MREs were literally a mixed bag in the late 1990s Army. They had this Spaghetti one and a Ham Slice one that everybody wanted. They also had something they called an omelet, but it had more in common with octupus flesh than anything fit for humans.
I ate many an MRE during Desert Storm in 91. This episode really brings me back though. Rations may have changed but the daily struggle of the infantryman to use his ingenuity to better his situation hasn't changed in a thousand years. While waiting to go into Iraq in January - February, we were in foxholes in the brigade area for several weeks. Unbelievably, the desert nights and mornings were bitterly cold. One day near our fighting positions, I found a discarded one quart metal oil can. Opportunity to improve my living conditions was at hand! I cut the top and bottom out and then cut openings opposite each other in one end. I now had a stove for my canteen cup. Purely by coincidence, as I'm certain it wasn't by design, I discovered that there was just enough cardboard in every MRE to boil exactly one single canteen cup of water using my improvised stove. Due to the fact that we might need to don our gas masks at any time, we were ordered to shave every morning as stubble will prevent a face seal. But every MRE came with a packet of instant coffee, creamer, sugar and often cocoa beverage powder. This could all be mixed with hot water to make a rather wonderful amalgam we called "mocha". During a freezing cold desert morning, it was the only thing available with any semblance of warmth or brief enjoyment. So as it took one canteen cup of water to do either, I was presented with an agonizing choice every morning. I could have a nice hot shave and the soul crushing lack of the hot morning mocha. Or I could enjoy a few brief moments of a piping hot tasty drink to warm my bones and then a horrific fifteen minutes of scraping an ice cold, dull, clogged up razor across my face. In those cold, dirty, dusty, stinking and uncertain times, there were more than a few mornings I opted for the mocha and resigned myself to tearing my face off with what felt like a frozen cheese grater. I still have my improvised stove in my collection of military memorabilia. And I never did need that damn gas mask.
That is the best description I've ever read for what it was like! People focus on the bigger stories, but it's the little ones like that which best depict life as a soldier. It was cold when I first got there, (Yes, it got incredibly cold during the winter) but it didn't stay that way for long, and I had a similar experience. But the majority of the time I was there it was unbelievably hot. Like living in an oven at times. I could literally cook my MRE by setting it on the dash of my truck (I drove a fuel rig). Cooked them better than the heaters.
I was in the navy, and during a community relations project in Malaysia, we got to work with the Marines. We had box lunches, with ham sandwiches, soda, chips and cookies. The Marines had MREs. I asked if I could have one, and they said sure! So I started tearing into the MRE, and my shipmate were like, "Whoa, where'd you get that?!" I told them, and they asked the other Marines if they'd like to trade MREs for box lunches. Boooy, you NEVER saw a human jump at something so fast! Those Jarheads were like piranha! They tossed us a whole case of MREs and swarmed over our box lunches like sharks in a feeding frenzy. We're like, "WTH, man? Don't they feed you guys on the ship?" Apparently, they do _not_ feed them the same way they do sailors. They only got one fresh meal a day, the other two were MREs.
Sheesh, Americans get chips and soda in their box lunches? Canadians just get juice boxes and a couple fruit/granola bars to go with your bologne sandwiches. You're lucky to get a nice cookie. Or a sandwich that's not bologne or egg salad.
One time in the field, I opened up a dinner-time MRE and was lucky enough to get an Irish creme coffee pouch. They came as a powdered mix, all you had to do was add water. I was so excited and planned to start the next day with it. First thing that next morning, I rolled out of my tent with my coffee pouch and walked over to this table in our area that had these water coolers. Mixed in the water, shook the pouch up, and took a big pull of my coffee. Which was a heck of a way to discover that they put a cooler filled with lemon lime Gatorade right next to the ones with water.
@@Magoover1 How could you mistake hot water for cold gatorade? The irish creme coffee mix does not work well in cold water, it clumps up and never mixes in right. You can add cold water and put the pouch in pot of hot water if you can get it... Or use the flameless heater.
Wonderful video as always. My only complaint is that the modern us military actually still fields field kitchens and cooks hot meals in the field. The MRE is used for soldiers on the move, when setting up a field kitchen is not feasible or compatible with the overall pace of the mission. I think it would be an interesting video to compare field kitchens from the 18th century to today
Yes, whenever there are large groups of infantry in one spot it's cheaper to wheel out a kitchen crew, better quality food aswell. MRE stuff is fine when hungry but about half the stuff they give you is not very good.
Much of it depends on the operation even though my unit was in what became a permanent camp in Iraq by May in 2003 it was almost October before they rolled out regular meals from the field kitchen much of it because we lacked a regular supply of potable water so the best they could do was occasional T-rations which where basicly squad sized mre's. We still where issues 3 mre's a day. By the time we had field rations we had almost stopped eating Mre's and had started using cases of them to build structures to keep out of the wind and sun because we where occupying the runways of an airfield and other then the tower and one hanger that was being used for maintenance we had no shelter.
@preston9412 oh yeah, that always comes with being first in for a lasting op. I remember walking through the base in Kandahar over a decade ago and they had a whole wall covered with old pictures showing the progress of the base from some HESCO barriers around the tower, circa 2002,, to the 25,000+ person base surrounded in 15ft high concrete slabs.
@Rudy97 Even when you get camp prepared rations a lot depends on the cooks and their effort. Despite the ration packs coming with spices and seasonings most of our food was prepared in ways that made it barely palatable. Bulk scrambling eggs in a bag by boiling them in water which turns them into a foam rubber consistancy un seasoned. Sausage links boiled until you have gray flavorless meat sticks, partially rehydrated nearly raw shredded potatoes they called hashbrown (never saw a flat top), unseasoned ground beef (tacos). instead of even putting the seasoning where we could get to it they straight dumped it in the burn pits. My unit lost an average of 40lbs each because the food was so bad.
In the Civil War, they were issued ca. 48 oz. "Muckets"- cooking pails like Jon's, but with a hinged lid. I think 32 oz. versions are available in stainless. Read of a Civil War soldier who made a tasty soup of a chicken and seawater! If I ever see the ocean again, doubtful, I'll try it!
Just be wary of where you're getting your seawater. A lot of sewage still gets dumped into there, treated or not it's likely not going to taste nice. That and washoff from farm fields.
Vietnam veteran here, and I well remember C rations while in SE Asia. Some were OK, and others, like ham and lime beans were an abomination. We discovered early on that if you could heat the canned entrees they were not too bad. The cheese spread and ‘John Wayne’ crackers were especially coveted. In Basic we had the WW2 mess kits you showed, and we frequently ate off them. I discovered that when you are very hungry all the Army chow was tasty. Of course, Tabasco made it all an epicurean delight. I left the Army long before MRE’s so can’t comment on them. Jon, thank you for your wonderful perspectives on our lives today versus what it was like in the 1700’s.
Absolutely, I feel that. I was in from 2016-2019 so I was around during the era of decent MREs but I 100% concur that when you've been in the field long enough anything hot tastes good. I used to never heat up my MREs and would hoard the chemical heaters so I could use them to warm my sleep sack up at night or stick one under my uniform top during especially cold weather. (Was stationed at Ft Riley so below 0 conditions were pretty common)
I'm Portuguese; but I guess if you were in Vietnam you may remember "the five fingers of death"! The first time I heard the nickname I must have laughed for minutes... 😂
MRE's in the field weren't always bad. The chili mac MRE or buffalo chicken was actually sought after. Pork sausage and gravy was outright disgusting if you didn't have time to warm it up, but when heated was meant to go with your flatbread as something kinda like biscuits and gravy. Vegetarian MREs always had the best snacks/desserts.
@@emperorcokelord1021 Do you mean the kosher/halal MREs? They were the bomb. To my understanding (taught to me by some of the Kurds) Kosher is always Halal, but Halal is not always Kosher.
@@scottbowers7431 Believe it or not I worked with a guy who actually liked the Vegetarian Omelet (or vomolet, as most of us knew it as), perhaps the most vile MRE ever conceived. 🤢🤮 My point is different tastes for different people. Everyone has a favorite, and everyone has that one MRE that you'd rather go hungry than eat it. 😉😂
Eating MREs was not bad, in my opinion. Most of the time you eat everything cold, except the hot drinks. Most of them tasted pretty good. There were a couple of them that I personally didn't care for. This was back in 2008 and 2009, so I am sure they have improved a little bit. I actually keep a box in my closet. You just never know when the weather or some other disaster will happen.
If those are leftovers from your military time don't rely on them too much at this point. The dry crackers and candies should be safe but the retort (foil pack) meals are going to be pretty iffy after this long.
They're experimenting with a new MRE with more freeze dried stuff from what I hear but most of the meals haven't changed much in the last 20 years. The Chili with Cornbread is my favorite but hot sauce with ALL MREs in my opinion...
You were lucky. The ones we had in the late 80s had no heater and some of those meals were just foul. Several were dehydrated as well like the beef patty. Took awhile to soften them up. And the chicken ala king looked and smelled like canned cat food
I eat MREs in the field all the time, so as a result, I’m often bored with them. In every instance which I’m tempted to complain about the mediocrity of an MRE, I will try to remember this video. Thank you for the much-appreciated perspective and history lesson, sir.
Your statement about needing perspective really rings true. I've been reading the Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne, a soldier in Boney's army in Russia as they went from rations brought from France to the luxuries of looting Moscow to absolute scarcity of food over just a few months. Everyone's heard that far too many people people met untimely deaths from freezing cold and starvation, but reading actual specific recollections of the bleak abject misery is well and truly harrowing.
MRE's are all about mixing and matching and imagination. Favorite example is the Chile with beans from 2015 onward: comes with Chili w/Beans, Corn Bread, Cheese Spread, Vegetable Cracker, Fudge Brownie, a drink and accessory packet. One could just eat these separately. Or: one could heat up the chile and cheese spread both in the heater - fold the MRE package in half, and pour the entirety of the chile, and all the cheese, and crushed crackers into the MRE pouch and get 1 giant entrée, with the corn bread as a side. Another trick is to add the MINIMAL amount of water necessary in the Cocoa beverage powder. Instead of a chocolate DRINK, you can create a chocolate ICING and spread that on bread or crackers.
I'm sure many here will agree when I say, the quantity of content you have is incredible, BUT the quality of it is even more AMAZING! Simply put... ANOTHER AWESOME VIDEO from a channel FULL of AWESOME VIDEOS!
I was a Soldier from 1978 to 2014, so I ate C-rations, T-rations, and MREs. The advantage of the C-Rats was they were in cans so you could heat them up in the can (just make sure to poke a hole in the lid first or it could explode from steam pressure). But C-Rats were heavy and every can in the meal had to be opened with the P-38 can opener (not easy when your fingers were frozen in the winter). There was an unofficial C-Ration cookbook, menus and dishes concocted from various components of different ration items. Some were very inventive. Hot sauce was a prized commodity due to the blandness of the foods. T-Rations were terrible in the beginning but aren't too bad now. These are designed to feed units and just required a steam table to heat and serve. MREs were also terrible in the beginning because they relied on too many freeze-dried components that had to be reconstituted by the Soldier. Soldiers cooked in the "Steel Pot" helmet until they were replaced by the Kevlar helmet. The Steel Pot was useful for cooking, shaving, and bathing but was useless for stopping bullets. One could also heat a pint or so of water in the canteen cup that comes with the modern plastic canteen. Soldiers then and now have always been inventive and supplemented their food with whatever they could forage or scavenge. I ate plenty of locally caught fish, snakes, birds, and turtles in the field. Added to provided rations, they filled you up and kept you going.
In the British Army we often just whacked a big dent in a can & considered it ready when the dent was pushed out... I think I'd be fuming if I saw my boys doing that now... but, the fact remains. Our little can openers in every ratpack were good currency for exchange on exercise with the US.
I remember being stationed near the DMZ in 1990 and my unit was in the field on average half the month. Winter set in and it was brutally cold especially for a 19 year old from south Louisiana. The MRE rations we got had these little short handled white plastic spoons. There we were with wind chills hitting well below zero and dirty hands trying to scrape the bottom of the bag. Then long handled brown spoons began to appear. Total game changer. They were slow to appear and anyone lucky enough to get one guarded it like it was made of gold. I finally got one (probably half of the company still didn't have one) and what a difference it made to my morale
MREs were after my service but I have eaten my share of C-Rations in four years (75-79) US Army Infantry. Mess kits were issued to everyone and nobody left their kits behind when we went to the field. Not only did the mess kit and the canteen cup come in real handy dolling up C-rats, they were also great for when the field mess hall was set up for warm chow. I've also fried up rabbit, armadillos and raccoons in the field. I always had an extra ammo pouch with cooking must-haves like salt, pepper, hot sauce, oil, garlic all in small containers. I always gathered up any unopened C-rats at the end of a field problem and fill a ruck.pocket with peanut butter, crackers, any kind of fruit or cake. Guys don't fight over the stuff when they're cleaning out APCs at the end of a field problem. I was also friends with our COs driver. He carried a frying pan with him. Sometimes he'd let me use it as long as I brought it back clean. We made hobo stoves out of two used C-rats cans, a handful of dirt and some diesel fuel. Worked great and the best part, you could just trash it when you were done with it and always had access to new cans to make a new one . If you went hungry in the Infantry it was because you weren't using what you had access to. Go ahead ask me how many guys had steak the night the company supply truck hit a beef cow out in the field. The army was supposed to pay for that, we ate the evidence!
This is exactly why the Canadian army issued platoon level camp stoves and kelly kettles. lets soldiers cook up raw or C-Rations into something palatable. And with kelly kettles they could even have hot food while inside blackout zones for hot beverages and a cups worth of whatever they could cook on the chimney of the kelly kettle. Standard issue salt and pepper I am sure was popular with soldiers too when they got sick of corned beef soaked in oil and rust from the cans =p
US Army 1978-1982, Infantry. While in Germany (1/15 Inf, 3rd ID) we would often supplement our C rats with whatever the German farmers grew, fresh onions, carrots, cabbage, potatoes and apples. It also didn’t hurt to carry a bottle of Tabasco sauce and tiny bottles of schnapps in one’s ammo pouches or rucksack. Beer was always a hitchhike away for some of us more adventurous types. Good times. I wouldn’t trade that experience for all the gold in the world (well, maybe some of it 😂).
I think with deepest sympathy of the Continental Army soldiers encamped at Valley Forge in the winter. It wasn't only food which was scarce, but practically every need imaginable, down to shoes for their freezing feet. We owe those men for the very existence of the United States, who suffered hardships barely conceivable to us today. =-[.]-=
To say nothing of the lack of toilet paper. Dysentery was an extremely common ailment for armies of this era and *splinter-free* toilet paper wouldn't exist until 1930.
MRE trick called Ranger cookies (I was in the Marines but that was what they called them): Take your hot cocoa packet and open it very carefully. Dump in the sugar and creamer meant to go with the coffee and mix things up a bit, then roll the end of the cocoa packet shut again. We had these multifuel pot-bellied stoves (Korea, early 90s, winter) to keep our tents heated, so if you put that on top of the stove it'll burn the plastic off the packet and stink up the tent but after a while the sugar in the cocoa plus the extra sugar should melt down and maybe even caramelize a bit. Take it off the stove after.... a while... and let it cool down and you've got a sort of a chocolate cookie/brownie thing. They never cooked evenly but they were okay.
Those melted plastic is likely carcinogenic. You might be entitled to benefits LOL, although then again the VA isn't known to hand those out willy nilly.
Pertaining to foraging in the field, My great uncle "Dude" Irwin was a tank driver in Patton's 3rd Army at the Battle of the Bulge. His tank got hit and he and his tank commander, Beumel Franks, were able to escape with a bandoleer of ammo and a couple of rifles. They were captured by the Germans, who only seized their rifles. They had so many prisoners to keep up with, Uncle Dude and Beumel were able to escape. They would steal chickens and boil them in a helmet, seasoned with gunpowder from the cartridges. When they got home, Uncle Dude introduced Beumel to his sister, so he ended up being my Great Uncle Beumel. :)
11:35 I bivouacked one time as a Civil Air Patrol (USAF auxiliary, still civilian, not military) cadet. Well before the trip, we as a squadron were policing the MREs we were budgeted, and I claimed a couple beef stew MREs, the luxury of being one of the ones doing the policing. I got a combination of praise and jealousy from my fellow cadets when they saw what I was eating. If only they knew how good it actually was, especially compared to their chow mein and hotdog MREs, my very life might have been in danger. . .
American MRE's are pretty great. I know they get a lot of flak from US military people, but I would rank them in top 3 MREs. Taste-wise, French have the best ones, by far. Their RCIR is straight up delicious, most of the menus. As far as I remember, 1 RCIR was traded for 3 MREs in Afghanistan. Cheers from Europe and thanks for another great video!
Honestly I think a lot of us didn't like MREs not because they were BAD, maybe certain menus were (vomelets are the most famous example but that was before my time), it's just that you get so sick of them over time to a point where you'd eat anything BUT that. I remember in USMC boot anytime we got MREs (we got them during a hurricane and the Crucible) was a gift for a number of reasons: it was a departure from the five minutes you ate at the chow hall (those powdered eggs get old too), there WAS a lot more variance, you could maybe get away with sneaking a dessert, and consuming them was a less rushed and/or continuous experience. Honestly I stand by the idea that MREs are great at what they do at the scale they do it at, and give you enough options to mess around with to add least add some variation (I always crushed my crackers into my chili mac, added jalapeno cheese, then maybe hot sauce) that can make things better.
Taste wise they are all right. They do get a bit repetitive. (Woe is me) But I like to think the US is second to none logistics wise as it applies to food. Sure the U.S. MRE doesn’t include other meals like Germany, Italy, and Russia. But we sure can throw a whole lot of them into a plane. Also they transport really easily in a ruck sack.
Pavlovian response after a while. Choke down enough MRE's when you're exhausted, filthy and cold and the conditioned association will make them repulsive.
@@silverjohn6037 Yep, this and simply growing tired of them to the point of being repulsed make a lot of sense. They could be the best meals possible, yet people would still hate them.
5:30 , active u.s. soldier here, we do have field mess halls, they will usually be a safe distance away from the action and will cook the food hot & ready and put them in mermites, the the lrp will transport the food to the soldiers. I'm here to clear up the idea that all the army eats are mre's, those are for emergencies when lrp can not bring you food
Love this video. I am working on a paper about Washington's anxiety about leading the war effort, and many of his concerns was about feeding, clothing, and maintaining the men. I did use Townsend's fried chicken video in my early survey of American literature this fall. I wanted to show students how there are so many ways from which we can learn about and view a historical moment, food being one of them! And that a cookbook is not only a cultural history but a literary document that invites us into a time in more tangible ways.
Yeah I definitely wanna see Steve1989MRE and Townsends have a collab about this. It would be absolutely fascinating to watch them interact. As a side note, while American troops are not issued mess kits many other militaries do still issue mess kits do to their MRE's being more labor intensive to prepare. Big one I can think of is Greece. Hellenic forces are very much expected to carry their mess kit at all times because they're defensive minded doctrine makes heavy use of field kitchens. Israeli forces are also known to do the same and in fact they have the closest I've heard of to this older concept of the squad being responsible for actually cooking a meal. Israeli field rations are pretty much just crates of dried/canned food that most seem to cook in the field. Not an expert, but having seen those field rations it seems only logical. Love to watch every new video keep going!
Big Clive, who normally talks on matters pertaining to electric and electronic devices in the UK, has sometimes reviewed the food pouches issued by tue various different European militaries. Some of the food pouches are heated by chemical heat sources, no flames required. I found it quite fascinating.
I was in the first basic training cycle at Fort Leonard Wood to get issued MREs in '84. The first MREs In the dark brown plastic might have been mediocre but the 18th century soldiers would have loved them.
Guns of the South (a fun sci fi alternative history book) had time travelers providing the south with modern weapons. In the midst of it General Lee asked the time travelers to provide the "dessicated" meals the future soldiers had too.
I dunno... I remember getting those dehydrated pork patties in basic and wondering how they managed to combine salt pork and hardtack in one food product.
@@Raskolnikov70 Freeze dried. I have a freeze dryer. You can make a good MRE with one. The trick is figuring how to reconstitute it where is better to eat.
@@C-Culper4874 Oh, that's the fun part. In basic, you don't have time or hot water to reconstitute anything, so enjoy your cold, dry, greasy pork patty. There's a reason us old-timers lower our voices just a bit when we talk about those dark days.
@@TheIndianaGeoff I remember that line, he asked for more "portable soup" because that was the only term they had in the 1860s for that sort of food! They also gave him nitro tablets for his heart which probably extended his lifespan quite a bit. Still one of my favorite alt-history novels as well.
When I was in, field food was an MRE for lunch with T-rations at breakfast and dinner. T-rats were sealed trays that the cooks would heat with either boiling water or in the field kitchen oven. Before the flameless heater was a standard MRE handout, you were assured of hot food at least twice a day. Eating too many MRE's too often could also lead to an unpleasant case of constipation.
This episode brought tears to my eyes. I am old and have seen the sufferings of many peoples throughout the world. But I am aghast at the meagerness of the food that soldiers had available to them and the terrible circumstances that human beings inflict upon one another. I am beyond grateful for all I have. Thank you for your wonderful channel.
You forgot to mention K-rations. Back during Vietnam in the Navy when at GQ, the mess deck would be closed and you were served a box of canned meals. My first K-ration was packaged during the Korean war, almost twenty years earlier!!! Came with a couple of smokes, plastic utensils, and a stick of gum. Maybe that's why I don't pay too much attention to "Best used by" dates on can goods these days.
Yeah my dad and brothers were still using K rations in the 70s and they were all at LEAST 20 years old. They would bring them home sometimes after manuvers and such and I would eat them they were pretty awful but were neat for a kid.
I remember the time we had "MRE" in the field when I did my basic training in the Swiss army. We've been out two days in January, with a couple of meters of snow besides the tank. And for lunch, we had a can of beef chilli. Most ate it cold but I warmed it with the portable field stove everyone got. The tank smelled lile a chilli kitchen and everyone wanted to have warm chilli. Wonderful how I was just happy to have something warming in my stomach. After that I got the better Idea: During the next exercise, I laid the can infront of the heater of the M113 and that thing got quite hot so less work for me. (Pro Tip: Poke a small hole in the can BEFORE you heat it. My friends tank was a huge mess because his can exploded...)
As a Helvetophile, I love anything I can read about Swiss life, danke for sharing. Did you ever go very high into the Alps? I know Juf is the highest village in Europe.
@@seronymus The highest I've been was once as target zone surveillance: Basically making sure that no hiker goes into an artillery target zone. I've been air-lifted to a small hut and stayed there for the whole day. It has been close to the top of "Fletschhorn", which is about 3’986m (about 13'000 ft). But in general we were stationed in between Simplon Village Simplon Hospiz (between 1'400 and 2'000m / 4'600 to 6'500 ft) for around 8 weeks. Winter was cold, much snow but very beatiful. Can recommend that part of Switzerland!
"Why do our soldiers keep dying of communicable illnesses which spread through our camps like wildfire?" -Random Revolutionary War Commander "It's a real mystery" -8th man to eat from the same spoon as a man with tuberculosis
The ones making disparaging remarks about MREs were the ones who wanted a big Mac when they got back and would trade most anything for a can of vienna sausages or a snack sized bag of chips
I know this may sound like a creepy detail about history, but these types of pots weren't any different from the ones used in Europe until the Second World War. My aunt was Italian, and she used them during wartime in the same way as Townsends showed us - basically to cook food, transport water and objects, and for another aspect that nobody would think about... well, it's using them as chamber pots. You must consider that people in the past rarely had toilets, and if they did, they were usually rich or upper class. So, these pots were used as chamber pots in case of emergency, especially in open places where you couldn't use a toilet, like during an enemy attack or guard duty, for example. In fact, my aunt specifically told me that when Allied American and British jets bombed her city to the ground, people used to seek shelter not only in bunkers but also in old houses with very strong structures. Thousands of people were pressed into one small space, with the sound of bombings, people screaming, babies crying, and fear making people completely frantic. Many of them felt the necessity to relieve themselves (that's why we use the expression 'pooped themselves up' to describe someone scared of something). Obviously, in this crazy situation, people remained civilized and used some polite manners. To avoid dirtying the place, they used these pots that they brought from home. When women had to use them, they covered themselves with large sheets to conceal them from men's eyes. You must consider that there were no public toilets in bunkers or places where Europeans took cover during the Second World War, and poop in pots was extremely necessary. I've heard similar stories from my British relatives under the German bombings of the Second World War and from other European friends like the French and Germans. The only unfortunate fact is that they were so poor that the next day, they cleaned the contents of the pot, washed them very well, and used them to cook a meal with whatever they could find after the bombings, usually rotten vegetables like carrots and potatoes and other food found by luck. History is a very hardcore matter. I know that many of you are Americans and may never have heard these aspects of war because you've never experienced it in your country. But this is what really happened during real wars, and sadly it's still happening in places like Palestine-Israel and Ukraine-Russian battlefields today. 💀☠💀☠💀
Wow. Thank you for sharing! As Townsend opened the episode - if I feel like I'm having a hard day I just need to imagine being in one of those buildings, hearing the bombs come down, not knowing what will be left when it's over. Damn.
Lord have mercy, thank you for sharing. Desperate times indeed calls for desperate measures. ;_; If you're not a perfectly humbled saint or have a scat fetish (sorry) that is torment isn't it? I imagine those pots were rinsed innumerable times by the wives...
How fitting, I just did a small FTX for my army MOS training and had a couple MREs. I’m always grateful for the cooks whenever they can come with us, because MREs get a little old after a few days. Seeing old mess kits at museums from WW1 and like this always puts it into perspective. The men in Washington’s army were a different breed, considering they had to endure some of the worst conditions imaginable, and that was before they even had to go and fight battles too. Just getting enough food to feed everyone seemed like an awful challenge back then. Excellent video.
I was in the Air Force so I never had the opportunity to sample MRE's. But going off the reactions of the soldiers we transported, they were stoked to eat at our chow halls.
I ate a lot of MREs while I was in the Army. Some are pretty decent. It's important to note that our rations aren't exclusively MREs, we do have forward support units that, among other things, bring the occasional hot meal. Field kitchens also exist.
Civilian's prospective on MRE's: My boss (in financial services firm) was an army reserve logistics officer during Desert Storm. He brought MREs for our lunch the day before Thanksgiving. A team of 10 people cooked and ate them in a conference room. Each meal had a couple of warming pouches, like insulated envelops with a chemical pouch in the bottom that got hot when you added water. Fold the top closed, wait a couple minutes, and the food was hot. We had to open the door; too many of those chemical warming packs in enclosed space made the air foul. Each MRE contained an entree and a side dish that could both be heated. He showed us that if you heated the entree first in the larger heater envelope, you could then put the side dish in that same larger envelop and you didn't need the small one. The food was high in carbs and fat; very high by our sedentary civilian standards, lots of energy for active soldiers. Each packet also contained a large hardtack-like cracker that was pretty good; foil sealed so it didn't have to be super hard to have good shelf life. It came with either cheese or peanut butter. The huge cracker and cheese/peanut butter seemed like enough food for a light meal in itself, too me. There was some kind of dessert with each one, chocolate pudding I think in some. Mine had a fruit pie. There was a little candy, spices and sauces and some sort of drink mix in each one. It was filling and satisfying. It did not taste great. It gave me prospective, and gratitude for our soldiers and the duties they perform, which was the point of course.
Bro, I served in the Army in the mid 90s. I was a patriot missile operator and mechanic. I spent 6 months of my life is Saudi Arabia in 95 manning the same equipment they fought the gulf war in. We had some rations that were dated late 80s. We loved them. They were so fresh and tasty. Please buy and try one. You will appreciate what we went through. Thanks for all your videos!
In Germany the soldiers still have a „Henkelmann“ a metal eating Equipment where you can get your Portion of the „Goulasch Kanone“ you can cook water in it too.
Is this the M-31 Kochgesschirr? The Bundeswehr had a tall 3-part set, the Wehrmacht ones had a top and pot, and the Kaiser's Soldats in the Great War carried a similar piece -- sometimes enameled. I have collected the East and West German variants. Very handy for boiling water.
I haven't eaten MRE's in the field as I am unfit to be a soldier, but I have eaten them at home, and honestly most of them are decent even from the perspective of a meal kit. They're nutritionally and calorically dense, most of them taste alright or even simply good, and the mix of meal and snacks means you can munch on it for quite a while, or mix and match ingredients however you please.
I served from 1989 to 2010. The MRE was better than the C rations(I experienced them once). But foraging and cooking my own food on the few survival hikes I participated in was more like 1776 or earlier soldiers. There was little to no supply. We had to rely on what we found or caught. There were hungry nights but the food was so much better when I cooked it myself. I learned to never be without tobasco sauce.
@@Mistah_Boombastic_BiggieCheese I'm sure they would have. I guess I was boasting that what I could come up with foraging was better than the MREs I've had
While in Afghanistan in the mountains of Nangarhar, we LIVED on MREs. I found myself desperate to eat something different to the point where i was scrounging together local ingredients to have some variety in our pallet. It was often onions from the abandoned bazaar, a can of beans, a bag of rice, a small bag of table salt, and a freshly killed rabbit (the amount of rabbits that were present always suprised me). All stewed together and cooked in a pressure cooker scavanged from an abandoned local dwelling. Those meals were always the best and had the most value in my opinion. Often the Afghan National Army Commandos and Special Forces we were working with would cook for us as well. It was very nice to eat with them, drink chai tea, and smoke cigarettes to build rapport with them. Rarley the Interpreters would make day trips to the nearest bazaar that was up and running (an hour to 2 hour drive on goat trails) and bring us back freshly cooked rice and veggie kebabs with naan bread. By the end of my tenure there I had put together my self a small mess kit consiting of a small camp pot with a frying pan lid and an mre spoon to cook and eat with.
I'm a bit surprised you didn't go into detail on soldiers making their own mess kits. Whittling was a huge pastime not too long ago. Take a knife, some fairly lightweight wood, and whittle away to make your own equipment. Could take a couple of days to weeks depending on the project. Boys learned to whittle at a young age and so it would basically be second nature to them by the time they reached adulthood. They could also use the shavings from whittling as kindling for starting a fire.
Excellent coverage of an interesting element of soldiering through history. As for myself, my military service did not include MREs, as I was warned ahead of time. My cousin (once removed) had survived Pearl Harbor and a Kamikaze sinking, and still suggested the Navy. Three meals a day, he said, and you don't have to eat any of them crouched in a muddy hole.
This isn't the sort of content i'd watch on a regular basis. I've even MRE's, or rations as we call them mostly in Britain, but i've never thought about what it must be like to prepare and cook every part of your meal on a fire after a day of walking or even fighting. Fascinating stuff.
Marine Boot Camp in early 1974 included a 4 week Second Phase at MCB Camp Pendleton, CA. We had the WWII style ''meatcans'' [Mess Kits] to lug around, but mostly were fed MCIs: Meals,Combat, Individual -- or ''C-Rats.'' Usually a small can with meat, or tuna / a small can with crackers and a chocolate patty [rumored to be an intentional laxative] / a taller can with fruit / a thin can with jam, peanut butter or cheese / and an accessory pack with cigarettes, matches, gum, stim-u-dents, salt, coffee, instant, sugar, non-dairy creamer, TP, and a plastic spoon. The P-38 can opener was also included. Called a 'John Wayne' in Marine jargon. We were instructed to open the Crackers/Candy can first, set the contents aside and make a Hobo Stove out of the can by punching vent holes thru the sides and top. Then a block of Trioxane fuel tab was lit off with the matches. It smelled horrible -- probably to prevent privates from trying to cook off in their pup tents and dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. The Canteen Cup, which fit under the O.G. plastic canteen could boil water for coffee or to heat the immersed ''entree'' can. Or you could heat the can directly on the hobo stove. Once made, the Hobo Stove was saved for future chow breaks. Unopened C-Rat cans could be stored in spare uiniform sox. Several cans made a nifty blackjack.
I think I remember seeing ashens try to eat a Vietnam War C-ration with a brick of cocoa, crackers, and peanut butter and jam. It had all gone rotten, but particularly the jam was leaking 😳
I had MREs in high school, I was in NJROTC, and we had them on a field trip. They ranged from pretty decent to "Meals Rejected by Ethiopians". Chicken was a solid win, the beef patty looked something akin to a brand of dog food called Gainsburger that was around in the 80s-90s. Didn't taste terrible, though. Incredibly calorie dense, something like 3000-5000 calories per meal.
In my time in the British Army we transitioned from canned rations to the equivalent of US MRE. Mostly an improvement; most could be boiled in the bag or - commonly - just kept in an inner pocket and warmed by body heat before eating. My mess kit reduced to one stainless steel mug that fitted under a water bottle. 👍
I had a variety of MRE's when I was in college. Enough for something like 10 meals. The food was perfectly edible and even though it wasn't stellar it wasn't terrible either. I found it was fairly simple to get things going and warmed up. Usually came with gatorade powder for electrolyte replenishment which I guess would be pretty important for a soldier in the field. Things have come a long way since the 18th century.
Watching this comparison makes me realize how interesting it is that in the relatively short time from WW2 to now, we have eliminated the mess kit despite refining it in the relatively long time between the revolution and WW2.
When I went to basic training, we were issued Viet Nam era 'C-rations' in the field. They came in a box, with the meals in a can (opened with the famous P-51 can opener). I always remember eating chicken loaf - that got covered in gnats in the Georgia sun during our 15 mile bivouac march. I was so hungry, I ate it anyway. By the way, the WW2 mess kit you showed, the divided plate was placed onto the handle to make a long tray when you were on the chow line.
Georgia gnats are something else, man. Very few other places in the states where you can hear the question "why is the pepper on my food moving?" with genuine sincerity from an infantry grunt
They were still issuing those WWII era mess kits when I went to basic in the 80's as well. Had the whole setup with the 3-station immersion heaters to clean them. Eventually the Army figured out it was easier and more hygenic to just give us paper plates and plastic dinnerware with every group meal and started shipping those with the T-RAT packs.
I served in the military during the Cold War, during the time when we switched over from C rations to the MRE'S and it didn't go well at 1st. MRE'S were spoiled and soldiers were getting sick, and we prefer the C rations because it was easier to heat up and we make stoves out of the empty cans to heat up our next C rations. I truly enjoy your videos, keep up the good work and God bless.
Those original dirty dozen MREs were terrible. I never saw C-rats but remember those, and the older guys in our unit who'd been a few years said the MCI rations were way better. Years later I saw a complete unboxing of all 24 MCI menus from the late 70's and was pretty impressed with the variety and amount of food in those. It took the MREs until the mid-90's to even remotely come close to what the MCIs had when they were discontinued.
I served in the Army during Desert Storm. Back then I'm so glad each MRE pack came with a small bottle of Tabasco. It either gave flavor or killed the flavor of the MRE meal. Tabasco or black pepper helped with powdered eggs from the field kitchen.
I spend parts of the last 4 decades in the the US Army and I just cannot get enough of these Revolutionary War era videos you put out. It really gives me perspective on the deprivations these men suffered through to give us out freedom. We haven't forgotten.
MREs are pretty good, I usually take a few with me when deer hunting because its nice to have warm food in the cold, the heaters are slow to warm stuff up but if you have the time then warm everything up since it'll taste better. I've never been a fan of most of the main courses (sans chili mac and asian style beef) but the sides are usually good, plus mixing the coffee and chocolate protein shake makes for a very filling and refreshing mocha. Be aware that youll be pretty backed up after a few days of eating only MREs and no the gum is not a laxative, thats a myth.
Mres, when I first came into the army, felt like a treat, but after having to eat two or more a day for multiple weeks, it makes me my stomach hurt. Now, when I go to the field, I bring a jet boil with me and make food it's more stuff that I have to carry, but it's worth it. I also use my canteen metal cup to heat and boil food over an open fire. Many other soldiers that I know have similar views, but we agree that when we are able to get hot chow in the field, it is the best.
We may not have mess kits, but we still have canteen cups. They've almost disappeared because of the camelback style hydration systems, and the MREs come with special "ziplock" style bags for beverages. However, the canteen cups still have a lot of utility in them. They're generally lightweight, and useful for everything from coffee and tea, the occasional soup (Whenever I'm doing training in colder climes the warm-up tent always has this mysterious soup made of a several gallons of warm water, a couple ramen packets and leftover mixed vegetables). Canteen cups are also useful when you have to shave in the field.
My father was drafted in the early-mid 60s and served in Vietnam... he would occasionally talk about his canned rations and since he carried C4 as part of his gear how well it worked to heat his rations when no one was around to chew him out if the caught him...😊
Excellent video, being a CSA Unit reenactor, I can relate to period cooking etc. Being a career soldier first I had C Rations then the many different types of MRE's etc.
Like every war, private purchase or privately traded items were used in conjunction with issued gear. Make a wooden spoon, trade for a large pewter spoon with local farmers, or trade a personal item to that one fellow soldier in the group of six who could carve a magnificent spoon in the blink of an eye, without even really trying. Can't be teaching into that cook-pot with your fingers.
from my experience in ukraine this is similar to how some soldiers still cook communally especially at rear installations. i have worked at a volunteer kitchen and we made ready meals that were portioned per squad. (shoutout to liviv volunteer kitchen 10/10 reccomend working there)
If you have the time and luxury to heat an mre, it is best enjoyed as follows: 1-Open mre bag, dump contents, and fold top half of mre bag back on itself-this is your bowl-set aside. 2-Take inventory of mre contents and identify meal type-they come in two types-a main meal and a side, with some treats (like crackers/bread, and a tube each of peanut butter and jelly) or a main meal, side, and various components that go with the meal. 3-heat the main meal and side together in the water activated heater bag, and while that is heating, enjoy your treats or cut up/tear components into pieces and add to the bag bowl. 4-when main and side meal is finished heating, add to bag bowl and mix well with included spoon and enjoy.
Yeah don't do this. The outer bag is not food-safe plastic. Its had cardboard and plastic rattling around and shedding inside for who knows how long. No one in the military does this. The main retort pouch usually has enough room inside to dump other stuff like broken up crackers or a side into it. The outer bag is for putting all the trash into.
@@obsidianjane4413…ahhh yes, Ive been waiting for this. The internet hero who bravley tells the former infantrymen and bradley infantry fighting vehicle commander “No one in the military does this” when literally he and everyone around him did this, across four posts in the US, four distinctly different units, and three combat deployments. And GTFO with that not food safe plastic BS. Plastic was the furthest thing from my mind then and its the same now. I literally have doormant malaria in my blood, arthritis at 32, silicosis of the lungs, no cartilage left in my spine, and I need a knee replacement that they wont give me until I’m 40 “because i’ll wear it out, and its a surgery they only want to perform once”
In Korea in ‘05 I remember me and the other medics combining our MRE’s in canteen cups and cooking them on the hurricane heaters. It’s funny how you can look back and remember fondly what we’re often miserable times.
I've had my share of MREs and field feeds. The worst one by far, the one that 'they' thought was a "treat" for us, were the prepackaged "Jimmy Deans" with like, tins of vienna sausage and other gas station convenience store items shrink wrapped on a styrofoam plate. No one liked them, everyone preferred MREs to them. Field feeds were nice though; hot food served buffet style by Army cooks (or privates given mess duty, working alongside and under the direction of the contractors).
I remember those trays, we usually got them on range days where we were out all day but not long enough to set up our MKTs. They're like 1/4th the cost of MREs which is why garrison DFACs like issuing them.
@@Mistah_Boombastic_BiggieCheese Those trays didn't count as hot chow. They were heated (sometimes...) but they were more like microwaveable dinners than anything else. They came pre-made, frozen in cases, trays covered with plastic wrap that the 'cooks' would put into a warming oven for a while to heat. Actual hot food - A or B rations - was actually cooked by humans in a mess hall, packed into mermite containers and shipped forward. It was typically better than MREs, still just cafeteria-style food at best.
@@Raskolnikov70 Mine (at the time like 06-08) weren't even frozen. Just normal shelf-stable crap I wouldn't eat if it was the only stuff left in my house.
We actually used something remarkably similar to those cook kettles. Only they were vacuum flasks for carrying out the hot rations to soldiers in the field. The cooking was done on mobile field kitchens or even delivered from a nearby mess hall. MRE's were too expensive per calorie.
Looks like mess kits haven't really changed since WW2. I remember mine fondly, got to keep the FDF issued plastic canteen after the service but not the other stuff. Pea soup tasted wonderful in -25c weather after digging fox holes in the snow all morning and we always got pancake after. Class of I/10 never domiciliate.
Another great video. I've always learned something from your videos. It was nice meeting you at Mississinewa in October. I appreciated that you gave me a few minutes of your time to discuss British rations/cooking from 1812, as I am one of my unit's cooks. I was in the Canadian Army Reserve in the late 70's/early 80-'s during the changeover from cans to boil-n- bags. In the field I've eaten from bags, cans, flying kitchens and hayboxes. When I was a young guy still living at home, I came to truly appreciate my mom's cooking after returning home from a weekend exercise or a 2 week long training concentration. I, like you, am grateful for every meal I'm able to eat. Merry Christmas.
Retired Navy with deployments to Afghanistan, Kuwait, Bahrain, and spent lots of time in the field training, convoys or general FOB hopping. We always had MRE in the event we weren’t near a DFAC (dining facility). Most MRE are actually pretty good. There are some bad ones too. The problem was always trying to get to the drop early so you would have first dibs on them. I’d always go for the Chili Mac..or anything that didn’t have powdered mashed potatoes or eggs. It was often fun to swap desserts or drink packs. One tip, always grab extra heat packs for times people grab them all up. Nothing worse than a cold MRE. Don’t turn down the extra items people don’t use, extra drink packs or otherwise, stuff em in your cargo pockets because you never know when you might want a snack or to add flavor to your water.
Soooo many non-food items haha. But a carton of reds over there - splitting that up would literally get you anything you wanted in the market LOL. American cigarettes FTW@@kleinster99
I ate both the first-generation MREs and second generation. The first gen I had was in basic in 1989 and they were eatable but not really good. The second-gen came out sometime in the 90s, they were really quite good with a diverse menu. You could even have hot food without a fire. They came with a heater that was full of chemicals that reacted with water and got very hot. You put what you wanted to be heated in the outer bag along with the heater and some water and a few minutes later hot beef stroganoff. Both gens had freeze-dried peaches that were supposed to be reconstituted with water but were better as is. They were kind of sweet peach-flavored candy.
Glad to see this! I just bought the same MRE in the thumbnail and absolutely love them. I can't stop eating them and have ordered a crate worth at this point.
I had 2 grandpas that served in WW2; one would only say 'he walked around a lot' and wouldn't extrapolate further. The other one was stationed in Greenland and was a cook; he said he never fired a shot in anger. According to him, the cooks had the most respected and important people on base, as they decided who got the good bread and good food. Nobody ever said a cross word to him. He opened a bakery once he got out of the service and he was the one who taught my father (and myself) how to judge good bread and make the best cookies.
Another interesting video from your channel which I have been watching for years. To give you a little context if you're interested...When I was in the British Army in the 1980's we were issued with Ration Packs and oblong mess tins which we would use to cook some of the Rat Packs over a hexamine block stove. However the Army has "Field Kitchens" (which i'm sure you're aware of) as was used during WW1 and WWII. The field kitchen, you would line up with your mess tin in hand to be delivered your ladle of slop...I mean delicious stew. In the Rat Packs was a miniature bottle of Tabasco sauce to make everything taste more palatable. We would also swap out the included rations we didn't like for ones we did ;-) Also During patrols / in the field Soldiers would (dont know if they still do it now) put all the contents of the Rat Pack into a polythene bag and stick it under their arm pit so it would end up a warm mush to scoop out and eat.
I was never in the military, so I never had to eat MRE's in the field, but one of my friend's dad's was in the National Guard. He brought home some first generation MRE's when they were first issued to them in the 80's. We tried one each. The "menu" was very limited at the time, not like today when there are at least 27 different kinds, even Kosher, vegan, and Halal options. The one we ate was freeze dried pork. This was also before they came with the water activated heaters. They were issued heater tabs, canteen cups, and stands to heat up your water. You were supposed to heat up some water and pour it into the freeze dried pork patties to reconstitute them and make a gravy so you could spoon out the meat and dip your cracker in the gravy/broth. We bit off the pork patty straight out of the pouch and it sucked every bit of moisture out of our mouths like the cracker challenge. :) The cracker was as hard as a piece of slate and it came with a squeeze packet of gray cheese or peanut butter. They tasted good, but didn't look appetizing. The desert was freeze dried pears, which was supposed to be reconstituted with warm water, but we ate straight from the package, like pear flavored styrofoam that also sucked all the moisture out of our mouth. We ate these with no supervision, or Tommy's dad would have probably told us about the reconstitution part. Now MRE's have heaters and all kinds of stuff. A lot of the food preservation techniques they developed for MRE's have made it into supermarkets, like all the various foodstuffs in a pouch where you can eat it in the pouch or pour it in a bowl after warming it in hot water or the tuna in a pouch. The individual packets of instant coffee or drink mixes that you pour into a cup of hot water or a water bottle came from MRE's. A Marine friend of mine did experience eating MRE's in the field in Iraq. He said they were warned not to eat them for more than 30 days straight, so of course, they had to eat them for more than 30 days straight until they ran out and they had to forage for food. Or at least, they paid their interpreter to forage. He said you could ask this guy for something and he would come back with what you asked for, or a reasonable substitute. "Hey, Abdul, can get find us some chickens?" Bam, he came back with a couple of chickens. "Can you find us a goat?" Here he comes, with a goat. When the case of MRE's gets busted open for the day, the officers and the Sgt get first choice and the rest of the guys scrabble and trade amongst themselves for the rest of it. They "rat (fornicate)" the MRE's, digging out the stuff they want to eat first then the stuff they don't want at the time goes into a duffle bag or box so people can scrounge around in them later. Everyone keeps a spoon, even going so far as to drilling a hole in the handle so they can put it on a length of 550 cord to hang off their dogtags or a carabiner. A lot of guys would fill their little hot sauce bottles with sand as a keepsake, even though it was against regulations (they don't want any weird diseases from the sandbox to make it to the US). I bet a LOT of the little packets of TP were left in the duffel bag. The packet of matches are water resistant. The cases used to have paraffin to help them with water resistance so they wouldn't get soggy when wet and ended up being a good firestarter. Even though they sell overstock MRE's at government auctions, operated by the Department of Defense, there's a branch of the DOD that tries to track down MRE's "illegally" sold at auction, trying to sue stores to recover "Illegally obtained" gov't resources, even though it was an auction held by the DOD with the money going to the DOD. If they didn't want to sell it, they shouldn't have sold it. MRE's can be frozen and stored for up to 20 years. If they're kept in a cool location, they're guaranteed good up to 10 years, but like other canned goods they're just starting to get good at that point. :)
One thing that hasn't changed. You still need to bring your own knife, just to open the MRE. A lot of improvised cooking done in WWII came from how Hobo's cooked. Solders are still learning to improvise with the food issue. We made puddling using the Coco Beverage mix with the coffee creamer plus sugar and adding a little bit of water. Great video!!!
![ร้อยพ่อพันแม่ - WanMai [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XY2pNYASEbg/mqdefault.jpg)
Tin Cook Pot! www.townsends.us/products/cook-tp724-p-1057
Wow, $165.00
ok
"This is the 1778 Continental Army Fresh-Cook ration, providing 1600 calories over a 24 hour period. Alright let's get this out onto a tray"
Nice!
Mkay
Unexpected SteveMREInfo1989. Nice.......
Huh, no hiss...
This is an absolutely decadent meal. It’s got everything you need to keep you going.
MREs were literally a mixed bag in the late 1990s Army. They had this Spaghetti one and a Ham Slice one that everybody wanted. They also had something they called an omelet, but it had more in common with octupus flesh than anything fit for humans.
You mean the vomelette?
octopus flesh is good though, thats not nice to the octopus
dehydrated pork patty or beef patty, made good hockey pucks too
Yeah, that "omelet" was green. They were phasing those out when I was in so I only had to choke down one of those.
I never had much issues with the omelette though they where much better cooked then cold for sure. I actually preferred them over the mini hotdogs
A collaboration between Townsend's and Steve1989MRE will be glorious
Nice hiss!
"Let's get this revolutionary war ration out onto a tray. Nice."
I would watch every second of that
Let’s get this ships biscuit and salt pork out on to a tray… nice!
I watch both channels in bed to nod off. I don't think I'd ever wake up from that video (in a good way)
Was literally about to type the same thing. It needs to happen!
I ate many an MRE during Desert Storm in 91. This episode really brings me back though. Rations may have changed but the daily struggle of the infantryman to use his ingenuity to better his situation hasn't changed in a thousand years. While waiting to go into Iraq in January - February, we were in foxholes in the brigade area for several weeks. Unbelievably, the desert nights and mornings were bitterly cold. One day near our fighting positions, I found a discarded one quart metal oil can. Opportunity to improve my living conditions was at hand! I cut the top and bottom out and then cut openings opposite each other in one end. I now had a stove for my canteen cup. Purely by coincidence, as I'm certain it wasn't by design, I discovered that there was just enough cardboard in every MRE to boil exactly one single canteen cup of water using my improvised stove. Due to the fact that we might need to don our gas masks at any time, we were ordered to shave every morning as stubble will prevent a face seal. But every MRE came with a packet of instant coffee, creamer, sugar and often cocoa beverage powder. This could all be mixed with hot water to make a rather wonderful amalgam we called "mocha". During a freezing cold desert morning, it was the only thing available with any semblance of warmth or brief enjoyment. So as it took one canteen cup of water to do either, I was presented with an agonizing choice every morning. I could have a nice hot shave and the soul crushing lack of the hot morning mocha. Or I could enjoy a few brief moments of a piping hot tasty drink to warm my bones and then a horrific fifteen minutes of scraping an ice cold, dull, clogged up razor across my face. In those cold, dirty, dusty, stinking and uncertain times, there were more than a few mornings I opted for the mocha and resigned myself to tearing my face off with what felt like a frozen cheese grater.
I still have my improvised stove in my collection of military memorabilia. And I never did need that damn gas mask.
Thank you for sharing your great story.
I feel you, but better safe than sorry!
That is the best description I've ever read for what it was like! People focus on the bigger stories, but it's the little ones like that which best depict life as a soldier. It was cold when I first got there, (Yes, it got incredibly cold during the winter) but it didn't stay that way for long, and I had a similar experience. But the majority of the time I was there it was unbelievably hot. Like living in an oven at times. I could literally cook my MRE by setting it on the dash of my truck (I drove a fuel rig). Cooked them better than the heaters.
You have a really nice way with words. I felt like I was reading a book and was transported into the scenario you were describing.
@@snipercomrade3059 I agree. I almost fell off my chair at the "Frozen Cheese Grater "line
I was in the navy, and during a community relations project in Malaysia, we got to work with the Marines. We had box lunches, with ham sandwiches, soda, chips and cookies. The Marines had MREs. I asked if I could have one, and they said sure! So I started tearing into the MRE, and my shipmate were like, "Whoa, where'd you get that?!" I told them, and they asked the other Marines if they'd like to trade MREs for box lunches. Boooy, you NEVER saw a human jump at something so fast! Those Jarheads were like piranha! They tossed us a whole case of MREs and swarmed over our box lunches like sharks in a feeding frenzy. We're like, "WTH, man? Don't they feed you guys on the ship?" Apparently, they do _not_ feed them the same way they do sailors. They only got one fresh meal a day, the other two were MREs.
Boy that is rough. I don't know how many MRE options there are but I bet that they get old really fast!
@@reginaldsafety609012... there are usually 12 options.
@@reginaldsafety6090 As of 2023, there are 24 MRE menus. Some more popular than others, others traded or discarded as soon as humanly possible.
Sheesh, Americans get chips and soda in their box lunches? Canadians just get juice boxes and a couple fruit/granola bars to go with your bologne sandwiches. You're lucky to get a nice cookie. Or a sandwich that's not bologne or egg salad.
As a Marine in the 1990s, we were always looking for a way to not have to eat MREs. I think they were made in Satan's kitchen!
One time in the field, I opened up a dinner-time MRE and was lucky enough to get an Irish creme coffee pouch. They came as a powdered mix, all you had to do was add water. I was so excited and planned to start the next day with it. First thing that next morning, I rolled out of my tent with my coffee pouch and walked over to this table in our area that had these water coolers. Mixed in the water, shook the pouch up, and took a big pull of my coffee.
Which was a heck of a way to discover that they put a cooler filled with lemon lime Gatorade right next to the ones with water.
Your story broke my heart...lol. A hot drink on a cold day in the field is a luxury most people don't understand.
@@Magoover1 How could you mistake hot water for cold gatorade? The irish creme coffee mix does not work well in cold water, it clumps up and never mixes in right. You can add cold water and put the pouch in pot of hot water if you can get it... Or use the flameless heater.
Wonderful video as always. My only complaint is that the modern us military actually still fields field kitchens and cooks hot meals in the field. The MRE is used for soldiers on the move, when setting up a field kitchen is not feasible or compatible with the overall pace of the mission. I think it would be an interesting video to compare field kitchens from the 18th century to today
Yes, whenever there are large groups of infantry in one spot it's cheaper to wheel out a kitchen crew, better quality food aswell. MRE stuff is fine when hungry but about half the stuff they give you is not very good.
Yep. In 7 years the only time I remember *having* to eat MREs were either short field ops or mountain warfare training.
Much of it depends on the operation even though my unit was in what became a permanent camp in Iraq by May in 2003 it was almost October before they rolled out regular meals from the field kitchen much of it because we lacked a regular supply of potable water so the best they could do was occasional T-rations which where basicly squad sized mre's. We still where issues 3 mre's a day. By the time we had field rations we had almost stopped eating Mre's and had started using cases of them to build structures to keep out of the wind and sun because we where occupying the runways of an airfield and other then the tower and one hanger that was being used for maintenance we had no shelter.
@preston9412 oh yeah, that always comes with being first in for a lasting op. I remember walking through the base in Kandahar over a decade ago and they had a whole wall covered with old pictures showing the progress of the base from some HESCO barriers around the tower, circa 2002,, to the 25,000+ person base surrounded in 15ft high concrete slabs.
@Rudy97 Even when you get camp prepared rations a lot depends on the cooks and their effort. Despite the ration packs coming with spices and seasonings most of our food was prepared in ways that made it barely palatable. Bulk scrambling eggs in a bag by boiling them in water which turns them into a foam rubber consistancy un seasoned. Sausage links boiled until you have gray flavorless meat sticks, partially rehydrated nearly raw shredded potatoes they called hashbrown (never saw a flat top), unseasoned ground beef (tacos). instead of even putting the seasoning where we could get to it they straight dumped it in the burn pits. My unit lost an average of 40lbs each because the food was so bad.
In the Civil War, they were issued ca. 48 oz. "Muckets"- cooking pails like Jon's, but with a hinged lid. I think 32 oz. versions are available in stainless. Read of a Civil War soldier who made a tasty soup of a chicken and seawater! If I ever see the ocean again, doubtful, I'll try it!
Just be wary of where you're getting your seawater. A lot of sewage still gets dumped into there, treated or not it's likely not going to taste nice. That and washoff from farm fields.
@@sykessaul123 Of course. Forgot to mention the mug handle they had. Somewhere between mug and bucket... the name was inevitable!
Actually it must have been salty water from a saline seep:- seawater has a lot of sulfate in it which has a massive and debilitating laxative effect
@@eve-marie6751 I suspect just a little seawater was added to the boil.
Vietnam veteran here, and I well remember C rations while in SE Asia. Some were OK, and others, like ham and lime beans were an abomination. We discovered early on that if you could heat the canned entrees they were not too bad. The cheese spread and ‘John Wayne’ crackers were especially coveted. In Basic we had the WW2 mess kits you showed, and we frequently ate off them. I discovered that when you are very hungry all the Army chow was tasty. Of course, Tabasco made it all an epicurean delight. I left the Army long before MRE’s so can’t comment on them. Jon, thank you for your wonderful perspectives on our lives today versus what it was like in the 1700’s.
Chili Mac! Chili Mac! Chili Mac!
Absolutely, I feel that. I was in from 2016-2019 so I was around during the era of decent MREs but I 100% concur that when you've been in the field long enough anything hot tastes good.
I used to never heat up my MREs and would hoard the chemical heaters so I could use them to warm my sleep sack up at night or stick one under my uniform top during especially cold weather. (Was stationed at Ft Riley so below 0 conditions were pretty common)
B units were there official name
Y'all talk alot about ham and lima beans.... Never hear about the "frank and bean component"
I'm Portuguese; but I guess if you were in Vietnam you may remember "the five fingers of death"! The first time I heard the nickname I must have laughed for minutes... 😂
Steve’s influence on the military ration scene is seen, heard and felt everywhere. Nice!
*_"Let's get this out onto a tray. Nice."_*
"Nice lil' hiss!"
N'kay let's start with the--
MRE Shaggy needs to start reviewing historical meals!
MRE's in the field weren't always bad. The chili mac MRE or buffalo chicken was actually sought after. Pork sausage and gravy was outright disgusting if you didn't have time to warm it up, but when heated was meant to go with your flatbread as something kinda like biscuits and gravy. Vegetarian MREs always had the best snacks/desserts.
Tried halal MREs? Those are to die for
@@emperorcokelord1021 Do you mean the kosher/halal MREs? They were the bomb. To my understanding (taught to me by some of the Kurds) Kosher is always Halal, but Halal is not always Kosher.
the chili mac is my favorite
That's crazy to me I thought the Buffalo chicken one was almost inedible. The chili with beans or beef "brisket" were the best I thought
@@scottbowers7431 Believe it or not I worked with a guy who actually liked the Vegetarian Omelet (or vomolet, as most of us knew it as), perhaps the most vile MRE ever conceived. 🤢🤮
My point is different tastes for different people. Everyone has a favorite, and everyone has that one MRE that you'd rather go hungry than eat it. 😉😂
Eating MREs was not bad, in my opinion. Most of the time you eat everything cold, except the hot drinks. Most of them tasted pretty good. There were a couple of them that I personally didn't care for. This was back in 2008 and 2009, so I am sure they have improved a little bit. I actually keep a box in my closet. You just never know when the weather or some other disaster will happen.
If those are leftovers from your military time don't rely on them too much at this point. The dry crackers and candies should be safe but the retort (foil pack) meals are going to be pretty iffy after this long.
@@silverjohn6037 No, I ate them back then when I was serving.
They're experimenting with a new MRE with more freeze dried stuff from what I hear but most of the meals haven't changed much in the last 20 years. The Chili with Cornbread is my favorite but hot sauce with ALL MREs in my opinion...
I loved the vegetarian ones. Something about ones with meat just didn't taste right to me
You were lucky. The ones we had in the late 80s had no heater and some of those meals were just foul. Several were dehydrated as well like the beef patty. Took awhile to soften them up. And the chicken ala king looked and smelled like canned cat food
I eat MREs in the field all the time, so as a result, I’m often bored with them. In every instance which I’m tempted to complain about the mediocrity of an MRE, I will try to remember this video. Thank you for the much-appreciated perspective and history lesson, sir.
Your statement about needing perspective really rings true. I've been reading the Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne, a soldier in Boney's army in Russia as they went from rations brought from France to the luxuries of looting Moscow to absolute scarcity of food over just a few months. Everyone's heard that far too many people people met untimely deaths from freezing cold and starvation, but reading actual specific recollections of the bleak abject misery is well and truly harrowing.
MRE's are all about mixing and matching and imagination.
Favorite example is the Chile with beans from 2015 onward: comes with Chili w/Beans, Corn Bread, Cheese Spread, Vegetable Cracker, Fudge Brownie, a drink and accessory packet. One could just eat these separately.
Or: one could heat up the chile and cheese spread both in the heater - fold the MRE package in half, and pour the entirety of the chile, and all the cheese, and crushed crackers into the MRE pouch and get 1 giant entrée, with the corn bread as a side.
Another trick is to add the MINIMAL amount of water necessary in the Cocoa beverage powder. Instead of a chocolate DRINK, you can create a chocolate ICING and spread that on bread or crackers.
I'm sure many here will agree when I say, the quantity of content you have is incredible, BUT the quality of it is even more AMAZING! Simply put... ANOTHER AWESOME VIDEO from a channel FULL of AWESOME VIDEOS!
Fascinating, well-researched information, fantastic editing, and marvelous footage. Always an educational delight!
I was a Soldier from 1978 to 2014, so I ate C-rations, T-rations, and MREs. The advantage of the C-Rats was they were in cans so you could heat them up in the can (just make sure to poke a hole in the lid first or it could explode from steam pressure). But C-Rats were heavy and every can in the meal had to be opened with the P-38 can opener (not easy when your fingers were frozen in the winter). There was an unofficial C-Ration cookbook, menus and dishes concocted from various components of different ration items. Some were very inventive. Hot sauce was a prized commodity due to the blandness of the foods. T-Rations were terrible in the beginning but aren't too bad now. These are designed to feed units and just required a steam table to heat and serve. MREs were also terrible in the beginning because they relied on too many freeze-dried components that had to be reconstituted by the Soldier. Soldiers cooked in the "Steel Pot" helmet until they were replaced by the Kevlar helmet. The Steel Pot was useful for cooking, shaving, and bathing but was useless for stopping bullets. One could also heat a pint or so of water in the canteen cup that comes with the modern plastic canteen. Soldiers then and now have always been inventive and supplemented their food with whatever they could forage or scavenge. I ate plenty of locally caught fish, snakes, birds, and turtles in the field. Added to provided rations, they filled you up and kept you going.
In the British Army we often just whacked a big dent in a can & considered it ready when the dent was pushed out... I think I'd be fuming if I saw my boys doing that now... but, the fact remains. Our little can openers in every ratpack were good currency for exchange on exercise with the US.
We heated our MREs on the engine blocks of our 5 ton dump trucks.
Necessity is the mother of invention. You had to get creative with your cooking.
@@DSS-jj2cw And if you liked the chicken alla king you were in good shape. That stuff was terrible.
@@C-Culper4874 chicken a la king and the beef frankfurter were my favorites
I remember being stationed near the DMZ in 1990 and my unit was in the field on average half the month. Winter set in and it was brutally cold especially for a 19 year old from south Louisiana. The MRE rations we got had these little short handled white plastic spoons. There we were with wind chills hitting well below zero and dirty hands trying to scrape the bottom of the bag. Then long handled brown spoons began to appear. Total game changer. They were slow to appear and anyone lucky enough to get one guarded it like it was made of gold. I finally got one (probably half of the company still didn't have one) and what a difference it made to my morale
MREs were after my service but I have eaten my share of C-Rations in four years (75-79) US Army Infantry. Mess kits were issued to everyone and nobody left their kits behind when we went to the field. Not only did the mess kit and the canteen cup come in real handy dolling up C-rats, they were also great for when the field mess hall was set up for warm chow. I've also fried up rabbit, armadillos and raccoons in the field. I always had an extra ammo pouch with cooking must-haves like salt, pepper, hot sauce, oil, garlic all in small containers. I always gathered up any unopened C-rats at the end of a field problem and fill a ruck.pocket with peanut butter, crackers, any kind of fruit or cake. Guys don't fight over the stuff when they're cleaning out APCs at the end of a field problem. I was also friends with our COs driver. He carried a frying pan with him. Sometimes he'd let me use it as long as I brought it back clean. We made hobo stoves out of two used C-rats cans, a handful of dirt and some diesel fuel. Worked great and the best part, you could just trash it when you were done with it and always had access to new cans to make a new one . If you went hungry in the Infantry it was because you weren't using what you had access to. Go ahead ask me how many guys had steak the night the company supply truck hit a beef cow out in the field. The army was supposed to pay for that, we ate the evidence!
This is exactly why the Canadian army issued platoon level camp stoves and kelly kettles. lets soldiers cook up raw or C-Rations into something palatable. And with kelly kettles they could even have hot food while inside blackout zones for hot beverages and a cups worth of whatever they could cook on the chimney of the kelly kettle. Standard issue salt and pepper I am sure was popular with soldiers too when they got sick of corned beef soaked in oil and rust from the cans =p
US Army 1978-1982, Infantry. While in Germany (1/15 Inf, 3rd ID) we would often supplement our C rats with whatever the German farmers grew, fresh onions, carrots, cabbage, potatoes and apples. It also didn’t hurt to carry a bottle of Tabasco sauce and tiny bottles of schnapps in one’s ammo pouches or rucksack. Beer was always a hitchhike away for some of us more adventurous types. Good times. I wouldn’t trade that experience for all the gold in the world (well, maybe some of it 😂).
@@robscoggins 2/58 inf, 2nd AD. Hoensfell, Graph and Ft Hood.
I think with deepest sympathy of the Continental Army soldiers encamped at Valley Forge in the winter. It wasn't only food which was scarce, but practically every need imaginable, down to shoes for their freezing feet. We owe those men for the very existence of the United States, who suffered hardships barely conceivable to us today. =-[.]-=
Always Valley Forge BUT the encampment at Morristown NJ was worse. So bad that troops mutinied
If you've ever been to New Jersey you understand.
To say nothing of the lack of toilet paper. Dysentery was an extremely common ailment for armies of this era and *splinter-free* toilet paper wouldn't exist until 1930.
MRE trick called Ranger cookies (I was in the Marines but that was what they called them): Take your hot cocoa packet and open it very carefully. Dump in the sugar and creamer meant to go with the coffee and mix things up a bit, then roll the end of the cocoa packet shut again. We had these multifuel pot-bellied stoves (Korea, early 90s, winter) to keep our tents heated, so if you put that on top of the stove it'll burn the plastic off the packet and stink up the tent but after a while the sugar in the cocoa plus the extra sugar should melt down and maybe even caramelize a bit. Take it off the stove after.... a while... and let it cool down and you've got a sort of a chocolate cookie/brownie thing. They never cooked evenly but they were okay.
Mmmm, yummy plastic fumes
Those melted plastic is likely carcinogenic. You might be entitled to benefits LOL, although then again the VA isn't known to hand those out willy nilly.
Pertaining to foraging in the field, My great uncle "Dude" Irwin was a tank driver in Patton's 3rd Army at the Battle of the Bulge. His tank got hit and he and his tank commander, Beumel Franks, were able to escape with a bandoleer of ammo and a couple of rifles. They were captured by the Germans, who only seized their rifles. They had so many prisoners to keep up with, Uncle Dude and Beumel were able to escape. They would steal chickens and boil them in a helmet, seasoned with gunpowder from the cartridges. When they got home, Uncle Dude introduced Beumel to his sister, so he ended up being my Great Uncle Beumel. :)
A cross country trek during wartime sounds like a great test of character for a potential brother in law.
Oh wow that’s an amazing story!
@@r3dp9haha no kidding!
@@r3dp9 I'm sure it made a good test for "Do I want to introduce this guy to my sister?"
Gunpowder for flavoring sounds like something out of a war movie comedy scene
11:35 I bivouacked one time as a Civil Air Patrol (USAF auxiliary, still civilian, not military) cadet. Well before the trip, we as a squadron were policing the MREs we were budgeted, and I claimed a couple beef stew MREs, the luxury of being one of the ones doing the policing. I got a combination of praise and jealousy from my fellow cadets when they saw what I was eating. If only they knew how good it actually was, especially compared to their chow mein and hotdog MREs, my very life might have been in danger. . .
American MRE's are pretty great. I know they get a lot of flak from US military people, but I would rank them in top 3 MREs. Taste-wise, French have the best ones, by far. Their RCIR is straight up delicious, most of the menus. As far as I remember, 1 RCIR was traded for 3 MREs in Afghanistan. Cheers from Europe and thanks for another great video!
Honestly I think a lot of us didn't like MREs not because they were BAD, maybe certain menus were (vomelets are the most famous example but that was before my time), it's just that you get so sick of them over time to a point where you'd eat anything BUT that. I remember in USMC boot anytime we got MREs (we got them during a hurricane and the Crucible) was a gift for a number of reasons: it was a departure from the five minutes you ate at the chow hall (those powdered eggs get old too), there WAS a lot more variance, you could maybe get away with sneaking a dessert, and consuming them was a less rushed and/or continuous experience. Honestly I stand by the idea that MREs are great at what they do at the scale they do it at, and give you enough options to mess around with to add least add some variation (I always crushed my crackers into my chili mac, added jalapeno cheese, then maybe hot sauce) that can make things better.
Taste wise they are all right.
They do get a bit repetitive. (Woe is me)
But I like to think the US is second to none logistics wise as it applies to food.
Sure the U.S. MRE doesn’t include other meals like Germany, Italy, and Russia. But we sure can throw a whole lot of them into a plane. Also they transport really easily in a ruck sack.
Pavlovian response after a while. Choke down enough MRE's when you're exhausted, filthy and cold and the conditioned association will make them repulsive.
@@silverjohn6037 Yep, this and simply growing tired of them to the point of being repulsed make a lot of sense. They could be the best meals possible, yet people would still hate them.
@@TheWellDweller Exactly. MREs are pretty good the first couple days. Not so much when you start going past four weeks on them.....
5:30 , active u.s. soldier here, we do have field mess halls, they will usually be a safe distance away from the action and will cook the food hot & ready and put them in mermites, the the lrp will transport the food to the soldiers. I'm here to clear up the idea that all the army eats are mre's, those are for emergencies when lrp can not bring you food
Love this video. I am working on a paper about Washington's anxiety about leading the war effort, and many of his concerns was about feeding, clothing, and maintaining the men. I did use Townsend's fried chicken video in my early survey of American literature this fall. I wanted to show students how there are so many ways from which we can learn about and view a historical moment, food being one of them! And that a cookbook is not only a cultural history but a literary document that invites us into a time in more tangible ways.
The Townsends/Steve1989MRE crossover is the collaboration video we never knew we needed.
Yeah I definitely wanna see Steve1989MRE and Townsends have a collab about this. It would be absolutely fascinating to watch them interact. As a side note, while American troops are not issued mess kits many other militaries do still issue mess kits do to their MRE's being more labor intensive to prepare. Big one I can think of is Greece. Hellenic forces are very much expected to carry their mess kit at all times because they're defensive minded doctrine makes heavy use of field kitchens. Israeli forces are also known to do the same and in fact they have the closest I've heard of to this older concept of the squad being responsible for actually cooking a meal. Israeli field rations are pretty much just crates of dried/canned food that most seem to cook in the field. Not an expert, but having seen those field rations it seems only logical. Love to watch every new video keep going!
And don’t forget about Santee of Arizona Ghost Riders.
I can see the Israeli supply lines being much, much shorter than that of the USA. That has an impact on preparation and how it's consumed.
Big Clive, who normally talks on matters pertaining to electric and electronic devices in the UK, has sometimes reviewed the food pouches issued by tue various different European militaries. Some of the food pouches are heated by chemical heat sources, no flames required. I found it quite fascinating.
I was in the first basic training cycle at Fort Leonard Wood to get issued MREs in '84. The first MREs In the dark brown plastic might have been mediocre but the 18th century soldiers would have loved them.
Guns of the South (a fun sci fi alternative history book) had time travelers providing the south with modern weapons. In the midst of it General Lee asked the time travelers to provide the "dessicated" meals the future soldiers had too.
I dunno... I remember getting those dehydrated pork patties in basic and wondering how they managed to combine salt pork and hardtack in one food product.
@@Raskolnikov70 Freeze dried. I have a freeze dryer. You can make a good MRE with one. The trick is figuring how to reconstitute it where is better to eat.
@@C-Culper4874 Oh, that's the fun part. In basic, you don't have time or hot water to reconstitute anything, so enjoy your cold, dry, greasy pork patty. There's a reason us old-timers lower our voices just a bit when we talk about those dark days.
@@TheIndianaGeoff I remember that line, he asked for more "portable soup" because that was the only term they had in the 1860s for that sort of food! They also gave him nitro tablets for his heart which probably extended his lifespan quite a bit. Still one of my favorite alt-history novels as well.
man i just love this channel
combines the 2 thing i love the most
HISTORY and FOOD.
When I was in, field food was an MRE for lunch with T-rations at breakfast and dinner. T-rats were sealed trays that the cooks would heat with either boiling water or in the field kitchen oven. Before the flameless heater was a standard MRE handout, you were assured of hot food at least twice a day.
Eating too many MRE's too often could also lead to an unpleasant case of constipation.
This episode brought tears to my eyes. I am old and have seen the sufferings of many peoples throughout the world. But I am aghast at the meagerness of the food that soldiers had available to them and the terrible circumstances that human beings inflict upon one another. I am beyond grateful for all I have. Thank you for your wonderful channel.
You forgot to mention K-rations. Back during Vietnam in the Navy when at GQ, the mess deck would be closed and you were served a box of canned meals. My first K-ration was packaged during the Korean war, almost twenty years earlier!!! Came with a couple of smokes, plastic utensils, and a stick of gum. Maybe that's why I don't pay too much attention to "Best used by" dates on can goods these days.
Yeah my dad and brothers were still using K rations in the 70s and they were all at LEAST 20 years old. They would bring them home sometimes after manuvers and such and I would eat them they were pretty awful but were neat for a kid.
This is the greatest TH-cam channel! Absolutely love the research and general respect to those that came before us.
I remember the time we had "MRE" in the field when I did my basic training in the Swiss army. We've been out two days in January, with a couple of meters of snow besides the tank. And for lunch, we had a can of beef chilli. Most ate it cold but I warmed it with the portable field stove everyone got. The tank smelled lile a chilli kitchen and everyone wanted to have warm chilli. Wonderful how I was just happy to have something warming in my stomach. After that I got the better Idea: During the next exercise, I laid the can infront of the heater of the M113 and that thing got quite hot so less work for me. (Pro Tip: Poke a small hole in the can BEFORE you heat it. My friends tank was a huge mess because his can exploded...)
As a Helvetophile, I love anything I can read about Swiss life, danke for sharing. Did you ever go very high into the Alps? I know Juf is the highest village in Europe.
@@seronymus The highest I've been was once as target zone surveillance: Basically making sure that no hiker goes into an artillery target zone. I've been air-lifted to a small hut and stayed there for the whole day. It has been close to the top of "Fletschhorn", which is about 3’986m (about 13'000 ft). But in general we were stationed in between Simplon Village Simplon Hospiz (between 1'400 and 2'000m / 4'600 to 6'500 ft) for around 8 weeks. Winter was cold, much snow but very beatiful. Can recommend that part of Switzerland!
"Why do our soldiers keep dying of communicable illnesses which spread through our camps like wildfire?" -Random Revolutionary War Commander
"It's a real mystery" -8th man to eat from the same spoon as a man with tuberculosis
I was in the Air Force in the 80s. People called MREs "meals refused by Ethiopians," but I thought they were OK.
That’s a pretty hilarious nickname 🤣
The ones making disparaging remarks about MREs were the ones who wanted a big Mac when they got back and would trade most anything for a can of vienna sausages or a snack sized bag of chips
What are your opinions on one of the MRE’s other nicknames: “Meals, Refusing to Exit?”
@@Shaun_Jones meals either come with cheese spread or peanut butter packet. The cheese is low moisture and is known to cause constipation
That’s funny. My dad was a radar navigator on a B-52G and that is exactly what he calls them.
As a 92G I greatly appreciate military and cooking you guys do on this channel. Happy I subscribed. One of TH-cam best channels to offer.
I know this may sound like a creepy detail about history, but these types of pots weren't any different from the ones used in Europe until the Second World War. My aunt was Italian, and she used them during wartime in the same way as Townsends showed us - basically to cook food, transport water and objects, and for another aspect that nobody would think about... well, it's using them as chamber pots. You must consider that people in the past rarely had toilets, and if they did, they were usually rich or upper class. So, these pots were used as chamber pots in case of emergency, especially in open places where you couldn't use a toilet, like during an enemy attack or guard duty, for example.
In fact, my aunt specifically told me that when Allied American and British jets bombed her city to the ground, people used to seek shelter not only in bunkers but also in old houses with very strong structures. Thousands of people were pressed into one small space, with the sound of bombings, people screaming, babies crying, and fear making people completely frantic. Many of them felt the necessity to relieve themselves (that's why we use the expression 'pooped themselves up' to describe someone scared of something). Obviously, in this crazy situation, people remained civilized and used some polite manners. To avoid dirtying the place, they used these pots that they brought from home. When women had to use them, they covered themselves with large sheets to conceal them from men's eyes.
You must consider that there were no public toilets in bunkers or places where Europeans took cover during the Second World War, and poop in pots was extremely necessary. I've heard similar stories from my British relatives under the German bombings of the Second World War and from other European friends like the French and Germans. The only unfortunate fact is that they were so poor that the next day, they cleaned the contents of the pot, washed them very well, and used them to cook a meal with whatever they could find after the bombings, usually rotten vegetables like carrots and potatoes and other food found by luck.
History is a very hardcore matter. I know that many of you are Americans and may never have heard these aspects of war because you've never experienced it in your country. But this is what really happened during real wars, and sadly it's still happening in places like Palestine-Israel and Ukraine-Russian battlefields today.
💀☠💀☠💀
Wow. Thank you for sharing! As Townsend opened the episode - if I feel like I'm having a hard day I just need to imagine being in one of those buildings, hearing the bombs come down, not knowing what will be left when it's over. Damn.
Lord have mercy, thank you for sharing. Desperate times indeed calls for desperate measures. ;_; If you're not a perfectly humbled saint or have a scat fetish (sorry) that is torment isn't it? I imagine those pots were rinsed innumerable times by the wives...
Emojis take away some of the weight of your message
@@NoHairofRedemption how so? What about kaomoji? :3 ^_^ no, seriously brother, look up the "Fools for Christ" saints.
@@NoHairofRedemption It's just my signature :D
How fitting, I just did a small FTX for my army MOS training and had a couple MREs. I’m always grateful for the cooks whenever they can come with us, because MREs get a little old after a few days. Seeing old mess kits at museums from WW1 and like this always puts it into perspective. The men in Washington’s army were a different breed, considering they had to endure some of the worst conditions imaginable, and that was before they even had to go and fight battles too. Just getting enough food to feed everyone seemed like an awful challenge back then. Excellent video.
Cheers to this fantastic channel!!!
Every winter your videos come back to my feed.
And Christmas season won't feel the same without you boss!
I was in the Air Force so I never had the opportunity to sample MRE's. But going off the reactions of the soldiers we transported, they were stoked to eat at our chow halls.
You guys got real food!
I ate a lot of MREs while I was in the Army. Some are pretty decent. It's important to note that our rations aren't exclusively MREs, we do have forward support units that, among other things, bring the occasional hot meal. Field kitchens also exist.
Civilian's prospective on MRE's: My boss (in financial services firm) was an army reserve logistics officer during Desert Storm. He brought MREs for our lunch the day before Thanksgiving. A team of 10 people cooked and ate them in a conference room. Each meal had a couple of warming pouches, like insulated envelops with a chemical pouch in the bottom that got hot when you added water. Fold the top closed, wait a couple minutes, and the food was hot. We had to open the door; too many of those chemical warming packs in enclosed space made the air foul.
Each MRE contained an entree and a side dish that could both be heated. He showed us that if you heated the entree first in the larger heater envelope, you could then put the side dish in that same larger envelop and you didn't need the small one. The food was high in carbs and fat; very high by our sedentary civilian standards, lots of energy for active soldiers. Each packet also contained a large hardtack-like cracker that was pretty good; foil sealed so it didn't have to be super hard to have good shelf life. It came with either cheese or peanut butter. The huge cracker and cheese/peanut butter seemed like enough food for a light meal in itself, too me. There was some kind of dessert with each one, chocolate pudding I think in some. Mine had a fruit pie. There was a little candy, spices and sauces and some sort of drink mix in each one.
It was filling and satisfying. It did not taste great. It gave me prospective, and gratitude for our soldiers and the duties they perform, which was the point of course.
I have had MREs with tiny bottles of Tabasco sauce in the accessories pack.
Bro, I served in the Army in the mid 90s. I was a patriot missile operator and mechanic. I spent 6 months of my life is Saudi Arabia in 95 manning the same equipment they fought the gulf war in. We had some rations that were dated late 80s. We loved them. They were so fresh and tasty. Please buy and try one. You will appreciate what we went through. Thanks for all your videos!
In Germany the soldiers still have a „Henkelmann“ a metal eating Equipment where you can get your Portion of the „Goulasch Kanone“
you can cook water in it too.
Is this the M-31 Kochgesschirr? The Bundeswehr had a tall 3-part set, the Wehrmacht ones had a top and pot, and the Kaiser's Soldats in the Great War carried a similar piece -- sometimes enameled. I have collected the East and West German variants. Very handy for boiling water.
@@HootOwl513I think so.
0:14 bro did not to be that caked up
Bro did not need to be that caked up*
@@Staggefly ty
@@Doctorwho11thdoctor np, was expecting for you to say something like “🤓🤓🤓” but you’re just too kind.
@@Staggefly nah man Im chill rn
I haven't eaten MRE's in the field as I am unfit to be a soldier, but I have eaten them at home, and honestly most of them are decent even from the perspective of a meal kit. They're nutritionally and calorically dense, most of them taste alright or even simply good, and the mix of meal and snacks means you can munch on it for quite a while, or mix and match ingredients however you please.
I served from 1989 to 2010. The MRE was better than the C rations(I experienced them once). But foraging and cooking my own food on the few survival hikes I participated in was more like 1776 or earlier soldiers. There was little to no supply. We had to rely on what we found or caught. There were hungry nights but the food was so much better when I cooked it myself. I learned to never be without tobasco sauce.
An American soldier in 1776 would have loved a C Ration and an MRE. I think they’d say its too good for them.
@@Mistah_Boombastic_BiggieCheese I'm sure they would have. I guess I was boasting that what I could come up with foraging was better than the MREs I've had
The research that goes into your videos is epic. Thanks for making this content!
While in Afghanistan in the mountains of Nangarhar, we LIVED on MREs. I found myself desperate to eat something different to the point where i was scrounging together local ingredients to have some variety in our pallet. It was often onions from the abandoned bazaar, a can of beans, a bag of rice, a small bag of table salt, and a freshly killed rabbit (the amount of rabbits that were present always suprised me). All stewed together and cooked in a pressure cooker scavanged from an abandoned local dwelling. Those meals were always the best and had the most value in my opinion. Often the Afghan National Army Commandos and Special Forces we were working with would cook for us as well. It was very nice to eat with them, drink chai tea, and smoke cigarettes to build rapport with them. Rarley the Interpreters would make day trips to the nearest bazaar that was up and running (an hour to 2 hour drive on goat trails) and bring us back freshly cooked rice and veggie kebabs with naan bread. By the end of my tenure there I had put together my self a small mess kit consiting of a small camp pot with a frying pan lid and an mre spoon to cook and eat with.
I'm a bit surprised you didn't go into detail on soldiers making their own mess kits. Whittling was a huge pastime not too long ago. Take a knife, some fairly lightweight wood, and whittle away to make your own equipment. Could take a couple of days to weeks depending on the project. Boys learned to whittle at a young age and so it would basically be second nature to them by the time they reached adulthood. They could also use the shavings from whittling as kindling for starting a fire.
That's true, perhaps he's saving it for another episode
Excellent coverage of an interesting element of soldiering through history.
As for myself, my military service did not include MREs, as I was warned ahead of time. My cousin (once removed) had survived Pearl Harbor and a Kamikaze sinking, and still suggested the Navy. Three meals a day, he said, and you don't have to eat any of them crouched in a muddy hole.
This isn't the sort of content i'd watch on a regular basis. I've even MRE's, or rations as we call them mostly in Britain, but i've never thought about what it must be like to prepare and cook every part of your meal on a fire after a day of walking or even fighting. Fascinating stuff.
Marine Boot Camp in early 1974 included a 4 week Second Phase at MCB Camp Pendleton, CA. We had the WWII style ''meatcans'' [Mess Kits] to lug around, but mostly were fed MCIs: Meals,Combat, Individual -- or ''C-Rats.'' Usually a small can with meat, or tuna / a small can with crackers and a chocolate patty [rumored to be an intentional laxative] / a taller can with fruit / a thin can with jam, peanut butter or cheese / and an accessory pack with cigarettes, matches, gum, stim-u-dents, salt, coffee, instant, sugar, non-dairy creamer, TP, and a plastic spoon.
The P-38 can opener was also included. Called a 'John Wayne' in Marine jargon.
We were instructed to open the Crackers/Candy can first, set the contents aside and make a Hobo Stove out of the can by punching vent holes thru the sides and top. Then a block of Trioxane fuel tab was lit off with the matches. It smelled horrible -- probably to prevent privates from trying to cook off in their pup tents and dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. The Canteen Cup, which fit under the O.G. plastic canteen could boil water for coffee or to heat the immersed ''entree'' can. Or you could heat the can directly on the hobo stove. Once made, the Hobo Stove was saved for future chow breaks.
Unopened C-Rat cans could be stored in spare uiniform sox. Several cans made a nifty blackjack.
I think I remember seeing ashens try to eat a Vietnam War C-ration with a brick of cocoa, crackers, and peanut butter and jam. It had all gone rotten, but particularly the jam was leaking 😳
I had MREs in high school, I was in NJROTC, and we had them on a field trip. They ranged from pretty decent to "Meals Rejected by Ethiopians". Chicken was a solid win, the beef patty looked something akin to a brand of dog food called Gainsburger that was around in the 80s-90s. Didn't taste terrible, though. Incredibly calorie dense, something like 3000-5000 calories per meal.
In my time in the British Army we transitioned from canned rations to the equivalent of US MRE. Mostly an improvement; most could be boiled in the bag or - commonly - just kept in an inner pocket and warmed by body heat before eating. My mess kit reduced to one stainless steel mug that fitted under a water bottle. 👍
I wonder how much weight was saved by switching from metal cans to plastic pouches?
I had a variety of MRE's when I was in college. Enough for something like 10 meals. The food was perfectly edible and even though it wasn't stellar it wasn't terrible either. I found it was fairly simple to get things going and warmed up. Usually came with gatorade powder for electrolyte replenishment which I guess would be pretty important for a soldier in the field. Things have come a long way since the 18th century.
When i saw the MRE i just heard a Voice in the Distance "Let's get this out onto a Tray.......Nice" Strange isn't it?^^
I still remember the "this tastes like old library books" when Steve was eating an original 1863 hardtack.
Watching this comparison makes me realize how interesting it is that in the relatively short time from WW2 to now, we have eliminated the mess kit despite refining it in the relatively long time between the revolution and WW2.
When I went to basic training, we were issued Viet Nam era 'C-rations' in the field. They came in a box, with the meals in a can (opened with the famous P-51 can opener). I always remember eating chicken loaf - that got covered in gnats in the Georgia sun during our 15 mile bivouac march. I was so hungry, I ate it anyway. By the way, the WW2 mess kit you showed, the divided plate was placed onto the handle to make a long tray when you were on the chow line.
Georgia gnats are something else, man. Very few other places in the states where you can hear the question "why is the pepper on my food moving?" with genuine sincerity from an infantry grunt
They were still issuing those WWII era mess kits when I went to basic in the 80's as well. Had the whole setup with the 3-station immersion heaters to clean them. Eventually the Army figured out it was easier and more hygenic to just give us paper plates and plastic dinnerware with every group meal and started shipping those with the T-RAT packs.
Seriously, I enjoy all the love and dedication that is put into this channel and all these great videos!
I served in the military during the Cold War, during the time when we switched over from C rations to the MRE'S and it didn't go well at 1st. MRE'S were spoiled and soldiers were getting sick, and we prefer the C rations because it was easier to heat up and we make stoves out of the empty cans to heat up our next C rations. I truly enjoy your videos, keep up the good work and God bless.
Those original dirty dozen MREs were terrible. I never saw C-rats but remember those, and the older guys in our unit who'd been a few years said the MCI rations were way better. Years later I saw a complete unboxing of all 24 MCI menus from the late 70's and was pretty impressed with the variety and amount of food in those. It took the MREs until the mid-90's to even remotely come close to what the MCIs had when they were discontinued.
I served in the Army during Desert Storm. Back then I'm so glad each MRE pack came with a small bottle of Tabasco. It either gave flavor or killed the flavor of the MRE meal. Tabasco or black pepper helped with powdered eggs from the field kitchen.
I spend parts of the last 4 decades in the the US Army and I just cannot get enough of these Revolutionary War era videos you put out. It really gives me perspective on the deprivations these men suffered through to give us out freedom. We haven't forgotten.
Hey man love the wholesome vibes and amazing education keep going god bless
MREs are pretty good, I usually take a few with me when deer hunting because its nice to have warm food in the cold, the heaters are slow to warm stuff up but if you have the time then warm everything up since it'll taste better. I've never been a fan of most of the main courses (sans chili mac and asian style beef) but the sides are usually good, plus mixing the coffee and chocolate protein shake makes for a very filling and refreshing mocha. Be aware that youll be pretty backed up after a few days of eating only MREs and no the gum is not a laxative, thats a myth.
Mres, when I first came into the army, felt like a treat, but after having to eat two or more a day for multiple weeks, it makes me my stomach hurt. Now, when I go to the field, I bring a jet boil with me and make food it's more stuff that I have to carry, but it's worth it. I also use my canteen metal cup to heat and boil food over an open fire. Many other soldiers that I know have similar views, but we agree that when we are able to get hot chow in the field, it is the best.
We may not have mess kits, but we still have canteen cups. They've almost disappeared because of the camelback style hydration systems, and the MREs come with special "ziplock" style bags for beverages. However, the canteen cups still have a lot of utility in them. They're generally lightweight, and useful for everything from coffee and tea, the occasional soup (Whenever I'm doing training in colder climes the warm-up tent always has this mysterious soup made of a several gallons of warm water, a couple ramen packets and leftover mixed vegetables). Canteen cups are also useful when you have to shave in the field.
The thumbnail of a Continental soldier holding a modern MRE goes insanely hard.
My father was drafted in the early-mid 60s and served in Vietnam... he would occasionally talk about his canned rations and since he carried C4 as part of his gear how well it worked to heat his rations when no one was around to chew him out if the caught him...😊
@JFK-co4fq that is the same thing that my father did in the USMC....but I believe the title was slightly different back then...but I could be wrong.
Excellent video, being a CSA Unit reenactor, I can relate to period cooking etc.
Being a career soldier first I had C Rations then the many different types of MRE's etc.
8:22 Caught red handed
Like every war, private purchase or privately traded items were used in conjunction with issued gear. Make a wooden spoon, trade for a large pewter spoon with local farmers, or trade a personal item to that one fellow soldier in the group of six who could carve a magnificent spoon in the blink of an eye, without even really trying. Can't be teaching into that cook-pot with your fingers.
from my experience in ukraine this is similar to how some soldiers still cook communally especially at rear installations. i have worked at a volunteer kitchen and we made ready meals that were portioned per squad. (shoutout to liviv volunteer kitchen 10/10 reccomend working there)
This is seriously the best channel on youtube
I liked the campfire reenactment part of this video as well.
If you have the time and luxury to heat an mre, it is best enjoyed as follows:
1-Open mre bag, dump contents, and fold top half of mre bag back on itself-this is your bowl-set aside. 2-Take inventory of mre contents and identify meal type-they come in two types-a main meal and a side, with some treats (like crackers/bread, and a tube each of peanut butter and jelly) or a main meal, side, and various components that go with the meal. 3-heat the main meal and side together in the water activated heater bag, and while that is heating, enjoy your treats or cut up/tear components into pieces and add to the bag bowl. 4-when main and side meal is finished heating, add to bag bowl and mix well with included spoon and enjoy.
Yeah don't do this. The outer bag is not food-safe plastic. Its had cardboard and plastic rattling around and shedding inside for who knows how long.
No one in the military does this. The main retort pouch usually has enough room inside to dump other stuff like broken up crackers or a side into it. The outer bag is for putting all the trash into.
@@obsidianjane4413…ahhh yes, Ive been waiting for this. The internet hero who bravley tells the former infantrymen and bradley infantry fighting vehicle commander “No one in the military does this” when literally he and everyone around him did this, across four posts in the US, four distinctly different units, and three combat deployments.
And GTFO with that not food safe plastic BS. Plastic was the furthest thing from my mind then and its the same now. I literally have doormant malaria in my blood, arthritis at 32, silicosis of the lungs, no cartilage left in my spine, and I need a knee replacement that they wont give me until I’m 40 “because i’ll wear it out, and its a surgery they only want to perform once”
In Korea in ‘05 I remember me and the other medics combining our MRE’s in canteen cups and cooking them on the hurricane heaters. It’s funny how you can look back and remember fondly what we’re often miserable times.
I've had my share of MREs and field feeds. The worst one by far, the one that 'they' thought was a "treat" for us, were the prepackaged "Jimmy Deans" with like, tins of vienna sausage and other gas station convenience store items shrink wrapped on a styrofoam plate. No one liked them, everyone preferred MREs to them. Field feeds were nice though; hot food served buffet style by Army cooks (or privates given mess duty, working alongside and under the direction of the contractors).
I remember those trays, we usually got them on range days where we were out all day but not long enough to set up our MKTs. They're like 1/4th the cost of MREs which is why garrison DFACs like issuing them.
Hot chow was worse than MREs???
@@Mistah_Boombastic_BiggieCheese Those trays didn't count as hot chow. They were heated (sometimes...) but they were more like microwaveable dinners than anything else. They came pre-made, frozen in cases, trays covered with plastic wrap that the 'cooks' would put into a warming oven for a while to heat. Actual hot food - A or B rations - was actually cooked by humans in a mess hall, packed into mermite containers and shipped forward. It was typically better than MREs, still just cafeteria-style food at best.
@@Raskolnikov70 Mine (at the time like 06-08) weren't even frozen. Just normal shelf-stable crap I wouldn't eat if it was the only stuff left in my house.
We actually used something remarkably similar to those cook kettles. Only they were vacuum flasks for carrying out the hot rations to soldiers in the field. The cooking was done on mobile field kitchens or even delivered from a nearby mess hall. MRE's were too expensive per calorie.
Looks like mess kits haven't really changed since WW2. I remember mine fondly, got to keep the FDF issued plastic canteen after the service but not the other stuff. Pea soup tasted wonderful in -25c weather after digging fox holes in the snow all morning and we always got pancake after. Class of I/10 never domiciliate.
Another great video. I've always learned something from your videos. It was nice meeting you at Mississinewa in October. I appreciated that you gave me a few minutes of your time to discuss British rations/cooking from 1812, as I am one of my unit's cooks. I was in the Canadian Army Reserve in the late 70's/early 80-'s during the changeover from cans to boil-n- bags. In the field I've eaten from bags, cans, flying kitchens and hayboxes. When I was a young guy still living at home, I came to truly appreciate my mom's cooking after returning home from a weekend exercise or a 2 week long training concentration. I, like you, am grateful for every meal I'm able to eat. Merry Christmas.
Retired Navy with deployments to Afghanistan, Kuwait, Bahrain, and spent lots of time in the field training, convoys or general FOB hopping. We always had MRE in the event we weren’t near a DFAC (dining facility). Most MRE are actually pretty good. There are some bad ones too. The problem was always trying to get to the drop early so you would have first dibs on them. I’d always go for the Chili Mac..or anything that didn’t have powdered mashed potatoes or eggs. It was often fun to swap desserts or drink packs. One tip, always grab extra heat packs for times people grab them all up. Nothing worse than a cold MRE. Don’t turn down the extra items people don’t use, extra drink packs or otherwise, stuff em in your cargo pockets because you never know when you might want a snack or to add flavor to your water.
The Chili Mac MRE is the GOAT. You could trade that MRE for just about anything you could possibly want in Iraq.
No they weren't, and we never took MREs into the field. MREs are junk.
@@After_these_messages haha….Yessir…..You could barter them for some pretty good non-food items also.
Soooo many non-food items haha. But a carton of reds over there - splitting that up would literally get you anything you wanted in the market LOL. American cigarettes FTW@@kleinster99
I ate both the first-generation MREs and second generation. The first gen I had was in basic in 1989 and they were eatable but not really good. The second-gen came out sometime in the 90s, they were really quite good with a diverse menu. You could even have hot food without a fire. They came with a heater that was full of chemicals that reacted with water and got very hot. You put what you wanted to be heated in the outer bag along with the heater and some water and a few minutes later hot beef stroganoff. Both gens had freeze-dried peaches that were supposed to be reconstituted with water but were better as is. They were kind of sweet peach-flavored candy.
Glad to see this! I just bought the same MRE in the thumbnail and absolutely love them. I can't stop eating them and have ordered a crate worth at this point.
Nice hiss.
Based.
nice.
Ever since I lost all my teeth, MREs have been my go-to meal for outdoors!
I had 2 grandpas that served in WW2; one would only say 'he walked around a lot' and wouldn't extrapolate further.
The other one was stationed in Greenland and was a cook; he said he never fired a shot in anger. According to him, the cooks had the most respected and important people on base, as they decided who got the good bread and good food. Nobody ever said a cross word to him. He opened a bakery once he got out of the service and he was the one who taught my father (and myself) how to judge good bread and make the best cookies.
Another interesting video from your channel which I have been watching for years. To give you a little context if you're interested...When I was in the British Army in the 1980's we were issued with Ration Packs and oblong mess tins which we would use to cook some of the Rat Packs over a hexamine block stove. However the Army has "Field Kitchens" (which i'm sure you're aware of) as was used during WW1 and WWII. The field kitchen, you would line up with your mess tin in hand to be delivered your ladle of slop...I mean delicious stew. In the Rat Packs was a miniature bottle of Tabasco sauce to make everything taste more palatable. We would also swap out the included rations we didn't like for ones we did ;-) Also During patrols / in the field Soldiers would (dont know if they still do it now) put all the contents of the Rat Pack into a polythene bag and stick it under their arm pit so it would end up a warm mush to scoop out and eat.
I was never in the military, so I never had to eat MRE's in the field, but one of my friend's dad's was in the National Guard. He brought home some first generation MRE's when they were first issued to them in the 80's. We tried one each. The "menu" was very limited at the time, not like today when there are at least 27 different kinds, even Kosher, vegan, and Halal options. The one we ate was freeze dried pork. This was also before they came with the water activated heaters. They were issued heater tabs, canteen cups, and stands to heat up your water. You were supposed to heat up some water and pour it into the freeze dried pork patties to reconstitute them and make a gravy so you could spoon out the meat and dip your cracker in the gravy/broth. We bit off the pork patty straight out of the pouch and it sucked every bit of moisture out of our mouths like the cracker challenge. :) The cracker was as hard as a piece of slate and it came with a squeeze packet of gray cheese or peanut butter. They tasted good, but didn't look appetizing. The desert was freeze dried pears, which was supposed to be reconstituted with warm water, but we ate straight from the package, like pear flavored styrofoam that also sucked all the moisture out of our mouth. We ate these with no supervision, or Tommy's dad would have probably told us about the reconstitution part. Now MRE's have heaters and all kinds of stuff. A lot of the food preservation techniques they developed for MRE's have made it into supermarkets, like all the various foodstuffs in a pouch where you can eat it in the pouch or pour it in a bowl after warming it in hot water or the tuna in a pouch. The individual packets of instant coffee or drink mixes that you pour into a cup of hot water or a water bottle came from MRE's.
A Marine friend of mine did experience eating MRE's in the field in Iraq. He said they were warned not to eat them for more than 30 days straight, so of course, they had to eat them for more than 30 days straight until they ran out and they had to forage for food. Or at least, they paid their interpreter to forage. He said you could ask this guy for something and he would come back with what you asked for, or a reasonable substitute. "Hey, Abdul, can get find us some chickens?" Bam, he came back with a couple of chickens. "Can you find us a goat?" Here he comes, with a goat.
When the case of MRE's gets busted open for the day, the officers and the Sgt get first choice and the rest of the guys scrabble and trade amongst themselves for the rest of it. They "rat (fornicate)" the MRE's, digging out the stuff they want to eat first then the stuff they don't want at the time goes into a duffle bag or box so people can scrounge around in them later. Everyone keeps a spoon, even going so far as to drilling a hole in the handle so they can put it on a length of 550 cord to hang off their dogtags or a carabiner. A lot of guys would fill their little hot sauce bottles with sand as a keepsake, even though it was against regulations (they don't want any weird diseases from the sandbox to make it to the US). I bet a LOT of the little packets of TP were left in the duffel bag. The packet of matches are water resistant. The cases used to have paraffin to help them with water resistance so they wouldn't get soggy when wet and ended up being a good firestarter. Even though they sell overstock MRE's at government auctions, operated by the Department of Defense, there's a branch of the DOD that tries to track down MRE's "illegally" sold at auction, trying to sue stores to recover "Illegally obtained" gov't resources, even though it was an auction held by the DOD with the money going to the DOD. If they didn't want to sell it, they shouldn't have sold it. MRE's can be frozen and stored for up to 20 years. If they're kept in a cool location, they're guaranteed good up to 10 years, but like other canned goods they're just starting to get good at that point. :)
Somehow and only the gods know why, this video came up on my feed. So glad it did. Fascinating! You've got a new sub.
guts and blackpowder in real life
Les go
One thing that hasn't changed. You still need to bring your own knife, just to open the MRE. A lot of improvised cooking done in WWII came from how Hobo's cooked. Solders are still learning to improvise with the food issue. We made puddling using the Coco Beverage mix with the coffee creamer plus sugar and adding a little bit of water. Great video!!!
That certainly is a thumbnail
That is indeed a thumbnail
Definitely one of the thumbnails of all time.
Undoubtedly, a thumbnail worth noting.