations on rapping the
first season. Thank you so much, thanks for having me. Yeah,
and don't take our word for it, folks, don't delay
check out the first season, available in its entirety today.
(50:49):
Thanks as always to our super producer Casey Pegram. Thanks
to Alex Williams who compose our our banging soundtrack. Thanks
to Christopher Haciotas, who, as it turns out, is also
the exactive producer of of this of this delightful show Service. Um.
He is here in spirit as always. He is like Mufasa,
just like a lording over all of us, like a
(51:10):
giant uh stately lyon in the sky. Thanks to. We
already said to super Case, I'm gonna give him he's
so nice to think him twice. Um. Thanks to Gabe Losy,
our incredible research associate. UM I think we we. It
turns out he's not a bot. Uh. He is an
actual human person um and he's gonna be on the
show at some point soon. So you're gonna hear the
(51:31):
true voice of Gabe. You heard it here first, folks.
He is the Chicken Tu Trazeni of our show. We'll
see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for my
heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
(51:52):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you so much for
tuning in. My name is Ben, and as usual, I
am starving. My name is Nolan. Ben. I have one
question for you. Shoot, are you down with m R? E?
You know me? Do you know you? You already said that, Yeah,
and you're I said that as well. Okay, so we're
we're all caught up. We know each other, we are ourselves,
(00:49):
We know each other, and we also know our super producer,
Casey Pegrham. That's true, but we have an unknown quantity
in the room in spirit sort of to day. Yeah,
it's true. That's true. No, we are not diving into
today's episode on our trio Lonesome. Yeah. We are joined
(01:12):
today by a friend of ours, a pure podcaster of ours,
Jacqueline ropos So, the host of one of the most
exciting podcast we've had come out recently, which is Service
Veteran Stories of Hunger and War Now. Jacqueline is a
freelance food writer, and when you and I were talking
(01:34):
about how we could team up and collaborate, we thought
who better to help us explore today's episode than a
real life expert. So, Jacqueline, thank you so much for
joining us today. Well, I am so glad to be here.
I'm very enthusiastic about this MRI topic, so I'm excited
to nerd out about it for a bit. Well, I
(01:56):
will a little bit behind the curtain. Ben has long
been and an m R E enthusiasts himself. It's a
bit of a bit of a collection. If I'm not mistaken.
I think you acquired a couple of new ones recently
that you were a little bummed about because they were
of the breakfast variety. Yeah, that's correct. You can't wait
them all. I got a deal on some Mr E
(02:18):
like at the Army StarPlus store where do you even?
I got him online and there were random pools and
I actually have one for you that have got to
give you what. Yeah, And you know there there's several
different menus as as you know, Jacqueline, and uh. You
can get a deal where you'll say, okay, I'll get
a low price on like three or four of these,
(02:39):
but you don't get to choose. The man don't get
to pick. You get what you get. Yeah, are you
just anti breakfast or just anti m R E. Breakfast.
I'm just I'm skeptical of eggs that don't need refrigeration.
Oh that is a good point, you know what I mean. Well,
we'll get into more of that and the whole idea
of food preservation and you know, making things last long,
(03:00):
longer than they should than the normal shelf life. But
to start off, obviously, today we are talking about m
r E s which stands for meals ready to eat.
Why do they leave the tea out the uh? Oh?
Because he has implied yeah, yeah, and also, uh it
just sounds better m r E. But they went through
(03:21):
a couple couple of different lines, and um, you know, Jacqueline,
when you set off to create the podcast service, it
feels like you tapped into this rich, fertile soil of
stories that are unfamiliar to a lot of people. And
just speaking for myself, a lot of these stories were
(03:42):
unfamiliar to me before we started preparing for this episode.
Could you tell us a little bit about what inspired
you to create this podcast? Yeah, well, actually directly, this
breakfast m r E issue was sort of it. I
was I was dating a guy who did two tours
in Iraq as an army captain, and he started telling
(04:03):
me stories about doctoring his m r. E s up,
especially the instant coffee, the uh, the powdered eggs, the
powdered milk products they had, the breakfast ones. I'm excited
to hear what you got in your breakfast Emory's I've
never got I've never seen those, but talking about how
horrible they are to eat out in the field when
you're hungry and you're tired. And he started talking about
mixing them up and trying to make them taste better.
(04:26):
And I told the story to my grandfather who was
in the army in World War Two, and he sort
of started laughing and nodding his head and saying, how
oh yeah, the instant coffee and how horrible it was
back then, and started telling me sort of similar stories
about how bad their k rations were. And that made
me think about this whole world that I just didn't
(04:47):
as a food writer and as someone who knows that
you know, who's every generation of my family has served
going back to the Civil War, Yet I did not
know this stuff. And so I was like, oh, wow,
this is a whole element of food history that we
have not sort of gotten down. Um. So hearing hearing
just that sort of umbrella of how bad the food
(05:07):
was and and in some ways still is, is a
very sort of exciting thing to get to delve into
with every episode. Yeah, yeah, this is Uh, this is
funny because we also have a lot of people our
audience who are veterans or they have family members in
the military, and so a lot of people, I think
it's safe to say, at least here in the US,
(05:28):
have grown up maybe seen in m R. E as
a kid, and you know, it's a cool thing. It's
packaged at lasts forever. Uh. And if you if you
like Noel and I are a fan of kits, then
you know, you open it up and you have so
much cool stuff to play with, at least as a kid.
You know, when you're out in the field and it's
your job, you're just trying to eat something that doesn't
(05:49):
taste terrible. Right. Uh. We we delved into, uh, the
history of army food because one thing, what we've got
to say to anybody who's thought I had a terrible
m R E. Uh, you're the worst. At mar E
today is still way way better than what armies eight
(06:09):
for the like majority of human history. Right, Well, because
they have such a bad rap it's insane. Like I mean,
you think about, uh, the idea of these you know,
m R E packages and it's army food in general
is always kind of notoriously had this really terrible rap.
And like you said, if it's made leaps and bounds, um,
(06:30):
you know, by today's standards, there a whole lot better.
But uh, it's often said that, um, you know, an
army this is a quote uh in in Uh some
of the research we found an army marches on its stomach.
And so these things are not only I mean obviously
first and foremost, they're about survival. So the idea of
of flavor and taste probably you know, a third fourth
(06:52):
kind of priority there. Um. But the history of of
m R. E s in general is a really really
fascinating one kind of goes hand in hand with the
history of food preservation and things like canning and like
salted meats and all of that. Why don't we start there,
go into a little of the backstory. Yeah, Well, I
think the first thing we have to think about is
(07:13):
just how armies are moving across time. So if we think,
you know, way back, if we think back to the
Sumerians and the ancient Egyptians. You know, if if you're
if you're battling sort of other tribes that are a
couple of miles away, then you're just bringing the equivalent
of like snacks with you, right, and then you're going
home and you're cooking, so thinking of bringing with you
(07:36):
starchy things like bread, which way back when would have
been something made from barley or rye, not wheat, because
they weren't cultivating wheat. Um. Then it became hard tack,
which is basically a cracker version. It's sort of like
a hard bread because we're not thinking these like, you know,
fluffy yeasted breads that we have today, which would eventually
become a problem for the military of how to make
you know, light and fluffy bread that would not get moldy.
(07:57):
And last, these are like crackers and hard beds. And
then one thing that I don't know exactly why this was,
but these ancient militaries usually carried onions with them. I
don't know if onions are a thing against scurvy, maybe
because I don't know if they actually like put two
and two together with needing vegetables until until much later,
until we get more towards our revolutionary and civil wars.
(08:19):
But a lot of them, the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians,
they usually carried an onion with them, or it could
have been because a lot of times when they did
have to go a little bit further when they were
traveling for a couple of days at a time, these
guys were also cooking for themselves. Sometimes they would be
carrying twenty pound bags of grain on their shoulders as
well and actually cooking. There's also nothing more of a
(08:42):
badass flex than just taking a giant bite of a
raw onion. Yeah. I think that might have had something
to do with it. That's just conjecture on my part.
It's like, if they treat themselves that way, what are
they going to do to us? Run exactly onion to
your belt as was the style of the time for
the Simpsons fans. Yeah, this is This is fascinating because
(09:03):
I love that you're pointing out the soldiers, especially when
we look at empires where they were moving across the
great distances. They did have to cook, and they did
have to haul their supplies. Uh. Supply chain is something
that's still bedevils modern militaries today. Uh we found that
in the West, at least in ancient Rome, Uh, soldiers
(09:26):
did have a ration of food that was supplied to them. Uh.
And one thing that might interest a lot of people
is that, as we'll find, militaries would frequently have alcoholic
beverages as part of their ration. But it wasn't like
a huge you know, ancient Greco Roman party time. Uh.
(09:48):
The wine was often safer than the groundwater. Right. So
so now we have these guys were carrying like twenty
pounds sacks of grain and then you know they're lucky
on in and maybe a sack of wine. It's just
it's bizarre. Well, and like as far as the wine piece, again,
that was part of that was a functional thing more
than I just wanted to get slashed every step of
(10:10):
the way. It was a lot easier and more predictable
to to drink wine than it was the questionable quality
of water that you might get. Right. And then even
back in the days of your all military options were
not created equally. So, Uh, Jacqueline, could you tell us
a little bit about how people ate in the navy, Right,
(10:33):
that's something that we we know was even more of
a difficult proposition. Well, the navy was sort of like
a double edged sword because in a way in the
Navy's you've got some space on chips to be transporting
things with you, but then you've got you know, moisture
and humidity issues. You've got things that are rotting and
going bad. So you've got yeah, more room to be
(10:54):
transporting you know, wine, which you know is is great
and all that, and the beer and the rum and
that kind of stuff. But then on top of that,
you've got problems with grains going bad. You've got a
lot of fish, so we're talking about salted fish, cod
and whatever is going to be native to whatever part
(11:14):
of the world. This this navy is sort of moving
within and then a lot of things going just bad
on on navy ships. There's not a lot of space
to cook. There's not It's not like our modern navy
where they've got these amazing kitchens, right um, And so again,
hard biscuits, salted meat, salted fish, not fresh water to
(11:36):
wash it down with. You're gonna get a little bit
of like the sugar from the wine or the beer
to give you a little bit of energy. But you know,
when you talk about your digestive system and marching on
your stomach. It's not exactly like this nice clean energy
we we think of nowadays when we're talking about working
out or going hiking. It's a lot of a lot
of grumpy men. Absolutely, And when we're talking about salted
(11:57):
fish and salted meat, we're not talking about a nice
lock or like a charcootery tray, right, Like, this is
pretty kind of rudimentary, not particularly tasty stuff, right yeah.
And this is way before we know about you know,
bacteria growing and what that is. So these are also
like things hanging in the open air, you know, as
they're being moved about, and this is the way it's
(12:17):
done for you know, hundreds of years before we get
to the idea of actually even how we move meat
and fish from place to place and like cut it
off the carcasses and transport it in different ways. So
this is literally like carcasses hanging and and just drying out,
which in some ways can make amazing presciuto and stuff
like that, but in other ways can just be like,
you know, things are eating away from the insides of
(12:39):
animals and coming to the surface before you're hopefully cooking
the bacteria out of them. Um. So a lot of
a lot of inconsistency and you know then put that
on men and a ship. So not not not delicious,
but they were cooking their food, right, I mean, they
would have some sort of like olive oil for example,
where they could use that as a as a cooking implement. Yeah,
(12:59):
that's why. Lot of times they're carrying some sort of
cured meat product that actually has like fat in it too.
So they'd either be carrying lardo or carrying sausages, or
carrying like cured pork. Especially for for the ancient Roman Empire,
the Romans actually comparatively had like really good pork products
because they were you know, Romans, you have some sort
of fat to cook with you, you've got the onion,
(13:21):
you've got some sort of grain, you've got a cured meat.
So there there is a semblance of being able to
make something with you know, whatever liquid you can find
and fire. And this is where too, you know, compared
to complanning about our m rs today, this is a
very you go and fight and then you got to
cook for yourself. A lot of the time it's not
(13:41):
it's you know, it's it's either pillaging and finding food
from the villages you're going into and just taking their
food or stopping on the side of the road and
cooking your own food with your rations. And a lot
of times the rations were, oh, it's this amount of
bread to cook into some to make a stew with
your with your meat and whatever else you can find,
(14:01):
or you know, finding vegetables on the side of the
road on these farms, or you know, using the grain
that you're given as a ration. It's not they're not
snack packs, you know, like you're that you're just eating
as you go, right. This is way before the culinary
revolution of the lunchable, uh. And that's also that's one
of the reasons why civilian populations often hated or feared armies,
(14:26):
even friendly armies, because you know, if you've got an
army going through the country to the border, they're still
going to have to eat whatever they can find. So
even if it's quote unquote your army or you're part
of the same empire, it could it could pose a
real threat to your livestock and your crops, right exactly.
And that's like one of I mean, that's one of
(14:48):
the main reasons why we have all of these just
constant land wars. In ancient history. You can't sort of
take over other people's land with your military if you're
not a are being their resources. And there are some
really weird things that I love about uh different civilizations
and how they would do that as they went on.
My favorite or is actually the Mongols, and they would
(15:11):
this is to me by far the weirdest. They were
these fierce riders and they so they would you know,
be riding one horse with two trailing behind them, so
then then they could switch horses and be riding, you know,
further than other armies had ridden. And while they're doing that,
they're taking meat and curing it like underneath their saddles,
like letting like the heat of their bodies and the
(15:32):
friction like beat up this meat on their saddles, or
the same thing with milk. They're like taking this like
milk and letting it become cheese in their saddle bags
as they're going along. So it becomes this sort of
like weird. Yeah, I know, right, it's it sounds disgusting
to be like curing cheese and and pounding meat from
(15:52):
the heat of your horse. And then they I don't
know how true this is. I read enough that makes
me think that this was definitely true that they would
also because they could not just you know, pull up
grass and get nutrients from grass, but that's what horses do.
They would now and then just like slice a little
vein in their horse and drink some blood to get
those nutrients, knowing that it wasn't going to kill the horse.
(16:13):
And that's not too crazy. I think we're burying the
lead here a little bit. You just coined a really
incredible catchphrase, pounding meat by the heat of their horse.
Pounding meat by the heat of their horse. Yeah, that
is a very evocative expression there. Um. One thing that
came up that in this research that I thought was
fascinating I don't think we've talked about yet is in
the Byzantine Empire, they were super resourceful. Um they had
(16:35):
these little like hand kind of mills, I guess, yeah,
but they would yeahs so and and the and they
would kind of, uh, you know, make their own bread
on the go, which seems insane to me, Like what
a commitment that is. Can you talk a little b
about what that process might have been, like, like how
do you get it to rise? Like how do you
(16:55):
do all this? I don't understand. That's the thing. We're
not talking about risen breads at the point. Like that's
why when we say hard tack, it's called hard tack,
you know, and which is essentially that's that's a cracker.
But these are not um, these again are not like
the light fluffy breads. They're more they're I'm trying to
think of like the equivalent of today, but they're they're
flatbreads essentially comparatively, So, yeah, you're grind, you're grinding flower,
(17:18):
which because it does have you know, some of these
flowers do have a good amount of gluten, and then
they are going to sort of develop um, you can
sort of add salt if they're fermenting them to like
you can ferment a flower for a while. So some
of these flowers are going to ferment. And if you
stick that on a hot pan, that's going to give
a sense of rise to it too. You're gonna have
enough reaction there that you're gonna get a little rise there.
(17:41):
But again, they're not we're not thinking about ovens here.
We're not thinking about like big camps necessarily where they're
having these big stone ovens and they're coming out with
these big loaves of bread like they would have that
in you know what we would consider maybe these base
camps of these forts and things like that, but that's
where other people would be cooking for them with properly
ground flowers. These are going to be like rudimentary ground,
(18:04):
coarsely ground flowers, almost like a moza, like an unleavened
bread kind of situation. Exactly. Yeah, so it's it's different.
It's it's definitely survival bread, not you know, it's not
luxurious comparatively, it's sorrowful bread for sure. For hundreds, if
(18:28):
not thousands of years, this kind of stuff was more
the rule than the exception until a revolutionary moment in
food storage history, which is a weird sentence, you know,
out of context. That is a the invention of a
Parisian chef named Nicholas A Pair a P P e
(18:48):
R t all the way in like the late eighteen century,
so seventeen nineties. Uh he is, he is ultimately right
the reason that we figured out canning. But that's not
exactly what he did, right, Yeah, he figured out our
basic like our basic means of why things that are
preserved in glass jars, why, like if we were making
(19:11):
at home nowadays, if we're making apple sauce or pickles
or jam, you know, when we take our mason jars
and you know, take our the hot jam that we're
making and put it in mason jars and boil it
to seal it. That's what he came up with, essentially,
and it was in a direct result of Napoleon having
(19:33):
one point five million men to feed, and he had
tried this sort of like pillage thing. We're like, okay,
we're gonna bring some food with us and then we're
going to pillage for it, and found out that that
wasn't gonna work with one and a half million men,
and so said, okay, we're gonna give a prize to
whoever can figure this out for us, and a pair
of being a chocolate maker at the time, he was
(19:54):
a chef and then went into candy, and so he
was already working with things like um, using a Marie
too slowly, you know, cooke down candies to melt chocolate,
to figure out ratios of of sugar, and jams and
jellies to have them set correctly. He was already working
on that kind of stuff and he really jumped into
(20:14):
this contest to figure out how they could preserve foods
like they did wine. Like they already knew that if
you took wine and put it in a bottle and
corked it, it was going to last for a long time. Um,
it wasn't going to explode. It's different than champagne, you know,
So they figured he figured there had to be a
way to do that with food, and that's sort of
what he set out to figure out. Well. And it's
(20:34):
interesting because a lot of this was just sort of
trial and air observational stuff, Like he didn't understand the
science behind it at all. He was just sort of like, Okay,
this works, I've experimented, this is the best method for
getting this done. Let's just keep doing it this way.
And then it was it was a good ways later
before the actual science of it was figured out. Right. Yeah,
what he figured out was essentially taking air out because
(20:58):
air is going to do a bunch of different things
to food as it breaks down. It's gonna, you know,
air oxidize a certain things. It draws sugars out, you've
got fat oxidation, It breaks down the cell structure of things.
So as food ages, a lot happens essentially because primarily
because of air. You've got heat and light and other things.
But he found out that, oh, if I just take
(21:19):
the air out, and that's why like sealing something in
a jar and then boiling it to you know, get
as much air out as possible. That was one part
of it, and then the other was essentially getting the
in the boiling process, getting that sort of at at
a certain point where okay, this is cooked to the
point that we wanted to a lot of the things
(21:39):
already had sugar and salt, which we know again pull
moisture out. Um, so we're getting as much of sort
of bacteria accidentally killed it's already transformed Byteria. He didn't
know this, but those things are sort of cooked out
to a point. So we're pulling as much water out
of the food substance as possible, using sugar or salt
to kell bacteria as much as we can, and eliminating air,
(22:01):
which is going to then reduce the food from decomposing
more until it's eat And that's basically what he figured
out right right, without even knowing the concept of aerobic bacteria. Uh,
he was he was fighting, you know, one of the
main antagonists in the story of preserving food. And I
always love to picture all of the misses that he
(22:23):
made along the way, you know what I mean. We
don't know too much about all like to your point,
and all about all the things he got wrong along
the way. But but shout out to him for winning
that prize of I think it was twelve thousand gold
francs in eighteen ten, uh, and even getting a book
deal out of it in his work the Book for
(22:46):
All Households or The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances.
For many years, really really creative title titles were longer
back then. People have more time to read. I mean,
at least you you know, it spells it out for
you know exactly you're getting attention spans. I guess they
had more They had more time for that kind of stuff.
But that's like a book right there is that title nowadays.
(23:07):
So you know, one thing that's very important that you
hit on Jacqueline is that we can't quite call him,
you know, the quote unquote father of canning or anything,
because he was working with glass. And it's not until
a few years later, Uh, Peter durand In in England decides, hey,
(23:29):
let's switch from glass to these tin containers or technically
tin coated iron containers, and soon enough he's off to
the races. And this means that the English Royal Navy,
the British Royal Navy, is the first military to have
what we would call canned food today. Correct. Yeah, and
(23:51):
it's it's funny like we don't we don't think about
them at all now, but to think about what a
novel invention at tin cans. They'd only had glass up
until then, and now you have another container that The
key is that they're cooking food in these containers. It's
not that they're taking food, putting it in a jar
and then cooking it. So you're actually cooking the food
(24:14):
in the can, and that's sort of the big deal there.
Or sometimes you're cooking the food first and then putting
in the cannon, then cooking it again. But the fact
that you can actually cook a food item in its
container and seal it and have it then be pretty durable,
that it's not going to I mean, they had problems
with this, but it's it's generally that the hope is
(24:35):
that it's not going to explode on you because of
breakdowns of things inside that it's going to be a
really durable container. Like that's that's pretty huge when that
has never existed before. And we know that from that point,
cans became, you know, the hot new thing. There's still
a hot new thing, right, Most people have cans of
(24:56):
something in their pantry, even if it's just like souper
some black beans, because they keep forever. And the US
military figured this out too, right, I think that what
we would consider the predecessor, the m R. E, was
actually a tin container, right, Yeah, So the first time
they started trying this out for the military, before they
(25:18):
even figured the actual ration part was just trying to
ship meet in tin cans, which they did for the
Spanish American War at the end of the nineteenth century.
And they were also generally just trying to find a
better way to ship meet in general, because meat is
the most expensive part of any menu in a restaurant.
For the military, it's always meat. And this is before
(25:41):
they had even figured out how to break meat down
from like this is when they were still shipping whole
carcass animals on train cars. They had refrigerator train cars
by this point, but this was literally like meat dangling,
you know, whole animal, and they weren't breaking it down
or freezing it. This is just meat going from you know,
(26:02):
Wisconsin or whatever to Florida to then get on boats
to go to Cuba or to Puerto Rico or over
to Guam or whatever. So they were trying to put
meat in cans. And what ended up happening is because
they didn't have this food science just as far as
how food breaks down, just like as food breaks down
with heat. Um, Now you're taking meat in a can
(26:24):
and putting it in a very hot climate. And so
it didn't work out very well in the Spanish American War. Um,
it just sort of went bad. Not in a bad
way that it got like what we'd think of as
bad bacteria like like salmonilla or eat col i or
anything like that, but in a way that people got sick.
They already were, they were already having problems with yellow
(26:47):
fever and typhoid and things like that. But for American troops,
only three eighty five died in combat and two thousand,
four d and eighty five died of illness. And so
everybody assumed it was the meat, that it was a
bad meat. It ended up not being the bad meat.
The meat did go bad. It looked They called it
embalmed meat, basically embalmed beef because it got it looked gross,
(27:09):
it got you know, it had a film on top,
and it smelled horrible, just like you know, you leave
beef in the refrigerator a little bit too long, it's
gonna look brown, and it's gonna smell a little a
little tinny, a little like a little minerally, but you
can still cook it and then it's fine. Um, think
about that times, like you know, twenty that all of
a sudden, like the meat is gonna look bad and
smell bad, but technically it's still safe if you just
(27:30):
cook it. This was a lot worse than it was
slimy and smelled horrible, and nobody wanted to eat it.
And on top of that, these guys are already sick,
and it really sort of put the military off before
World War One of wanting to use canned meat for
a little while. So it's sort of a little hiccup, um,
which they got over, but it wasn't It wasn't the
best way to start. Yeah, yeah, we do at least
(27:54):
see that. Um. There was there was a move to
organize things into kits towards I guess toward the last
half or towards the end of World War One, where
they would get a ration that was uh, let's say
we actually got the numbers here, uh jacqueline for background,
here are ridiculous history. One thing that often bedevils us
(28:16):
is will learn about historic dinners or meals of importance,
and we can never find the menu. So this is
big for us to actually know what these what these
folks were eating, Uh that twelve ounces of bacon or
some kind of some kind of meat, uh to eight
ounce cans of again hardtack. Uh. They had some preground coffee,
some sugar, a salt pack. Interestingly enough, at the time
(28:40):
they were also given a tobacco ration, which I guess
just speaks to how common smoking was at the time.
But but they went back, the Uncle Sam went back
and continually tried to improve this. Um. I believe it
was in nineteen thirty six they got some aviation of menus,
(29:01):
so you weren't always eating the same thing. And then
at the very top of the show you mentioned something
called I believe the k ration. It's it comes after
the rise of something called the Sea ration in nineteen
thirty eight. Now, while these are military food they don't
look anything like the m R. E S of today
(29:24):
right there. They're kind of, I guess a box. Yeah.
So so in the in World War One, they basically
used the can like you had a lunch box, you know.
They put all these dried sort of foods in the
can so that they were generally waterproof and you could
carry them around and it just made it easier. Essentially.
That's sort of what the k Ration was in World
(29:44):
War Two, which they had just taken this idea of
all of these military foods throughout history, and what were
they They were basically, again, something sort of crackery, something dried.
Now we have instant coffee, which came out in World
War One, which again is not the same type of
coffee that we have now. It was different type of
drying process, so it doesn't taste quite the same. Um.
(30:04):
But still now they have dried coffee versus like in
the Civil War they were actually taking coffee and grinding
it and making coffee you know, on the road. Now
they've got instant coffee and they're just putting that in
the can. By World War Two, they switch up the
use of the can with the sea rations and the
k rations sort of became that grazing mentality. And so
depending on if it was your snack ration, these your
(30:27):
field rations. So it's either your snack ration, which could
have biscuits, jerky, cigarettes, instant coffee, or your breakfast one,
which could have um, again would have usually cigarettes instant coffee. Um,
you might like this because it's the breakfast one. They
I heard of guys. Uh, they called them poop bars.
(30:47):
They were fig bars, um, which in my mind are
like fig Newton's, but I guess not nearly as good
because they call them poop bars. Well, and it's actually
it's it's it's a it's fruited cake. Just for the record,
so of course I'm I was sorry. I'm sorry the
fruited cake bars that the fruited poop bars of World
War two. Um, but they which they didn't like, to
(31:07):
the point that when one of my one of my
veterans told me that after the liberation of Paris, they
went back into Paris and kids were begging for they'd
be like cigarette, Papa cigarette, and they would give them
the poop bars instead, you know, which was still I
guess a treat. But that's how willing they were to
give away the poop bars. Um. And then powdered eggs,
which you mentioned eggs. Yeah, powdered eggs were by number
(31:30):
one out of every complaint that I've heard from World
War two veterans are were number one and evidently are
still number one. I've read about guy, I've heard and
read about people today complaining about the omelets in m
RI e s. Today. Powdered eggs are still pretty horrible.
But the k rations were sort of would lend to
our civilian snacking habits too, because they were biscuits, jerky,
(31:52):
you know, sometimes chocolate, which has changed over time. Um,
sometimes they've had good chocolate. They've had you know, eminem
or chocolate. The taste like chocolate. Sometimes it's not great.
They have the d bar, which was intentionally created not
to taste good. Um. It was fortified with oats with
the sugar was sort of rebalanced. It's it's bitter chocolate,
(32:15):
milk powder, oat flour, um and some vitamins added to
it so that it intentionally is not something they'd want
to eat, but that it's six hundred calories of square.
You'd get three of them together so you'd have enough
calories and an emergency so those could be in them too.
So they were. They changed as World War Two went on,
but they were, um, you know, they were sort of
the the snack pack version of the rations versus the
(32:38):
sea rations, which were the first real meal in a can.
Uh So, first off, I love that you mentioned the
powdered egg far because I've had some some interactions world
War two veterans, and it's weird that they all mentioned
the same specific thing. I know, right, Yeah, that was
(32:58):
a big swing and a miss. We know now that
this evolution see ration k ration all the way like
all the way through various different conflicts around the world
and in various different missions. We know they ultimately lead
to what armies eat today. Here in the United States,
(33:22):
we call this the m r E. The meal ready
to eat. I believe the first m r E s
came out pretty recently in the span of history, right
in the nineteen eighties or so. Yeah, that's when we
officially changed the name and put them in this sort
of new packaging. Um, because up until the late seventies,
(33:42):
we didn't really have the pouch technology that we have now,
so from World War Two forward, we had cans and
then we had dehydrated foods, and that was sort of
what we had up until now. So the powdered foods
um in World War Two, it wasn't a powdered eggs um.
Talk about menus. I love looking at these old menus
(34:04):
you can find. And potatoes were another thing that were
powdered in World War Two. They were called flaked potatoes.
If they were trying to make them fancy, um, they
would use these rehydrated potato flakes. Milk was powdered, Cheese
could be powdered. Most of the time. Those were used
more in the garrison camps to to feed people, um,
not necessarily in the field, but they basically tried to
(34:26):
just to save space, right because again you're moving in
World War two. We had six over sixteen million people
working in World War two, which is why we have
all of this innovation that came out of World War Two.
But to save space, you dehydrate things. That's the fastest
and easiest way to to shrink something down. So they
dehydrate milk, they dehydrate eggs, they dehydrate potatoes and then
(34:48):
reconstitute them. In regular just dehydration, you just pull the
water molecules out some things, and the food stuffs are
gonna oxidize, they're going to deteriorate, You're gonna lose some flavor,
you're gonna lose some aroma when you rehydrate them. And
so those things like the instant coffee weren't gonna smell
as good the powdered eggs. You're never going to get
the texture of powdered eggs or fluffy, fatty mashed potatoes.
(35:12):
And so what they figured out later was freeze dehydrating
under pressurized conditions, which is what we use now, which
is completely different. Um, So you bring the materials to
below the freezing point, you shock those molecules into immobilization.
So the water is still going to freeze and sort
of separate, but everything else stays intact, or as much
as possible, stays intact. So fat molecules, sugar molecules, they're
(35:35):
not sort of breaking down. And then with you know,
immense pressure, then you vacuum out the frozen water and
so everything's okay comparatively. So that form of dehydration just
really changed how we have dehydrated foods and led to
what the army wanted to sort of do with m
ras in the future, or will with what would become
(35:55):
the m RAS of the future, with just dehydrating foods
like we all know grew up with having astronaut ice cream,
you know, for fun as kids, and that essentially is
what they thought that they could actually do for military
food like but with both sweet and savory foods, just
freeze dehydrating food and um, I have not heard this
yet because I have not started interviewing Vietnam veterans, but
(36:17):
I've been told that I might be hearing some freeze
dehydrated foods dropped into those veterans, because again, they're incredibly light,
and they can be you know packed, you know, immense
amounts of food can be sent in into very remote locations.
But then you have the problem of a reconstituted you know,
think about like reconstituting freeze dried ice cream. It's not
(36:37):
gonna have the texture of ice cream at all. Um.
And then on top of that, you know, you've got
petrid water conditions, and then imagine doing that like with
roast beef or something. It's just not going to be
a satisfying food. So that was a huge failure in
that way, but that does give us the better coffee,
the better coco. Now in m R E's we have,
(36:57):
you know, mocacino versus just in sdank coffee, and that
comes from a better way of powdering coffee and powder
and different and powdering different types of f or like
you know, like a nice sanka, like a sanking. Yeah,
thank it was. That was another step to you know,
we had instant coffee and then head sanka. I still
don't really know what it is. I don't understand what
(37:18):
senka now they do, I but they make it look
really cool on teles right, you made a really good point.
We had a little computer glitch and and we're off
offline for a second. We were just chatting about how,
like so much of the prepackaged food we eat today,
(37:39):
it follows a lot of these same rules, but it's
just like a better, kind of bougier version of these
m R E s. Um I wonder if we could
maybe take things to the present and talk about how
m R E s have kind of improved h and
maybe while they're still not as good as like, you know,
our kid cuisines, or whatever. They're a hell of a
lot better than they used to be in the early days. Yeah,
(38:02):
there's two things I sort of geek out about for
this that are not really sexy. But the biggest thing
to me is the container. Again, the container itself is
this retort pouch, which are the it's the same plastic
pouches that now you know give us uh go girt.
And are those little squeeze tubes that you know we
have peas in and stuff like that. And again they
(38:24):
seem pretty innocent, but these things are amazing because they
are different layers of material that allow us to cook
food inside of them at slightly higher temperatures than you
need to in a can. But because there's a greater
surface area for a shorter amount of time, and so
the food just is going to taste fresher. You're gonna
(38:44):
have less of a breakdown of the actual food. So
if you put chunks of beef in there, they're going
to actually be chunks of beef or beans like the
m R e s that I have just to have
them are a black beans, you know, so you're going
to have the texture of beans not like being mush.
And then you can heat them up faster as well
in the field, so you don't need to It's not
a can that you're heating up to eat. Uh. You
(39:06):
know the corned beef and potatoes that are World War
two veterans were eating. Now you can have a much
wider variety of foods, pastas and things like that that
are going to have a better mouth feel. You can
heat them up faster. Um. So it's this whole new
world because of these specifically made plastic pouches, which plastic
was we can complain about it a lot now, but
(39:27):
starting in the fifties, the military invested in this finding,
you know, in developing with all these private companies developing
plastic and what we could do with it, So making
a seal that you could it's essentially vacuum seal these pouches.
You could pressure cook them and then they they do
well in extreme conditions, in heat, in pressure, in human climates,
(39:50):
dry climates. Um. They can hold up better than cans did. Uh.
So that I think is particularly exciting that these pouches
sort of really changed they game when it comes to
how our emery's taste today. And we also know that
there is a lot of research that goes into this
The foods uh science here is fascinating because despite what
(40:15):
uh many people in the military may believe, the researchers
do actually run extensive taste test and extended you know,
feeding tests, both in the field and in the lab,
which I feel like sounds like a cool lab ratte job,
you know, because it's not all going to be the
infamously terrible veggie omelet of two thousand seven or uh,
(40:38):
what's that other really creepy captain Country Captain Chicken? Did
you ever hear that one? Normal that's still around. We've
got a full list here from how stuff works. We've
got stuff like beefsteak with mushrooms and Western beans. I'm
more of a Northern beans kind of guy myself. We've
got this very odd combination of pork rib and clammed
showder who asked for that? I don't understand. We've got
(41:00):
beef ravioli and potato sticks. Sure, Country Captain Chicken, which
is an inherently bad ben I mean, oh, it's like
famously bad. This one is famously the dishes, it's like
an Indian thing. I think I believe you're correct, and
and buttered noodles, um then we have chicken breast and
minnestrone stew, chicken with Thai sauce, just generic Thaie sauce.
(41:22):
They don't give us any more with it. Well it's
yellow slash wild rice peel off. That's a lot of
rice combos. You want to give us some more there
twenty four and all so, uh, you can favorites. Yeah,
you can see the you can see the full list,
and you know they want to have this variety. So
for every meatloaf with gravy, you might get a chicken
tetrazini or so on. Uh. And what we see is
(41:45):
that the food science has also verged into psychology. They
found that varying the menu means that people will eat
more because there's a lot of varieties. So you're getting
you know, Country Captain chicken or even manicotti every day.
And this is this is something that got that was
(42:06):
interesting to me. They found that if they gave things
commercial or civilian graphics, people tended to like them more.
So that's why hot sauce is a huge commodity in
Mr East today. And that's why you know you'll get
uh side items like candies and stuff that will have
a brand name because I don't know, maybe it reminds
(42:27):
people a home, maybe there's familiarity. Maybe you just you
don't feel like you're eating out of a drab all
of bag, right like like like you said, I think
you mentioned this. Um they even have like, you know,
kind of sexed up the packaging a little bit where
it might have like a cool logo or more of
like a snazzy graphic design kind of concept to it.
Which you know, I'm a big fan of brightly colored sodas.
(42:50):
Don't know why. It doesn't matter what they taste like.
I also like things that are green, like I like
pistachio ice cream. I like the flavor, but I also
love the fact that it's green, or like blue power
aid yea or or one of my personal favorites Superman
ice cream, which is really just vanilla ice cream, but
it's just like multicolored and that makes me I don't know,
and I'm just really into it for some reason. Freaks
me out. Man, I'm a real sheep. Oh no, no,
(43:14):
what is life if not to be lived? We also
know that m R e s. In addition to inspiring
so much civilian food, they're also used in civilian emergency
situations like natural disasters, so we can get a lot
of food to people very quickly. But m R E
s are not the only example of modern military food.
(43:34):
There are tons of other militaries in the world right
and they they often have their own kind of thing.
I read somewhere that for a number of years, the
French version of the m R E, the R C
I R, was considered the best, and people would you know,
different soldiers from different militaries would meet and they would
kind of trade these back and forth. Uh and and
(43:57):
even now, if you have listened to this and you
are interested in trying an m R E, you can
find them online. I think you can. Actually you can
pick them up from Amazon even or of course eBay,
but buy or beware because you know they may not
be as recent as you would like. Learn from my mistakes, folks,
don't get stuck with that two thousand seven veggie omelet,
(44:20):
which I just want to point out. Apparently the street
name for that thing, you guys, is the vomblet. Yeah,
what is in the breakfast one that you have been currently?
It's the Veggie's several of them. I thought you had
a few, know, I have one breakfast one and then
I have a m I think a Hollapano chicken dish
(44:42):
that I gave to our rider guy pal Matt Frederick.
Something I want you to know. Good for for all
this coronavirus prepping. Yeah, yeah, oh no, no, I was
doing that anyway because I had to build a new
bike out back. Coronavirus not with me, and no know
you you you had a doomsday prepper shelter before it
was invoke? Quick question though, how do you what's this
(45:03):
omelet situation? Like you literally just add water and stirred
around and it's basically just like weird egg putting kind
of or what they come with a flameless heater. I
believe so because they also we also found out people
want to eat food hot. Uh And this this is
where we're at now. We don't know, well I guess
I don't know, and I don't think either of us
(45:25):
know what the future of m R ease is. But Jacqueline,
do you think that the technology involved is kind of
at a I don't want to say at a plateau,
but at a stable point. Is there anything that people
are trying to change with MRS in the future or
have we arrived at the perfect army food. Well, I
think right now that what they are seeking they've sort
(45:48):
of hit as far as making these rations for men
and women who are functioning at a very high energy level.
They are they are packed with sodium, they're packed with carbohydrates,
they're packed with calories. They're jacking them with caffeine, with vitamins.
I think that's sort of where they are continuing to
try to excel is figuring out how to get all
(46:09):
this stuff in the foods and actually making them still
palatable and taste good. There are a lot of jokes
about m R E. S UM. You mentioned the bomblet.
They're called meals ready to Exit. There's a lot of
jokes about how bad they are because they're so high
in sodium. You know, they're really not great for the
body after a couple of days or the digestion literally,
(46:32):
but they technically have all the nutrients that people wanted them. Um.
I'm particularly curious about getting fresher foods and vegetables into them,
because that's still going to be the biggest problem is
how you get something other than you know, zapple sauce,
which has a lot of sugar and carbs and sometimes
caffeine in it. But the difference between m R e's
(46:53):
for civilians and soldiers is that they are burning their bodies,
you know, and that's really what these foods are intended
to do. So I think it's continuing to figure out
how to make them durable, portable, you know, consistent, and
so that people will want to eat them. And we
have a very multi ethnic, multicultural military, and I think
that's that awesome thing about the variety of m r
(47:15):
as we have now versus when we were in Vietnam,
versus the Korean War, World War two. So that to
me is the exciting thing to see continue to develop.
Just how you know, being American soldiers, how that is
just encompassed and this menu, uh so, who knows where
that is? How that's going to continue and keep going.
Why do you think there isn't more like vacuum seal
(47:36):
technology being used. I wonder if that would be an
alternative or a way to have like fresher foods that
that could last a little longer. That might just be
Americans resisting that. I believe that that is already much
more commonly used for both militaries and civilians. UM in
Asia and in Europe. I forget exactly where, but I
(47:57):
believe that that we've just been slower to acquire that. Um,
I think that's that might be happening more and more,
but I think we've just been slower to acquire even
just foods and pouches, has been slower on our ends
than it has been in other countries. My last question,
and then I will I will throw it to my
co host to to to ask any final wrap up questions.
Did you guys ever have those milks that came in
(48:19):
a bag when you were in when you were in school. Yeah,
it's weird milk in a bag. Milk in a bag. Yeah,
it's like the same um, it's the same amount of
milk as you would get in the typical paper carton
that lunch kids get, but it's in this weird bag
that looks like some kind of um, like a breast
implant or something. Yeah. Yeah, I was trying to think
(48:41):
of a different way too. I'm intrigued. You get a
little straw stab it in there. You have to stab it,
which which made it a hot commodity. It seemed like
a bit of a flash in the pan because I
only remember it for like one year in elementary school,
and then it was back to Carton's. I wonder what
the thinking was behind that easier to shift. Maybe you
could just PLoP them all into a box and didn't
(49:02):
have to stack them take around in other places. But
uh milk in a bag, milk in a bag. Aside,
I do also want to point out that you can
buy uh mr E's from all over the world online.
I'm particularly excited about this Korean apparently bulgogi flavored rice
I've got on the way. Yeah, and I'm going to
(49:25):
check out the technology there. But while we're waiting for that,
I want to say, Jacqueline, thank you so much for
joining us today and giving us this strange and fascinating
journey through the history of food and the history of militaries.
For anyone who would like to learn more about service
(49:47):
veteran stories of hunger and war, where should they go?
Where can they find the show? What? You can find
us streaming on all podcasting platforms of course, I heart radio, Apple, etcetera.
And you can learn more at of this podcast dot org.
And we are also always sharing a lot of extra
nerdy food history and outtakes from our veterans on Facebook
(50:08):
and Instagram. We are at Service Podcast and you by
this point the time this episode comes out, you will
have wrapped your first season. Yeah, we just wrapped our
first season. So we featured um, a number of World
War two veterans themselves and then also some historians to
help us sort of recap how World War to change
the world. Yeah, and that not only is it a
(50:28):
really fascinating podcast where you learn a lot, it's really
well produced and and very moving, great storytelling. Really really
props for a wonderful show. And congratulations on rapping the
first season. Thank you so much, thanks for having me. Yeah,
and don't take our word for it, folks, don't delay
check out the first season, available in its entirety today.
(50:49):
Thanks as always to our super producer Casey Pegram. Thanks
to Alex Williams who compose our our banging soundtrack. Thanks
to Christopher Haciotas, who, as it turns out, is also
the exactive producer of of this of this delightful show Service. Um.
He is here in spirit as always. He is like Mufasa,
just like a lording over all of us, like a
(51:10):
giant uh stately lyon in the sky. Thanks to. We
already said to super Case, I'm gonna give him he's
so nice to think him twice. Um. Thanks to Gabe Losy,
our incredible research associate. UM I think we we. It
turns out he's not a bot. Uh. He is an
actual human person um and he's gonna be on the
show at some point soon. So you're gonna hear the
(51:31):
true voice of Gabe. You heard it here first, folks.
He is the Chicken Tu Trazeni of our show. We'll
see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for my
heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
(51:52):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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