Explaining Meals, Ready To Eat

To understand Meals, Ready-to-Eat better let’s imagine you prepared a meal and then kept it in a roasting hot warehouse. Later on you dropped it from an airplane and rolled it on mud and left it open for vermin and bugs. Now, thinking of eating this food after three years. Tell you what if it is MRE (Meals, Ready-to-Eat), nothing will happen to it. After years of deep intense research and thoughtful product development MRE or Meals, Ready-to-Eat has evolved as an excellent operational ration all over the world.

The US military has become the finest-fed fighting force of the present times. In early 1980s, the military officials were fed with canned meals and Combat Individual or C ration and eventually these got replaced by much more standardized operational ration called the MRE. With advancing time the operational rations are required to be more adequate in terms of nutrition and health and yet should be highly mobile and flexibly packaged for combat situations. Meals, Ready-to-Eat, is an answer to such a call. The organized food facility is replaced by MRE operational ration which is then fed to the Marines and Soldiers. 

However, these MRE courses were not quite pleasant and palatable. The meal did fulfill the body requirements of nutrients and sustain the health keeping the soldiers fit yet, it earned a lot of bad names too, for instance, "Mr. E" ( like mystery), "Meals, Rarely Edible", "Meals Rejected by Everyone", "Meals Rejected by the Enemy", "Meal, Ready to Excrete", "Morsels, Regurgitated, Eviscerated", and "Materials Resembling Edibles". The individual meals also got some funny names, like the frankfurters that came in sealed packets of four were called "the four fingers of death".

With time the quality of MRE has definitely improved but the nicknames the food earned still are popular. It is also popularly known as "Three Lies for the Price of One"; which means it isn’t a Meal, isn’t Ready, and no one can Eat it.

MRE also had a low level of dietary fiber in it. It caused constipation and thus was also referred as "Meals Refusing to Exit", or "Meals Refusing to Excrete", and even as "Massive Rectal Expulsions". Although the ration did contain a higher than the standard vegetable content which can facilitate excretion.

In 2007, three gourmet chefs were called to taste the 18 packets of MRE meal. On a scale from 1 to 10 they rated MRE as 5.7. Since then steps are taken in order to improve the quality of the food. Year 2009 saw the introduction of food items like corn bread and buffalo chicken. By the year 2010 much improvement is on its way.