Let's have a look at another MRE, this time Menu 12: Elbow Macaroni in Tomato Sauce.
What's elbow macaroni? It's macaroni that's bent slightly. Menu 12 is one of four vegetarian MRE options. In the last post I had a look at Menu 11, vegetable crumbles in taco sauce, and it was pretty good, or at least the main meal was pretty good. Let's see what the macaroni is like.
MREs are military meals created by the armed forces of the United States. They replaced canned C-rations in the early 1980s. Early MREs were apparently not much cop, but modern MREs are generally fine, although after eating them non-stop for a few weeks you'd get sick of them.
Each MRE is a single meal, rather than a day's worth of food. As a civilian foodstuff they don't make a lot of sense - they're too bulky for camping, too expensive to eat as a regular meal - so they're basically a novelty, but life would be dull without novelty.
Each MRE comes with a bunch of stuff, which is one of the reasons they're appealing. It's like a big grab-bag of stuff. Menu 12 has cheese spread, snack bread, a chocolate drink, Skittles, an accessory packet with coffee + creamer + sugar, and hot sauce, gum, and of course the main meal. There are fewer things than menu 11 but the meal as a whole is more coherent. You get a main meal with a side dish and a pudding, instead of a main dish and several puddings.
This one came with coffee, instant, type III. I've read about coffee, instant. All the MREs I've tried so far had branded coffee, but I know from Steve1989's popular Youtube videos that MREs also have official-sounding coffee, instant, type I / II / III, of which types I and II are the best. What's it like?
Disappointingly it was indistinguishable from the Genial-brand coffee I have tried before. Hard rather than smooth; not harsh, but manly, a bit bland. Whenever I drink this type of coffee I have a mental image of a room with tatty-looking school desks, where the walls are breezeblocks painted white, and there's a noticeboard with instructions for booking leave and outdated equality and diversity posters. It could be an army headquarters or a local government office or a social club. That is my vision.
As always I wonder why they only include one sachet of coffee, given that coffee is a space-efficient means of sustenance. Perhaps the authorities prefer it if the soldiers drink plain water, or perhaps there's an assumption that soldiers already have access to coffee. I don't know. Let's heat up the main meal.
I've had duff heaters before but this one was rageous. You're supposed to rest the packet on a rock (or something) but I find that laying it down flat works just as well. While the main meal cooks let's try out the bread.
My first impressions were positive. I was half-expecting the kind of crispy breakfast bread that's popular in Europe, but this was moist and had a yeasty, bready smell. Tastewise it's actually a cross between bread and cake. It's denser and more sugary than bread. Let's deploy the cheese spread:
I think you're supposed to knead the spread. I didn't. It tastes like a thicker version of the cheapest cheese triangles you can get in a petrol station. The resulting sandwich was edible but sugary. There's a popular stereotype that Americans don't understand cheese, and MRE cheese spread does nothing to dispel that. On the other hand cheese goes off harder and faster than other foods so it must be difficult engineering a form of cheese that can survive for five years on a shelf.
Have you ever read a book called Man Plus? It's by Frederick Pohl and was published in 1976. It's a sci-fi novel in which scientists try to surgically enhance a human being so he can survive on the surface of Mars. It has a fascinating central premise although I can barely remember the plot. I thought about it whilst eating the MRE cheese. At what point does cheese cease to be cheese? If all of the components of cheese are replaced with artificial substitutes, is it still cheese? Does it matter if only the idea of cheese survives?
Let's wash that down with the chocolate drink. Some MREs have powdered fruit juice; this one has a milkshake-type drink. MRE drinks are designed to mask the taste of purified water, but they taste surprisingly good. I would buy them if they were available on the commercial market.
You're supposed to pour in some water, seal up the bag, then swoosh it around. I put in some slightly warm water - let's pretend that the milk came fresh from the udder - and swooshed it for a minute or so, but obviously that wasn't enough:
It looked bad but tasted fine. It was essentially milkshake powder. I have no idea if the protein did me any good. At this point the main meal has finished cooking. Let's get it out onto a plate:
The pepper sauce was OTT. It just gave the meal a slight kick. Was the meal any good? Surprisingly so. The sauce was thick; there was a distinct tomato flavour; nice mouthfeel etc. The only problem is that it was relatively bland. It would have been better if there were little bits of meat, or meat substitute, but it's just macaroni. It's thicker and tastier than canned macaroni. Perhaps I could have put the cheese spread in it and mopped it up with the bread.
As always the main meal is surprisingly small, and if I was making a commercial MRE I would double the size of the main meal, get rid of the accessory packet, get rid of the side dish, and just slim it down to a meal plus a snack. In this case the pudding was fruit, which as before was okay but very insubstantial:
It took just a few seconds to finish it off. In the last-but-one MRE I tried the fruit juice had an odd metallic-petrol taste, but that must have been a one-off.
What about the accessory packet?
Massive packet of salt. The toilet paper is useless as toilet paper unless you're Taylor Swift. Perhaps you can douse it in petrol and use it as a signal. It's no good as toilet paper.
I don't know if the matches work; I am frightened of fire. The gum has a minty flavour that doesn't last. The moist towelette is just a wet wipe. What about the Skittles?
They were addictive, and also very sugary. After finishing them off I felt as I could climb a mountain single-handedly, which is fair enough for a military meal. My teeth probably wept tears of frustration, but it has been a long time since I listened to my teeth.
And that's MRE Meal 12: Elbow Macaroni. It's blander but less random than meal 11. The main meal is solid, but unspectacular; the accessories feel a bit rote; the snack bread probably has tonnes of sugar to keep it fresh, and as a consequence it tastes more like a cake than bread. It fills a space but I wish the cheese spread was more savoury.
As an experiment perhaps they could include a sachet of Marmite instead, because Marmite keeps forever. Do Americans have Marmite? It's an acquired taste, but soldiers are trained to obey orders, they can be trained to eat Marmite, the end.
