College Kids Eat MREs

I’ll fight a motherfucker for a pork rib MRE.

My joes know I like the lemonade. when they get it in their mres they usually hand it over or try and use it as a bargaining tool with me when we are in the field.
 
Shit. They should've given them the Gen 1 MRE's. Beef or Pork patty, Beef slice (chunked and formed), Ham & Chicken Loaf (who the fuck thought of that one?!?!?!)...fuckers were horrible (and didn't have heaters, so were almost always eaten cold). Even the Gen 2's (while an improvement) were still shit, and still only had 12 options, period. 12 options got old, real quick when you're stuck eating them for 8 weeks straight....
 
I actually liked the C-Rats over the early MRE's (at least the C-Rats still had cigarettes in them).

The sad part is that we used to get those in the Cub Scouts! One of our scoutmasters had an unlimited supply through the VARNG... and so when we went hiking or camping, we'd get boxes of C-Rats. Chicklets, John Wayne Crackers, TP, Cigarettes and all! The scoutmasters would tell us to hand over the smokes. Not everyone did. I never got the habit myself. But there were a few who waited until after dark and lit on up! I think we were... 11?

Lima beans and ham were disgusting. Spaghetti was actually pretty good. The Peanut butter was awesome! We'd sit around trading cans like a bunch of Arab rug merchants!

Cheers,

Sirhr
 
Ham and egg c rats cold with lots of tobassco sauce, tobassco sauce was highly prized in the field. Pound cake. Cans of fruit. Cigarettes, high test coffee. I did not mind C rats. I had a few MREs given to me after I had been out 20 years and I ate them, seemed ok. Packages were a lot lighter.
 
Nothing wrong with MRE`s if you are hungry......... if you`re not..... don`t eat....... They are designed to keep you alive......not fulfill your specific culinary desires....I`m impressed with the forethought of design in the calorie way..and packaging. it would be hard to come up with a meal so complete in a waterproof package....
bill larson
 
It’s amazing what people in the field will do for a damn package of skittles or m&m’s...always interesting SMFH

Chili Mac was worth fighting over. Or that jalapeño cheese shit. Had a guy who would horde the stuff and ate it like it was going out of style
 
The jalapeno cheese on the vegetable crackers with a ham slice or chicken with grill marks stuck in the middle.

Really?? Fuckin fake grill marks. I could do that with a sharpie
 
Ahhh...the fond memories of "Chicken ala string"...tabasco and crushed crackers added to it, was the only palatable way to get that shit down...brrrr...full body shiver of memories.
 
The National Guard was giving out C Rats after Hurricane Harvey.
I stopped by to chat them up while patrolling, they offered me a kit.
I kindly declined, I told them I had just shit earlier after a couple of days and didn't want to back up the plumbing again.
I ate quite a few when I was working in Kuwait. Tobasco sauce made almost all of them taste better.
 
Ahhhh...Fond memories of pulling pranks by making a CS bomb with a perforated water bottle, mre Heater, and water mixed with tobacco. Throw that under some poor unsuspecting joes cot. Funny shit right there.
 
Nothing wrong with MRE`s if you are hungry......... if you`re not..... don`t eat....... They are designed to keep you alive......not fulfill your specific culinary desires....I`m impressed with the forethought of design in the calorie way..and packaging. it would be hard to come up with a meal so complete in a waterproof package....
bill larson

Ive has my kids eat them just for the experience and for my entertainment. I explained to them the concept of what you stated above. If you’re belly is growling, they taste just fine.
 
I used to keep some C-Rats, just in case. When they approached their expiration, my Daughter and I would do a C-Rat lunch. Now I had to eat a lot of Charlie Rats back in The 'Nam, and I really got to liking them. Sometimes the alternative involved the chow hall getting mortared. My Daughter said she'd eat 'em again under the proper circumstances, and began to look forward to the next C-Rat lunch.

I liked MRE's, some, maybe a few years into the program. Then they started coming out with the weird ones, I'm guessing to shut up the whiners. Nowadays, I wouldn't go near even half of the "choices". Being required to eat some of them seems like being in prison. I would probably die of starvation.

I did some research on Amazon regarding foreign military field rations. Some of them seem a whole lot more interesting than MRE's; but man, that stuff gets expensive fast.

Greg
 
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Agreed. I really enjoyed the British rations, though I'll admit the "Mutton and Potatoes" was not to my liking. The German rations were actually pretty good as well.
 
I did my tour of VietNam March to March 69-70. We had lots of C-Rations and toward the end of my tour we got a few LRRP rations, an early form of freeze-dried food stuff.
C-Rations were heavy, as well as the water we carried, so the LRRP rations were great as far as their weight went but it seemed that no matter how hot you got the water you poured into them or how long you let them "cook"whatever had beans like Chili or peas like Beef or Chicken stew the fuckers were like biting down on a rock so we picked them out as best we could but there were always at least a few surprises in every meal.
There were a few meals in C-Rats that were good but some of them even a hog would not eat but when only a few boxes were kicked out to you from the bird we would divide up the good and the bad and hope we were pulled out before we had to eat the bad.
Weight was a big problem with C-Rats as well as the fact they tasted like shit and with only 12 menu choices or maybe a few more, depending on how old they were, it was nice to get back to the forward LZ and hit the mess tent or be really lucky and hit the rear LZ where the Big mess tent was. Many of them were really old and tasted only like a tin can.
With the weight thing you need to remember that everything you owned and needed was in a Ruck on your back so how much did you want to carry? you did without a lot of things that a lot of people take for granted so lots of things were culled or just done without.
I have had some MREs while hunting and camping so have little sympathy for others who had to "suffer" through them. They don't know how lucky they were.
I also had to "suffer" through some K-Rations during my time in training and I really have a lot of sympathy for the Combat troops that did their thing and that is what they had to eat.
I think each generation of troops, no matter what or when, will bitch about what they had to eat but they All would make a turd and keep you going.
Foul Mike E Co 5/7 Cav 1st. Cav Div. 69/70
 
They should have given them C-rats...

MRE's were positively Ruth's Chris Steakhouse compared to C-Rats.

Cheers,

Sirhr

While at US Embassy Liberia there was a case of C-rats in the excess storage.

Boxes were dated 1952.

Had me a nice tasty can of meatballs with canned crackers while standing a mids watch circa 1990. Enjoyed the retro experience of opening 38 year old low bidder meat with the included P38 opener.

Couple nights later figured Id go for another meatball sandwich snack.

Set the P38 on the edge of the can and just pressed the point through steel when it was met with an eruption of smelly meat sauce.

The can continued to eject meat sauce all over the drop down ceiling tile and my post for what seemed like a full 60 seconds by 1000 count.

That was the last game of C rats Russian roulette I played. Liberian mystery meat was a safer alternative.
 
Shit. They should've given them the Gen 1 MRE's. Beef or Pork patty....

Beef/pork patty was actually pretty good if you had time to rehydrate it in water mixed with the soup packet.

Put it between two cracker boards with your cheese packet and it was like.............eating two pieces of cardboard with salt and goo inside.

Of course because you couldn't get hot water it took a long time to rehydrate the little brick and most of the ones I ate usually had one corner or a center that was still dehydrated.
 
Yeah, we used to save the cheese spread from the "Turkey, Diced with Gravy" MRE and then make a field version of the cheese burger with the Beef patty and crackers. This would be the times when we had time/access to the old heat tabs, and enough water to waste on heating (ultimately draining/tossing the water away) to make the patty somewhat palatable. Most times, if we were lucky, laying the entree packet on the exhaust pipe (the flat spot before it turned up to the caged sectioned of the fording pipe) of a hummer got the thing somewhere up to "warm'ish", and was our closest thing to getting "hot" chow.
 
I was the guy who ate the Ham and Mothers, and even the Green Eggs. One thing for sure, if that was what you could eat, you always had plenty of it available. I liked the Ham and... at least; maybe, just maybe, nobody liked the Green Eggs.

Prior to my Induction in early 1966, my Scouting unit had substantial access to C-Rations, but the ones we had were pre-Korean Conflict, with three meals in one box, about the size of a shoe box. They even had an entire pack of 20 cigs, but the oly filters were Viceroy, and sometimes we ended up smoking Lucky Strike Greens.

There was a lot more variety, and that's what we mostly ate on camp-outs. The novelty was a huge enticement for a bunch of teenage ruffians, and we never complained about any of the selections. Each of us would toss our cans into a large common pot of boiling water to heat them. It served the purpose, and simply heating cans in that pot saved a lot of time end effort. When we were done eating, all the cans got stomped flat and went into the campfire, to be buried the next morning.

By the time I was actually in the service and in combat, I was long used to the Charlie Rats concept and never gave any of the choices a second thought.

When Patton was dishing out his complements about the M-1 Garand, he missed another War Winner, Charlie Rats. For me, all the fancy-nancy newfangled field rations that came afterward were in a distant second place.

I think that sometimes, a subject can get overthought, and that when entire organizations get created, with an entire dedicated civilian contractor support element established firmly in place; things can go off the rails fairly predictably. The old C Rations had much longer expiration dates, provided more bulk and nutrition, looked and tasted a lot more like 'real food', and I think they were more satisfying than "Meals Rejected by Ethiopia". But that's never going to change while the entire subject of field rations has taken on the status of a sacred cow.

Bad cans could be easily identified because the lids were designed to bulge when they went bad. If you missed the telltale and a can started spraying, the quick fix was to simply turn it upside down. This reduced the mess to a small puddle.

Our ration heater was a shallow can filled with sand, holes in the sides, with gasoline or diesel fuel wetting the sand.

Greg
 
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