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 1991 Gulf War, when MREs were widely fielded for the first time. The initial 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 an industrial 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 the main meal. MREs come with a water-activated flameless ration heater, but to be safe 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 to give the stew a backbone. Eating a stew by itself feels odd.

But, nonetheless, the sloppy joe was surprisingly tasty. Legitimately good. It even had a decent mouthfeel. It's essentially a form of chilli, but tomatoey. Given that the food is thirteen years old I was amazed that it 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. If only human beings could be preserved so well.

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 still 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.

Latvian MRE, Menu 8

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.

What else does the ration have? There's some powdered pea soup, rice porridge, nuts, bon bons, coffee, rye bread, honey, jam, a rubber band, an unexceptional plastic spoon, gum:

Turbo Xtreme gum. Given the name, I wondered if it was laced with amphetamines, but after chewing it for a while I didn't notice any adverse effects. I did however finally get around to typing up a theory I have devised, inspired by the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky - a theory that the fictional universes of Kelly's Heroes, Where Eagles Dare, A Bridge Too Far, The Longest Day etc are in fact reflections of an actual event that really happened. An event that has been erased from history, but not without leaving a few traces behind. It was a conflict between green-clothed Anglo-Saxon men and another group of Anglo-Saxon men who wore grey and black.

After studying the hairstyles and equipment present in those films I came to the conclusion that this conflict took place in the year 1958. And that women were far rarer in the past than they are nowadays, because they are outnumbered many times to one in those films. Could it be there was a point in the fairly recent past when women did not exist? What made them happen? What makes women happen?

I intend to publish my findings in book form, when I regain my strength, but after typing up my manuscript - it came to eight pages - I was overcome with a profound sense of fatigue.

Incidentally top internet person Steve1989 has also reviewed this very MRE. He liked it, and I don't think that's just because he's naturally positive. Here's his take:

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.

A Polish MRE - they feed their soldiers well.

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.

Polish S-R-9 MRE

Let's have a look at another Polish MRE. This is S-R-9, which is makaron po bolońsku. It's not quite as good as the other Polish MREs I have eaten, although it's still good. Let's see what you get:

Polish MREs are designed so that there's a main meal, a second meal that can be combined with the first, and a sweet of some kind. They're slightly more flexible than US MREs, if only because there are a lot of crackers, but on the downside there's no coffee, but on the upside there's salt and pepper, and the toilet paper has more coverage. The combination of toilet paper and the wet wipe might actually be effective for its intended purpose.

S-R-9 has a typical loadout. The non-main-meal components of Polish MREs don't change much. There's a pouch of fruit tea, a paper-baked grain bar, some sweets, a tin of jam, a tin of meat, a main meal, and two packs of rock-hard SU-1 rusks. US MREs are wrapped in masses of plastic but the Polish variety at least makes a nod to the recycling industry by using card and metal as well.

The rusks are too stiff to bite through with your teeth. They have a distinctive, slightly aniseedy taste that apparently comes from caraway seeds. I had the first packet with the konserwa:

What's in the meat? To quote Tygan from the classic tactical wargame XCOM 2, "I do not know, and quite frankly I do not want to know". It was lighter, less greasy, less salty than Spam(r). Too solid to dig out with the rusks, so in the end I chopped away at it with the provided spoon.

The spoon is transparent, thinner and sharper than an American MRE spoon, with wider bowl:

What does this say about Poland? It's hard to say. It could be that Polish people have wider mouths than Americans, but perhaps the different designs are a result of military doctrine. Perhaps the Polish armed forces are trained to eat their food with a small number of large mouthfuls. An awful lot of thought went into the design of those spoons, and with sufficient counter-thought perhaps I could reverse-engineer the Polish mindset, and by extension the fundamental consciousness that existed before language. Our tools say a lot about us, and long after we are gone the creatures that will evolve from rats will wonder what we were like.

The snack bar is covered in edible paper. The paper keeps it in one piece. It's very dry. As before, I wondered if I was supposed to draw a map on it, and then eat the paper to keep the map from falling into the hands of the Russians.

I've written about the boiled sweets before. They're surprisingly good. The chocolate one actually does taste of chocolate; the other sweet doesn't stand out, but together they're slightly better than I expected. But what about the jam? Let's try out the jam, which is raspberry, or malinowy:

There are fifty-five holes in each cracker. Eleven rows of five. The holes are there to stop the dough from bubbling up too much during the baking process. That's why. The jam highlighted the versatility of the SU-1 crackers. They are a universal accompaniment that makes up for the lack of potatoes or rice in a military meal. I have no idea if they're any good for my digestion or not, but I can confirm that the human body digests them. NB The jam itself is jam; it's hard to get jam wrong.

Let's have a bash at the main meal. Some European MREs have a combination of a flameless ration heater and a hexy stove, but Polish MREs just have the heater, which is very effective:

At this point I realised I had forgotten about the tea drink. Let's try it out. I've had it before. The tea granules smell of pee, but the tea itself is thoroughly anonymous:

It tasted of a weak fruit juice. What was tea about it? What made it tea? Leaves? Is it made from leaves, or fermented in some way? Is tea fermented? Is that the right word? Why does a military meal have herbal tea? What does herbal tea have to do with bayonetting and grenading waves of Russians?

But the people of Poland are unfathomable. They have different lives, a different worldview, a different vision of the future, a different past. When they swallow it tastes different. Let's check out the main meal, which has by now cooked:

Or mostly cooked. The main courses of Polish MREs are meaty and thick. You get lots. The main course is 300g by itself, which is about two-thirds the weight of an entire US MRE. The downside is that it takes longer for all that mass to cook, so I ended up eating mine lukewarm.

Was it any good? It was okay. I didn't use the salt sachet but it still tasted salty, but then again it's aimed at soldiers who have been bayoneting and grenading Russians all day - there are millions of them - so perhaps the salt is there for a reason. In fact it tasted almost exactly the same as the pasta courses in US MREs, which suggests to me that there are only so many ways to prepare beef pasta.

On the whole the meal felt more substantial than a US MRE, although it's no good if you're vegetarian.  The emphasis on chunks of meat with a side-dish of meat is slightly off-putting even if you're a meat-eater.

Does a Polish MRE make sense if you're hiking in the wilderness? Not really. It has the inherent inefficiency of all wet rations combined with little tins that probably wouldn't survive being sat on, whereas US MREs are packaged in sealed plastic pouches. Stripping it for weight is problematic because the main meal is so chunky, and the lack of a caffeinated drink is annoying. If you're doing light camping with a car it does however have variety, which is a morale-booster, and the FRH and rusks give you something to keep your mind occupied.

And that's S-R-9. As with all military meals it's a novelty in a civilian context. Can you buy the SU-1 crackers separately? I'll have to check out the Polish section in my local supermarket.

MRE Menu 15: Mexican Style Chicken Stew

Skip-rope, Travis-style, Mr Belvedere, and today we're going to have a look at another MRE. Menu 15: Mexican Style Chicken Stew.

Chickens predate human beings by millions of years. When they first appeared they couldn't have known that people would one day breed them for food. Instead they prayed that whatever creatures ate chickens in the Paleogene period would leave them alone instead.

They got their wish! They outlived their original predators, only to fall prey to a new breed. Us. We. You and I. Humanity. But perhaps they're playing the long game. I'm digressing here. The text has fallen out of sync with the images. I'll have to post one of the pictures again. Let's have a look at the contents of the MRE:

Don't worry, I didn't have to upload that image again. That would have been a waste of electricity. All I did was create a second link to the original image. 

Menu 15 contains Mexican chicken stew, cheddar cheese pretzels - they are fantastic - a packet of mixed fruit, a pair of MRE crackers, some cheese spread with jalapenos, a First Strike chocolate bar, a chocolate drink, and a lemonade drink. Lots of chocolate.

The accessory packet has a moist towelette, iodized salt, crushed red pepper, indifferent and almost tasteless MRE gum, and some quote toilet paper unquote that might possibly be useful as a wound dressing - you could use it to seal off a chest wound - but is no use as toilet paper.

Let's try the drinks first. I've had MRE lemonade before. It's awful, it tastes like mouthwash:

I drank it as quickly as possible. I've said it before, but MRE lemonade is probably formulated to mask the taste of water purification tablets. In that respect it's a success, but it's not much fun to drink. Let's try the chocolate hazelnut beverage:

I've had several MRE chocolate drinks before. They're odd - the instructions specify cold water, but they're essentially hot chocolate and only mix properly if you use hot water. This time I used warm water and it still didn't mix, but it tasted nicer. I don't know why they put cocoa in a military meal. MREs aren't supposed to put soldiers to sleep, they're supposed to keep them alive in the absence of alternative food.

At this point I put the main meal in the flameless ration heater, along with the mixed fruit. It wasn't until I played The Long Dark that I realised you were supposed to heat up mixed fruit. Until then I had always eaten mixed fruit cold.

Some MREs come with coffee creamer, and I wonder if it goes well with the mixed fruit. You could mix it in with the syrup. While the meal is cooking, let's try the crackers and the cheese spread:

MRE food exists on the same level as Sunday morning hangover food, e.g. it's crap, but tasty. The cheese spread bears very little resemblance to cheese, but if you put it on the crackers the result is wonderful. It's not good for you, it's not healthy, it would horrify a professional chef, but it's tasty.

Let's try out the cheese pretzels.

On the subject of tasty crap, the pretzels were excellent. They're crunchy biscuit things with cheese sauce in the middle:

They are the best crunchy MRE snack I have tasted to date, much better than the trail mix and the mixed nuts, even better than the baked snack crackers. They are apparently sold on the civilian market in the United States as Combos. Sadly I've never seen them here in the UK.

By now the main meal has heated up. Let's see what it's like:

It's nice, but anonymous. A lot of the MRE main courses I have tasted are very similar - chicken in an anonymous stew with bits of vegetable. The mixed peppers were a mistake and just made the meal unpleasantly tart. Nothing about the flavour of the chicken suggested Mexican cuisine. It's a pleasant but anonymous meaty stew that might go well on a tortilla, if you have one. It would also be good dumped on a plate of chips, but the same is true of lots of things.

Let's finish it off with the First Strike bar, which has military-style packaging and is, again, also available on the civilian market:

It's essentially a chewy, flexible block of sugar with chocolate flavouring and bits of cereal. It's like a parody of a "health bar". It's okay, but too sugary for my taste. It has fewer calories (282) than I expected but is probably bad for you in many different ways.

Almost forgot the fruit. Let's try out the fruit. It's paltry:

I've tried MRE fruit before. You get a small amount of fruit with some juice. It's just mixed fruit; no better or worse than mixed fruit from a can, but there's less of it. I wonder if you could combine it with the chocolate drink. Apparently US service personnel have super-secret MRE recipes, because there are only two dozen MRE menus and they get monotonous. Top Youtube chap Steve1989 has talked about "army mochaccino", which is a mixture of cocoa and coffee powder, but there must be more.

That's enough about Menu 15. It's one of the most consistently decent MREs I have tried. None of the individual elements are bad (except for the lemonade) and the cheese pretzels are excellent. The only downside is an overabundance of chocolate and a paltry main meal. If only the First Strike bar had been strawberry, and the chocolate drink had been banana milkshake or something, there would have been more variation.