after 20 years, MRE pizza a reality for troops Dave Phillips
NA TICK, MASS.—The U.S. military calls its combat fifield rat ions MR Es, for Meals, Ready to Eat, since they require no cooking. But the troops long ago decided that those initials stood for Meals Refused by Everyone. The stuffff may have been fifilling, but it sure wasn’t appetizing.
Even the head of the Army’s combat ration program acknowledged that the fifirst few generations of MRE entrees were full of “mystery meat and no-name casseroles,” and that troops in the fifield quickly grew sick and tired of them.
Worried about morale, the Army set out on a long-term effffffffffffort to upgrade the menu with items that the troops might actually like. And its food scientists have fifinally hit on what many say is the holy grail of field rations: the MRE pizza.
Now being shipped to military bases around the world, the newest of 24 current MRE options is a humble 3- by-5inch Sicilian- style slice, scattered with melt-proof shreds of mozzarella and pebbles of mild pepperoni, sealed in a dun-colored laminate pouch.
It isn’ t much to look at, even by free-pizza standards. But this is no ordinary slice. To qualify for MRE duty, a food item has to be able to survive years of storage in a dank ship’s hold or a sunbaked shipping container, withstand Arctic freezes and tropical monsoons, st ave offff assaults by insects, and remain intact through a parachute airdrop or even a free fall from 100 feet.
Forget 30-minute delivery — Army regulations say it has to stay fresh for 36 months. And after all that, the pizza still has to be tasty enough to eat.
It’s at all order, and the Army’ s Combat Feeding Directorate, based at the Na tick Soldier Systems Center in the suburbs of Boston, has been trying to fifi ll it for more than 20 years. It took hundreds of failed attempts before the directorate fifinally came up with a workable version.
But the deployment of MRE pizza is not just a victory for food technologists. It is an indication of how much the military has been forced to change its culture since the draft effectively ended in 1973.
To recruit and retain the volunteers it needs, the military has built up an elaborate social support structure for troops and their families. It now ofers childcare and family counseling, continuing education benefifits, improved base housing, and fifitness centers that can rival those in luxury condo complexes. The core mission still includes service under spartan conditions in dangerous lands, but there has been a growing focus on delivering small comforts when possible.
“Benefifits that were once reserved for the career force were extended to even the lowest soldier,” said Jennifer Mittelstadt, a professor of history at Rutgers University who has taught courses at the Army War College on the military’s changing social contract. “There was a broad shift toward making life for the soldier more palatable, and pizza is part of that ,” she said.
MREs, introduced in the early 1980s to replace canned fifield rations, come in a tough plastic pouch and are meant to supply a complete 1,200-calorie meal, including snacks, dessert and instant coffee. All MREs also come with a flflameless ration heater activated by adding water to a chemical pouch. The pouches also include items like toilet paper, matches and chewing gum that may be hard to come by in the fifield.
Soldiers have always groused about their chow, of course. Generations of generals have repeated the adage that armies march on their stomachs, but few ever mentioned taste buds. As U.S. military rations evolved from the salt pork and hardtack of the Civil War to Vietnam- era c ans of ham and lima beans, the verdict of the troops remained reliably grim.
It was only during the fifirst major fifield deployment of MREs, during the Gulf War in 1991, that military leaders realized the monotonous and largely brown rations could become a morale problem. After t he war, Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffffffffffff, summoned the head of the Combat Feeding Directorate and gave him a two-word order: “Fix it.”
The directorate responded by scrapping its top-down system of developing rations in favor of a strategy it called “soldier requested, soldier tested, soldier approved.”
Food scientists began following troops into the fifield, not just to ask them what they liked and disliked, but also to dig through the trash to see what the troops actually ate.
Soon the least popular of ff ff ff ff ff fe rings—including a“ham and chicken loaf ” and a package of beef frankfurters that troops called “the four fifingers of death” — got the hook. The directorate also got rid of the rainbow packs of Charms candies that were tucked in to some packets: the candies rated well in taste tests, but many Marines considered them bad luck and refused to eat them.
To accommodate an increasingly diverse force and to combat what the Army called menu fatigue, the directorate doubled the number of MR Ev arie ties, adding en trees like Thai chicken and vegetarian tortellini.
But when the Army surveyed the troops about what they really wanted, the top answer was always the same.
“They all wanted pizza and beer,” said Michelle Richardson, one of the Army’s senior food technologists. “We couldn’t give them beer. But pizza? I like a challenge.”
As ubiquitous as pizza is in America, it proved very hard to perfect as a fifield ration. Make the crust too dry, and you end up with hardtack; too moist, and it molders in the pouch. It took years to develop a spongy, stable bread with just the right amount of moisture, trapped with a blend of gums, oils, sugars and a touch of glycerol.
Adding cheese, sauce and meat brought a barrage of new problems. Moisture would migrate from one ingredient to another, drying out the sauce and turning the crust to mush. Oxygen hiding in the hole structure of the bread turned the cheese brown and the pepperoni rancid. ( The same issues ultimately sank the directorate’s attempt to make an MRE peanut butter and jelly sandwich.)
The food scientists kept tweaking the pizza’s cheese, bread and sauce until they all had the same level of moisture and the same pH, so they would not interact and spoil. And to fifight oxidation, the team added a small sachet of iron fifilings to the sealed pouch, which will bind any free oxygen.
When they had a slice that could remain stable for six months in storage at 100 degrees Fahrenheit, it was time for a taste test.