MRE Menu 22: Sloppy Joe

Let's have a look at another MRE. This one is Menu 22: Sloppy Joe, which was part of the 2011 batch of MREs (PDF). It was only available for that one year, although earlier batches included Menu 17: Sloppy Joe Filling, which was very similar.

In fact Menu 22's meal packet appears to be recycled from Menu 17, so I wonder if the US Army found a warehouse full of unissued MRE meals and thought "frumple".

Today I learned that silicon dioxide is a food ingredient. It's used to prevent caking. Well I never.

What is Sloppy Joe? If it hadn't've been for Sloppy Joe, I'd've been married a long time ago. Where did you come from? Where did you go? I'll stop that. Stop. Sloppy joe is ground-up tomatoey oniony minced beef filling that goes well in a burger bun. Here in the UK it's really obscure. Imagine minced beef but with a pasta-style sauce.

The date code is 1333, which means that my MRE was packaged in the 333th day of the first year of that decade, e.g. 29 November 2011. That's thirteen years ago.

The last time I ate a really old MRE it was Menu 17: Country Captain Chicken, from 2002. Most of the food was ruined, but the main meal, the country captain chicken, was well-preserved and actually tasted really nice. I was surprised nay astonished.

I don't want to spoil the surprise, but Menu 22: Sloppy Joe is much the same. Most of the food was borderline-edible, but the actual main meal was, yes, perfectly well preserved and surprisingly tasty. Country Captain Chicken and Sloppy Joe are both mildly spicy, so I wonder if the spices kept them fresh? Who knows.

Why am I writing about MREs? A couple of reasons. I'm old enough to remember the first Gulf War, when MREs were widely fielded for the first time. The first generation of MREs had a reputation for poor quality - "meals rejected by everyone" was one of the most polite descriptions - and I've always wondered what they were like. The answer is that Gulf War-era MREs were apparently foul, but the modern-day variety is okay, although very sugary and salty.

Secondly they're a little glimpse into a different culture, because all the sweets and coffee etc are made for the US market in industrial estates on the far side of the world. It's odd to think of the United States as a different culture, but it is. The coffee in this MRE was packaged by the Maximus Coffee Group of Planet Houston:

Eventually Maximus became Atlantic Coffee Solutions, and in 2018 they shut down. British military meals are packaged on industrial estates in Slough and Staines by companies that never appear in the news, and the same is true of US MREs.

Why else do I write about MREs? I went hiking in Greenland a couple of years ago, and I was curious to see if MREs made sense as hiking food. To which the answer is no, as illustrated by the following picture:

For a couple of days a bag of MREs makes sense as hiking food, albeit more as a morale booster than sustenance. Each MRE has lots of different things, and the best meals can be mixed and matched in different ways. But for more than a couple of days MREs are too bulky, and even if you strip off the packaging you're left with pouches of wet food. Freeze-dried food would make more sense. The US does actually have a range of freeze-dried MREs - they're designed for cold weather operations - and the very first MREs had freeze-dried elements, but cold weather MREs are expensive and rare.

Still, let's get down to business. Menu 22: Sloppy Joe has a lot going for it. The meal includes the main course; a thick slice of snack bread; a cinnamon bun; peanut butter; apple jelly; plus accroutrements. Accouterments. Accroutements. Acoutrements. Accouterments. Accoutrements. Accoutrements! I did it!

I finally did it! A-cout-rah-ments. A-coo-tre-ments. I finally did it. I forced myself to spell it correctly. Just like millennium and accommodate. Accoutrements. One day I'll master how to spell diahorreah. Then I'll be able to spell four words correctly.

Accoutrements. I'm so proud of myself. Sloppy Joe has a lot going for it. You can mop up the meal with the snack bread, or have a peanut butter sandwich, or have a jam sandwich, or add the jam to the cinnamon bun etc. I opted to start off with a peanut butter sandwich:

Alas, the snack bread smelled slightly odd. I've had MRE snack bread before. It's basically cake, not bread. It's very sugary. I took a nibble, and didn't die, but I'm not a lunatic so I scraped off the peanut butter and ate that instead. The peanut butter was perfectly fine. If there's one thing I've learned from watching Steve1989 on YouTube it's that peanut butter, cigarettes, coffee, and boiled sweets tend to last, I assume because they don't have much moisture NB I am not a scientist.

Let's try out the cinnamon bun as a second appetiser:

That not jelly. It's jam. Sadly the cinnamon bun also smelled slightly odd, but again I've had an MRE cinnamon bun before so I haven't missed anything. They're okay but very dry. The jam actually smelled okay, but as mentioned passim I am not a lunatic, and I already have plenty of jam, so I prodded it with a knife and thought "what I am doing with my life" to which the answer is that I am violently upsetting the flow of an otherwise ordered universe.

Let's wash away the disappointment with some coffee. What is Diario? Is it Italian? Diary? I've never heard of it. This is the range of accoutrements that accompanies Menu 22:

The coffee was okay. It tasted very bland, but it was palatable. As with all MRE coffee it's hard rather than smooth, if that makes sense. Imagine you are on a training course, with an early morning start. It tastes like that.

The creamer is probably lethally poisonous by now. The gum was edible but didn't taste of anything, I have to assume the Splenda artificial sweetener is preserved, and salt is salt. What about the tabasco sauce? Read on, dear reader, read on.

The MRE also included a powdered orange drink. The powder smelled of pee. I've had MRE powdered drink before, and even when new it smells of pee. The resulting drink is a very bland orange squash, and I had no desire to dice with death just for the sake of bland orange squash so I threw it away.

Let's try to main meal. MREs come with a water-activated flameless ration heater, but to make doubly sure I boiled the sloppy joe in water for ten minutes:

After it cooled down I snipped off the corner of the packet and gave it a sniff. It smelled vaguely spicy, not obviously rancid, so I dipped my finger in it, and it tasted okay. I decanted it onto a plate and added the tabasco sauce, which had also stood the test of time.

This illustrates one of the problems with MREs. They're mostly just stew. An actual meal would have chips, or rice, or a potato or something. Eating a stew by itself feels odd.

But, nonetheless, the sloppy joe was surprisingly tasty. Legitimately good. It even had a decent mouth-feel. It's essentially a form of chilli, but tomatoey rather than harsh. Given that the food is thirteen years old I was amazed that it had lasted. Whatever Natick Labs did, it worked. If only they would team up with the people who make Lithuanian and Polish MREs, and borrow some of their rock-hard rusks. It would give the meal some roughage.

And that's... oh no, there's one more thing. Choclettos.

What are they? Imagine Opal Fruits, or Starburst if you're modern, but chocolate. I was torn. They smelled bad, but in a way that suggested they actually did smell like that naturally. But the concept of a chocolate-flavoured Opal Fruit felt wrong, so I threw them away. I learn from the internet that they were discontinued in 2018 and date back to at least the Second World War, so perhaps I should have sold them on eBay. It's too late now.

And that's Menu 22: Sloppy Joe. After thirteen years on the shelf most of it was ruined - not massively, but enough to put me off. However the main meal was preserved just fine, and tasted great, and a few days later I haven't noticed any untoward effects. When it was new it would have been a pretty good MRE, with a flexible range of mix-and-match components, although as mentioned passim it would have benefited from one more snack bread, or an extra packet of MRE crackers.