In many ways, life in Afghanistan is just like life anywhere else - you get up, eat breakfast, do stuff, eat lunch, do stuff, eat dinner, do stuff, and go to bed… then you do it all over again the next day.
When you look at that list, you realize that eating is a pretty significant part of the day - especially for those soldiers who are doing the more physical work, burning lots of calories all day long.
Of course, these calorie-burning soldiers are often outside the base… which makes it a little less convenient to get to the mess hall for lunch.
So they have MRE’s - or Meals Ready to Eat - an entire meal in a conveniently portable, flat, cardboard box. Inside, there are various sorts of pre-packaged foods, including at least one pouch of something meant to be eaten hot… and a chemical pouch to heat it with (it’s not all hotdogs on the campfire out in the wilds of Afghanistan!).
Of course, Michel and I couldn’t resist trying one out… so we convinced our Press Officer Captain Jørgen to show us how it works. He experimented on us with served us a savory Cheese Omelette with Vegetables…
You can listen to our taste-test adventure here… and look at the contents of the package in the pictures below.
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- The cheese omelet with vegetables MRE contents spread out for inspection... hmm... what to try first...??
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- To heat the food pouches, you simply add a little water to the heat pounch to start the chemical reaction, put the food pouch in, wait a couple minutes, and voila, hot lunch!
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- Press Officer Captain Jørgen takes a bite... mmm... yummy...?!
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- The Cheese Omelet. Now you can see why I was so... unenthusiastic... about tasting it!
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- The was the hash browns and bacon. It tasted better than it looks. Hey, at least it had texture...
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- The mini bottle of tabasco sauce that we discovered too late to disguise - er, improve - the flavour of the omelet.
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on May 11th, 2009 at 10:23 am
A small but not unimportant detail: the meals you sampled were U.S. MRE’s. There’s also a Dutch variant which, for reasons unknown to me, they didn’t let you taste
on May 11th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Ah yes… thanks Hans!
I did hear from one girl that the US ones are better… but that claim remains unsubstantiated… any personal taste-test results you want to add??
on May 11th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
[...] For more on the Afghan bakery, watch the video on this earlier post. You can also hear more from the salsa-dancing soldiers and see pictures of them in action here, and you can listen to our taste-test of a portable meal (and see the enticing plastic presentation) here. [...]
on May 18th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Alas, my culinary field experience is limited to US MRE’s in Uruzgan, and Royal Dutch Marines Artic Rations in sizzling Chad ( I kid you not). As far as the actual hot meal ingredient is concerned, both were fine with me; but in the case of the Dutch rations you need to add boiling water - no chemical heating. As a souvenir, I have one box of Dutch ‘Combat Ration, breakfast and lunch for 24 hrs’, which is filled with goodies, and quite different from my own army days a few decades ago.