Survival Cooking Part V

More food!

Next on the list of fun survival foods I tried was Mountain House dehydrated hiking food.

While these are lightweight hiking options, they definitely lacked in taste and substance. First off, after the magic of MREs, getting single servings of food with no internal variety just isn't nearly as cook. Next off, you actually have to boil water and add it to the food, then wait for it to cook and rehydrate? What's up with that? :P As a hungry college student, with a college rush for time, I will gladly take a mysterious instant-heat package over waiting for water to boil any day.

Furthermore, when it takes several minutes to discriminate between the ingredients of the meal in order to figure out which one is the meal, it's just not a good sign...

Sorry, Mountain House! You just can't quite live up to the competition.

Survival Cooking Part IV

Next on the menu- Mainstay Emergency Food Rations

These munchies are twice the size of Datrex, and look something like squares of cornbread, only they're about 4 times as dense. They're lemon flavored, but are thoughful enough to not be overpoweringly scented. Also, the bag comes with a built in ziploc seal. (So considerate!)

With 400 calories a cube, these Mainstay blocks really can replace a meal. However, while they're not bad, they did lead me to start thinking about the purpose behind food. Sure, you can consume all the calories you need for a day in blocks of uniform, well-preserved food, but is it really worth it? So much of food is in the experience of taste and variety, different smells, changes of texture, even variations from how the same meal is prepared different days.

Without an experiential side of living, what are we really gaining? If we cut out the sensory input of life to be able to survive on through routine, eating without tasting, living without feeling, what is it we are hoping to gain by that sacrifice?

Unrelated to existentiosensory abstraction, I'd definitely pick Mainstay over Datrex as a food source, but I'm not really planning on stocking up on either any time in this, well, lifetime.

Survival Cooking Part III

MREs- Meals Ready-to-Eat/Maybe Relatively Edible?

MREs are the most commonly used survival rations, used by the US military and emergency relief packages alike. Now that I've sampled one, I can see why.

First off is the sheer convenience of the meal. While most survival rations consist of one calorie-loaded entree, MREs consist of a complete meal, beverage, entree, side item, and desert, and all you need to do is add water.

The main meal is nothing short of magic. I put the foil package of chili and pasta into the heater envelope, and added a few tablespoons of water. This activated a chemical heater in an instant. All I had to do was slide it into the angled cardboard box, and wait a few minutes for the whole meal to heat itself up. No fire, no electricity, no waiting for water to boil just, just... shazam!

Anyways, it was pretty cool.

The entree itself was pretty close to the edibility standards of food in our servery (and we have the 3rd best food in any school in the US). There was a little more pepper than I would have liked, but considering that MREs stay edible for decades while some servery leftovers in my fridge are already going stale after a week, I'm not complaining.

Additional items included a package of peanut m&ms, crackers, and a dairy shake that fell between Instant Breakfast and an iceless strawberry smoothie in tastiness.

So while shows like NCIS can make derogatory jokes about MREs as food sources, I totally vouch for their use in any number of situations. I'm going to be hard pressed to find another long-term food source providing so many easily preparable calories (over 1000) with so much variety. I'd even consider it as a handy option for the occasional OC meal next semester, backpacking supplies, or a picnic lunch. I'd even say they could be a substitute for serving for breakfast for kids, but I think only Vin Diesel can pull that one off.