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:
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.
