Let's have a look at another MRE. This one is from Latvia. It's menu number eight, pork with buckwheat. What is buckwheat? It's a pseudocereal, like quinoa. You learn something every day. Latvia's armed forces may not have much in the way of long-range heavy artillery, but they do have sophisticated MREs.
US MREs are supposed to replace a single meal, but the Latvian variety has twice the kaloritāte - 2589 according to the label on the front of the packet - despite weighing only a little bit more. Is 2589 calories enough for a whole day if you do a strenuous outdoors job? Probably not, but it's fine if you spend a lot of time sitting down.
As mentioned passim MREs only make sense in a very narrow context. They're much more expensive than ordinary food, and they're too bulky for an individual to carry lots of them during an extended hiking trip. At least not without stripping them into their individual components. They are however interesting novelties.
In the past I've tried Polish and Lithuanian MREs, and they have a similar design. They're essentially a big meaty meal, with a smaller second meal, plus hardtack crackers and honey etc. My understanding is that Lithuanian rations are manufactured in Poland, so I wonder if Poland also makes Latvian rations.
One difference is the roughage. Polish and Lithuanian rations have panzercrackers, so-called because they're incredibly tough:
They're a clever idea. You have to split them into chunks before you can eat them, and they take time to chew, so they feel like a more substantial meal than they are. Do they help you poo, or do they have the opposite effect? I haven't eaten enough of them to tell. Still, they work both as a sweet and as a savoury, and it's a shame they aren't available in supermarkets here in the UK.
However the Latvian MRE doesn't have hardtack. It has rye bread instead:
I could have dunked the bread in the pea soup, but instead I made honey and jam sandwiches. I was pleasantly surprised by the rye bread. It was still moist, and I could have eaten it raw. It's miles better than the bread in US MREs, which smells nice but is more of a muffin/cake than bread.
The Latvian rye bread is small, but it's dense enough to be filling. It serves a similar function to the panzercrackers, in the sense that it goes well with everything.
Let's try out that soup. It's pea soup with breadcrumbs, which sounds awful, but it's not bad:
I can't see any breadcrumbs either. The soup belongs to the same taste family as leek and ham. It's very salty, and I wonder if it could be sprinkled into the main meal as seasoning. Compared to a typical packet soup sold here in the UK it was greasier and saltier, but it felt more substantial. Perhaps I didn't dilute it enough.
Let's try out the main meal. I decided to cook it with the enclosed hexy stove, taking care to leave all the windows open and doing it next to a sink. The warning about using fuel tableti as food raises a number of questions:
There's something cost about cooking things with a hexy stove. Steve1989 chopped his meal up with the enclosed spoon, but I let it be. While the meal was cooking it smelled of barbecued beefburger. A certain amount of it stuck to the can, but after scraping it off with a metal spoon I got this:
It has to said that it looks awful. The buckwheat looks like bits of gristle. But it's actually not bad. As with the Polish and Latvian meals it's far less greasy than I expected - notice how the buckwheat seems to have absorbed all the fat - and overall it had a relatively subtle taste, with no obvious gristle. It would be excellent draped over chips, or in a bap.
The meat in US MREs has the mouthfeel of reconstituted meat paste, but the Latvian MRE meat actually felt meaty. It's not a patch on Polish MRE meat, but it's still good.
When I started trying out MREs, two years ago - I was planning a trip to Greenland and wanted to see if they would be a good option (answer: no) - I expected them to be horrible. It would be more entertaining if they were horrible. But the only one that even approached badness was a United Nations patrol ration. Perhaps because no nation had invested in it. It was so boring I still haven't bothered to write about it. The chocolate in particular was imitation chocolate that felt like something you might find in a cheap Christmas cracker.
In contrast even US MREs are consistently tasty. Their worst sin is saltiness, and I suppose if you had to eat three a day for weeks on end you'd go mad. The biggest limitation is a lack of "mass", such as potatoes or chips or rice. It feels odd to eat a tray of meat just by itself.
But I'm digressing here. Let's have some of the coffee, which is standard store-bought Nescafe. It was weak, so you might want to use two sachets per mug instead of one. I didn't photograph it because it's coffee. You know what coffee looks like. Think of coffee. That's right. That's what it looks like.
Unfortunately I over-diluted the soft drink:
It had a weak "red flavour", but that was my fault. Incidentally in the background you can see the Akai CD3000XL sampler I wrote about here. It's a hardware sampler from 1996 that I picked up cheaply at the April 2022 VEMIA synth auction, because no-one else wanted it.
Compared to Logic or Cubase it's incredibly awkward, and it only has 32mb of memory, but the sound quality is fine and it makes for a handy accessory if you have an analogue synth, because you can build up a library of interesting sounds and play them back polyphonically.
Let's talk about the Latvian MRE again. I finished off with the bonbonita barberry. Barberry is a type of plant. The sweets tasted red. There was nothing wrong with them, but again they're no different from store-bought sweets.
Is that it? No, hang on, I've completely forgotten the rice porridge. What is rice porridge? I don't know. Some kind of half-way house between oat porridge and tapioca. Let's try it out:
It was okay. I dumped in one of the two packets of sugar. It had a bland taste, and would have benefited from a little bit of milk, or about 25% more strawberry flavouring.
And that's one of Latvia's MREs. The hexy stove has enough fuel to cook the main meal and at least warm up the coffee or the porridge, although I wouldn't count on it boiling either of them. Overall the meal is solid, on a par with the Lithuanian ration. I would improve it by increasing the amount of soup, adding more flavouring to the porridge, ditching the tea, and perhaps adding a second packet of rye bread.
With a little bit of work it could be transformed into a proper 24-hour ration, which raises the question of how you can force a bunch of bored 17-year-olds to not eat all of it in one go. Or mess around with the fuel tablets. Luckily that's not my problem.
Oh, the nuts. I forgot the nuts. I ate the nuts. They were nuts.
