00:09it's three in the morning you haven't slept in two days your boots are wet your back is screaming
00:15and you've been carrying 80 pounds of gear up a mountain you're starving and in your pocket is
00:22a brown plastic bag about the size of a textbook inside that bag is everything you'll eat for the
00:29next eight hours the label calls it a meal ready to eat the soldiers carrying it call it something
00:37else meals rejected by everyone meals refusing to exit meals rejected by the enemy and on the road
00:47to Baghdad in 2003 some of the men eating these things genuinely believed certain pieces of candy
00:55inside the bag could get you killed here's what's actually inside one of these things an entree
01:03sealed in a foil pouch and shelf stable for about three years at room temperature a side dish usually
01:11rice or mashed potatoes or fruit a bag of crackers or wheat snack bread a spread almost always peanut
01:19butter jelly or jalapeno cheese a dessert often pound cake or m&ms or skittles a drink powder coffee sugar
01:29salt gum a tiny bottle of tabasco a plastic spoon a matchbook and toilet paper total weight is about a
01:38pound and a half total calories around one thousand two hundred fifty
02:03the math says soldiers should eat three a day to get the roughly three thousand eight hundred calories
02:11the body burns under combat load the whole bag is engineered to survive things normal food simply
02:19cannot the military requires it to withstand being dropped from a plane at over a thousand feet without
02:26a parachute and from nearly a hundred feet without one and still be edible at the bottom it can sit
02:33in a
02:33desert truck at a hundred and twenty degrees and still be safe to eat months later the packaging is
02:40military grade and inside somewhere is the strangest piece of all of it a flat plastic envelope of gray
02:49powder that boils water without fire the flameless ration heater was introduced in 1990 before that soldiers
02:58heated their food by boiling it in a canteen cup over a fuel tab or laying it on the engine
03:04block of a
03:05running humvee or just eating it cold cold mre entree out of the bag in winter is a memory most
03:24veterans
03:24would rather not revisit the heater itself is one of the more elegant pieces of military engineering
03:31that almost nobody outside the service has heard of inside the envelope is a thin pad of magnesium powder
03:39mixed with iron and salt you add about two tablespoons of water slide your meal pouch in next to the
03:47pad
03:47and prop the whole thing up against a rock or your boot within seconds the pad starts hissing the water
03:55dissolves the salt which turns the magnesium and iron particles into thousands of microscopic batteries
04:02that all short circuit at once the reaction releases enough heat to raise your meal a hundred degrees
04:10fahrenheit in about 10 minutes the reaction produces no flame which means nothing for an enemy to see at
04:18night around 3 billion of these heaters have been produced since 1990 now you can start to understand
04:25why a lot of soldiers will defend these things despite the nicknames
04:50when you have not slept when you are cold when you have been moving on adrenaline and bad coffee for
04:5636
04:56hours the moment that bags start steaming and you smell hot food in the field is genuinely something
05:04it is hot salty and dense enough in calories to keep you upright it does the job and in some
05:12menus
05:12it is even kind of good chili mac is the consensus favorite beef stew has a cult following the shredded
05:21barbecue beef is widely considered a small miracle the pound cake especially when warmed against the heater
05:27pad gets close to actual dessert the jalapeno cheese spread on a cracker is a meal in itself skittles and
05:36reese's pieces show up randomly and feel like winning a small lottery veterans will tell you with a straight
05:43face that the maple sausage breakfast saved their morale at least once
06:00the mre is not built to compete with a restaurant it is built to keep a human being functional in
06:07places
06:08where restaurants do not exist where stoves do not exist where sometimes water and electricity do not
06:16exist by that standard it is one of the most successful pieces of food technology ever invented
06:24and then there is the other side a 2007 taste test by the salt lake tribune brought in three
06:31professional chefs to rate 18 mre menus on a scale of 1 to 10 the highest score was a 5
06:39.7 the chicken fajita
06:42averaged 1.3 there was until 2009 a menu so reviled that soldiers in iraq invented a new name for
06:51it
06:52recipe number four was officially the vegetable cheese omelet the grunts called it the vomelet because it
07:00was visually indistinguishable from one it was eventually pulled from the lineup and the food
07:07scientists who designed it were presumably told to never speak of it again the sodium content is brutal
07:14a single mre can contain close to a full day's recommended salt intake three a day puts a soldier
07:22at roughly 19 grams of sodium which is about eight times what the fda suggests for the average person
07:30for a soldier sweating through their uniform in iraq that's a feature for anyone sitting still it is
07:37a slow motion blood pressure crisis the fiber problem is the other half mres average about 12 grams of fiber
07:46but they also lack the live bacteria found in fresh food
08:10a 2019 study by army researchers published in the journal of nutritional biochemistry
08:17finally confirmed in writing what every soldier already knew people eating only mres averaged one
08:24fewer bowel movement per week than the control group meals refusing to exit scientifically validated
08:32this is where the culture comes in soldiers do not eat mres the way the box suggests they tear them
08:39apart the practice has a name in the military a profane one but the polite version is field stripping
08:46or gutting the mre you open the brown bag you pull out everything you keep what you actually want
08:54and you toss or trade the rest trading is its own economy the veggie crackers go to the new guy
09:02who does
09:02not know better the peanut butter is currency Reese's pieces are platinum anyone who finds a menu with the
09:10beef ravioli has briefly become the most powerful person in the squad there are unofficial rules unwritten
09:19hierarchies and lifelong grudges about who took whose pound cake at a checkpoint outside mosul in 2006
09:37we dig into stories like this every week if that sounds good subscribe there is also a small kitchen
09:45subculture built around hacking the mres into something better a spoonful of creamer sugar and cocoa
09:54powder mixed with a little water becomes ranger pudding the cheese spread plus the tabasco plus crumbled
10:03crackers become something halfway between nachos and a war crime depending on who's making it marines have
10:11been known to mix the entire mre into one cup on the theory that it all ends up in the
10:17same place anyway
10:19the recipe books for this kind of thing get passed down between generations of soldiers like family
10:25heirlooms except the family is the united states military and the heirloom involves jalapeno cheese
10:33none of this prepares an american soldier for what happens when they meet a french one the french combat
10:39ration is called the r c i r it contains roughly 3 200 calories comes in 14 menus and includes
10:50things like
10:50duck cassoulet deer pate salmon with rice rabbit stew and a small bar of dupont designy caramel
11:01there is a real chocolate bar there is a small block of canned cheese that veterans have described as the
11:07best canned cheese they have ever encountered the whole thing is packaged in a cardboard box with a small
11:14folding stove and fuel tablets included
11:38in afghanistan the new york times reported that a single french ration could be traded to american
11:44troops for around five mre's in somalia an entire crate of french rations was once exchanged for an
11:53american field cot the french apparently believe at the level of national policy that an army that eats
12:01well fights well and to be fair to the french they may have a point the british have a 24
12:08-hour ration pack
12:09with curry and yorkshire pudding the italians historically packed in a small bottle of cordial
12:16the russians load their rations with buckwheat and salo which is essentially salted pork fat
12:23the americans by contrast get jalapeno cheese and a pound cake and then there is the part of the mre
12:31story
12:31that does not show up in any nutritional study until 2007 every mre included a small roll of hard candy
12:41called charms lemon lime raspberry cherry innocent enough on the surface marines decided otherwise sometime
12:50in the 1990s a belief took hold across the marine corps that charms were cursed not metaphorically cursed
13:10lemon caused vehicle breakdowns lime brought rain even in the desert raspberry the worst of the four was
13:19associated with death marines threw them out buried them sometimes hurled them at the enemy to transfer the
13:27bad luck drill instructors ordered recruits to discard charms in the field by the early 2000s an entire
13:36generation of marines genuinely refused to carry the candy at all in 2007 the department of defense
13:44combat feeding directorate quietly removed charms from the mre menu officially no reason was given
13:53unofficially it was simpler to stop including the candy than to fight the superstition the charms are
13:59gone the apricot superstition that has haunted tank crews since world war ii is still going strong
14:07there are armored units today where bringing a single can of apricots aboard a tracked vehicle will get
14:14you in serious trouble so why do soldiers love and hate these things at the same time because what's in
14:21that brown bag is closer to logistics than to food it is the answer to a question almost no civilian
14:28ever
14:28has to ask which is how do you keep a human being alive fed and capable of running across an
14:35open field
14:36with a rifle when the closest grocery store is 10 000 miles away and currently being shelled
15:03the flavor and the constipation are both side effects of the real mission so was the vomulet the whole
15:11point of the system is that an 18 year old in hellman province can pull a brown bag out of
15:17his
15:17pack add water to a chemistry experiment and eat a hot meal 11 minutes later that is not a small
15:24thing
15:25that is the result of half a century of food science billions of dollars of development and a quiet
15:32group of researchers in natick massachusetts who have spent their entire careers thinking about
15:38how to feed people who cannot stop to cook the soldiers who curse the mre will also tell you
15:45given a long enough conversation that they would not give it up because the alternative is going hungry
15:53and going hungry in the wrong place can kill you faster than any pound cake here's the question though
16:01if the french can put duck pate in a combat ration and the americans cannot get past jalapeno cheese
16:08spread what does that say about how each country actually thinks about feeding its soldiers
16:13i genuinely don't know drop your answer below
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