MRE: Beef Stew – IOTW Report

MRE: Beef Stew

Sunday, 14 February 2021, 12:00 MJA Uncategorized 22

From 35 years ago.

This preserved 1st generation MRE was a real treat! Stored in perfect conditions underground, it was sealed in time. A meal to remember, featuring the Cherry Nut Cake, a highly coveted dessert and one of my personal favorites, and that Beef Stew being quite different than the modern version (and much better back then in terms of quality), freeze dried fruit, and those much loved salted crackers. The best thing I ate all month!

22 Comments on MRE: Beef Stew

  7. Cherry nut cake was the best. Beef stew wasn’t a bad choice either. Definitely better than the omelette. Omelette was the worst. Nothing made it good, no matter how much salt, pepper, hot sauce, hot or cold, didn’t matter. Always bad.

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  11. Did that one come with the cheese and crackers that would clog up the digestive track?

    I forget which ones had it but after living off them for a few months in the desert I will go hungry before I tear into one again.

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  13. Sapper Chris
    FEBRUARY 14, 2021 AT 12:51 PM
    “…Definitely better than the omelette. Omelette was the worst. Nothing made it good, no matter how much salt, pepper, hot sauce, hot or cold, didn’t matter. Always bad.”

    …I’ve had a hand in producing warfighter rations for a quarter century, and my main defense is that we only put in the bag, what the Government SAYS to put in the bag. We can suggest, but they decide.

    …I don’t know when you were in, but the omelets have been out of the program for many years. We had a big contrast with a feeding program for whatever military Canada maintained, but the Canucks got both more and better food, but that was a function of what they asked for…and PAID for.

    The omelet was a good contrast because they were so different. The US version was a liquid fill that cooked after being sealed into the gluey yellowish mass your used to, but the CAN version was actually an omelet that was made the usual way by a different company, frozen, then we put it in a hermeticaly sealed envelope and cooked it again to kill everything on or around it, so it would keep without refrigeration.

    THOSE were pretty good.

    …I once knew the taste of everything we produced, when we were smaller and before Desert Shield.

    I don’t now.

    This is not because I don’t have faith in the process or that I think the taste has substantially changed, but rather because after the Iraq War, the US in general and my patch in particular got a LOT more…uhh…”international”, and it was impossible to not notice the bizarre bathroom behaviors of our Friends from Around the World, especially the Muslims, so I kinda lost interest in eating anything they might have handled, even though we had a reliable kill step afterwards, just because I KNOW about them, so I don’t get to unsee some things, and also-while this has NEVER happened-just the THOUGHT of getting a pubic hair, however sterile it might be, was enough to quash any further interest on my part to sample anything.

    …and before you go off and thank your lucky stars that YOU don’t have to worry because you don’t eat MREs any more…

    …think again.

    …the food business is VERY incestuous, in that the same workers, managers, and executives kind of rotate between food plants over a fairly large geographical region, and most plants “red label”, or co-manufacture for name brands, so I know what goes on in OTHER plants as well, and its the same everywhere. Any of those folks may have touched any of your food at ONE time or another, and it may actually be WORSE with frozen food or “further processing” meals, because only Shelf Stable or Fully Cooked or Ready To Eat products have a kill step AFTER our foreign freinds have handled it after handling themselves, so trust me when I say ALL of your HOME processed food has this potential, too.

    And the government isn’t ABOUT to weigh in on the Koran approved bathroom business of them, either. No sir, you’re on your OWN.

    …as for the ancient MRE here, just FYI, the warranty period is only a couple of years, not 3 dozen.

    Just sayin’…

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  14. In the 1st Gen MREs (Meals Rejected by Ethiopians), the Good Stuff was the freeze dried strawberries.
    The stuff that always upset my stomach (heart burn) was the tomato based marinara style sauces.
    We’d take the coffee, hot chocolate, creamer, and sugar, mix it all in a half canteen cup of hot water, and call it Mississippi Mud. Yum!
    I’ll have to look downstairs and see what I have…… how do you interpret the date code on these things.

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  15. President Elect Toxic Deplorable Racist SAH B Woodman Domestic Violent Extremist
    FEBRUARY 14, 2021 AT 3:21 PM
    “…… how do you interpret the date code on these things.”

    …it’s been a Juian date for some time, usually the first digit pertaining to the year and the other 3 the day, e.g. 8035=2/4/2018. This doesn’t fill in the decade, but again they’re not warranted for that long, but tell me more about it and I may be able to fill in the blanks…

  17. When I was in Nam in 1970 we got a case of C-rats with the year 1945 or ’46 stamped on them.

    But I can’t remember if they were any better or worse than the more contemporary ones.

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  20. ^^^we’ve had this discussion before, Mr. Burr. We can only add what your government TELLS us to add, so if you get charms it’s because THEY want you to have charms, not us, so go hang around the Capitol if you want to lodge a complaint, I understand they’re expecting disgruntled citizens and vets anyway so I’m sure they have a system in place to greet you…

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