TRIGGER WARNING: You really can’t talk about MREs without using foul language. Or the inability to poop after having consumed one. You’ve been warned. Read on … if you dare.
Meals Rejected by Everyone. Meals Rarely Edible. Meals Rejected by the Enemy. Three lies for the price of one – it’s not a meal, it’s not ready, and you can’t eat it.
That pretty much sums up my feelings about supplementing your prepper food storage with MREs.
I wrote two days ago about the need to store what your family typically eats, and not load up on freeze-dried survival food that may or may not taste like wallpaper paste. This applies, and then some, to MREs.
Meals, Ready to Eat have mythic status among newbie preppers and mall-ninja poseurs. But they’re hardly what they’re cracked up to be, for the following reasons:
They’re Expensive
A box of 12 MREs would set you back almost $70 before the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it’ll set you back at least $100 – if you can find any you can trust. That same $100 could buy a month’s worth of rice, beans, oats and pasta for a family of four. Do the math.
They Don’t Last as Long as You Think
The legendary shelf life of MREs is pretty much all hype – it depends exclusively on how they’re stored.
A brand-new box of MREs right off the assembly line in the deepest pit of hell the MRE factory lasts about three and a half years. That’s if it’s kept at a steady 70-degree temperature and out of the light. Subject MREs to varying temperatures and humidity and that shelf life drops sharply. Store them in hot conditions, you’re talking a few months.
Also, you have no idea just how old the MREs are that are available from online vendors. As for any guarantee they may give you …
However, unlike Tommy, you’re not going to be able to take a dump in a box, because …
You’ll Never Shit Again
I forgot to add “Meals Requiring Enemas,” “Meals Refusing to Exit” and “Meals Refusing to Excrete” to the list of joke names in the lead of this article.
MREs have almost no dietary fiber – like the leaders who get our nation tied up in all these silly little wars, they have no exit strategy. One or two MREs can cork you up for a good long time. Living through a disaster is going to be stressful enough without adding constipation to your problems.
And when you do finally deliver that big, brown baby after a prolonged gestation period … well, the Internet is full of horror stories. I’ll let you look them up yourself.
The military designed MREs, which contain about 1,250 calories apiece and enough sodium to kill an elephant, to fuel warfighters who are running around like maniacs and sweating like an unrepentant sinner on Judgment Day. And even then, the military does its best to not allow troops to eat them for more than a few days at a time.
Just like Jesus died on the cross for your sins, the fellow in the video below ate nothing but MREs for 21 days so you don’t have to find out what it’s like for yourself.
And this brings me to the final drawback:
They Suck
Brave but hapless reporter Juan Leon gave all the testimony you need to hear in the above video.
To be sure, some MREs are better than others. I rather liked chili mac, pork chow mein, chicken and salsa, and a few others. And let me tell you, scoring jalapeño cheese spread (aka “field money”) is like winning $500 from a scratch-off.
I didn’t even mind beef frankfurters, otherwise known as the “Four Fingers of Death.” (There’s an NC-17 name for this meal that substitutes fingers with another piece of anatomy.) But most of the other menus were bland, unpalatable, or straight out of “Fear Factor.”
My first-ever MRE happened to be the infamous ham omelet, which is generally agreed to be the worst MRE ever produced. We called it “chicken shit,” because it looked, smelled, and tasted like a bunch of chickens shit in a pouch.
The good people at Duffel Blog, which is the military version of The Onion, summed up the process by which the DoD selects menu items quite nicely. It’s not safe for work, but then again, neither is this post, so you may as well click on it because HR’s already coming down the hall to fire you.
To conclude
If you’ve got a bunch of money, and don’t have much of a sense of taste, and you’re a masochist, and you’re cool with being backed up like a Los Angeles freeway during rush hour, and you’re cool with your family hating you forever, then MREs are the way to go for your survival preps.
Otherwise, you may want to spend your money on real food.
Now all you kids get off my lawn.