Today has come once more, so let's have a look at a United Nations Patrol Combat Ration Pack. This one is Halal Menu 2: Chicken with Lentils. There are also beef and vegetarian options.
UN ration packs are similar to British and US rations, but slightly larger, with one more drink and an extra sweet. They're assembled in the UK from components that are made by a network of little companies that I've never heard of, with names like Britannia Superfine, AIB, and Malton Foods. I imagine warehouses on industrial estates, scattered around the country so that if the Soviets drop a nuclear bomb on one location there is always another.
The cookie bar is much like the rest of the pack. Edible, competent, not quite up to the standard of commercial food.
I have to admit that I know absolutely nothing about the history of UN patrol rations. Are they actually used by the United Nations? Are they just one of many different rations, or the one main ration? I haven't found any convincing photographic evidence of UN forces using them - the internet has lots of photos of patrol rations, and UN troops, but no photos of UN troops eating the patrol rations - but then again perhaps the UN changes its suppliers every few months.
The ration pack has around 2000 calories, which makes it a twelve-hour ration if you're doing heavy manual work, a whole day if you're sitting in front of a computer waiting for Doom Eternal to download because Britain is gripped by a viral outbreak.
As with all military rations UN patrol packs aren't really practical as civilian food - they're too bulky, too expensive - and they're not even much use for long-term survival, because they only last a couple of years, but they're fun novelties. They have water purification tablets! Sadly they don't have a hexy stove.
The bulk of the food, main meal at bottom-right.
The trail mix and flameless ration heater, plus paperwork.
What do you get? There's the main meal, which is essentially a meat stew or a meat-free pasta. There's also some trail mix, a cinnamon bun, some boiled sweets, a cereal bar, some fake chocolate, a couple of soft drinks, sadly no coffee or tea. The ration also has chewing gum and enough water purification tablets for six litres of water, and there's a flameless ration heater.
US and Polish MREs tend to have a second main meal item, e.g. some tortillas or snack bread, or hard tack crackers in the case of Polish MREs, but the UN patrol pack has a single main meal plus lots of pudding. Overall the variety is interesting but only one thing stands out as being particularly tasty. Which one? Read on.
It's the trail mix. The tropical fruit and nut mix. Not hard to mess up. It's peanut-heavy, and there's only a tiny bit of banana, but the ratio is pretty good and I enjoyed it. Not too sweet, not too dry. Let's wash down the trail mix with a drink.
The apple protein drink is weird. It's a powdered milk drink, but apple-flavoured. Once I got used to the concept I actually quite liked it. Imagine apple milkshake. It looks like spit, but it's nice.
Let's try the fake chocolate, the Chockablock Bar:
The packet describes it as a candy bar with chocolate flavouring, which is an admission that it's not real chocolate. Purely on its own merits the bar is edible, but compared to actual chocolate it's no good. The kind of greasy cheap fake chocolate you might get as part of a fairground prize. It gave me a renewed appreciation for the real chocolate in Lithuanian MREs, viz:
It's not as if real chocolate goes off quickly. Top Youtube personality Steve1989 has eaten chocolate bars from the 1950s, and apart from some bloom they were perfectly fine. Still, let's wash down that disappointment with the cinnamon bun. I wasn't sure whether to eat it straight from the packet or heat it up, so in the end I ate one half cold and microwaved the other half for ten seconds.
It's not bad, but it was very stodgy and didn't have much filling. I had to chew and chew before it went down. The stodginess is probably a side-effect of making the bun shelf-stable. It could be improved by dunking it in some coffee, but as mentioned earlier the UN meals don't have coffee. Perhaps the soldiers are expected to carry a flask around with them.
I have to say I don't think of UN soldiers roughing it in trenches - they did during the Korean War, but that was a long time ago - so perhaps they're expected to source hot drinks from the mess, with patrol packs for rare occasions when the barracks are too far away.
In the 1990s and early 2000s UN soldiers famously used food rations as a means of paying for child prostitutes, in which case I would be unsure whether to use the Chockablock Bar or the cinnamon bun. The Chockablock Bar is dire, so I wouldn't miss it, but I would feel guilty about using it to pay for sex; the cinnamon bun is slightly too good to give away. Furthermore living standards in the Third World have improved over the last thirty years so I imagine that prostitutes in war zones demand more than just a cinnamon bun. Here in the UK women demand more than just a cinnamon bun before they will have sex.
Let's try out the other drink, and also have a look at the accessories:
What is guava? I have no idea. The drink had a nondescript fruity flavour, and even after stirring a lot it still tasted a bit chalky.
The accessory pack has a complete set of cutlery, not just a spoon. They're less robust than the classic brown US MRE spoon, tougher than the thin plastic spoons that comes in Lithuanian MREs.
American MRE toilet paper is only useful as wound packing or as a means of lighting things (when dipped in petrol). UN toilet paper is much better; you could in theory wipe yourself with it.
I was tempted to write "srebrenica massacre", and "do not like" but I'm not sure how to spell "srebrenica".
Let's cook the main meal. The flameless ration heater is a small rectangular pad of heating material. As with other FRHs you're supposed to expose it to water. I did so and initially nothing happened, but after a minute it suddenly activated - it was very effective, bulking up and sending out a cloud of steam.
The main meal reminded me a lot of the stew in the Lithuanian MREs I have tried. Similar taste and consistency, larger bits of meat, but still relatively runny.
As with the Lithuanian main meal it's tasty but thin, and it also suffers from the lack of an accompaniment - chips, or potatoes, or rice or something. It feels odd to eat meat stew by itself. Polish MREs have a similar problem, but much less pronounced because they have masses of meat, viz:
Now that's a meal. Let's wash the chicken and lentils down with a boiled sweet:
It's a generic boiled sweet. Mine had melted a little bit and was hard to unwrap, so perhaps the meal had been stored on a warm shelf. Who knows.
In summary the UN Patrol Combat Ration Pack is similar to a Lithuanian MRE, minus the hardtack crackers, plus an extra drink and a cereal, with vastly inferior chocolate. The apple protein drink is pleasantly surprising and I liked the fruit, and of course the UN does a huge amount of positive work that never appears in the media because nothing goes wrong and no-one dies. We only remember the bad things.
Quality-wise it's on a par with Lithuanian rations - more stuff, none of it horrible, but not quite as good - but not as good as Polish rations, which have an excellent main meal albeit that it's inedible if you're vegetarian. This might be why the UN doesn't just use Polish rations instead. In contrast American MREs are all over the place, but they tend to have more variety. And that's about that.
