They call it the holy grail of ready-to-eat meals for soldiers: a pizza that can stay on the shelf for as long as three years and still remain good to eat. Soldiers have been asking for pizza since lightweight individual field rations — known as meals ready to eat, or MREs — replaced canned food in 1981 for soldiers in combat zones or areas where field kitchens cannot be set up. Researchers at a U.S. military lab in Massachusetts are closing in on a recipe that doesn’t require any refrigeration or freezing…. “You can basically take the pizza, leave it on the counter, packaged, for three years and it’d still be edible,” said Michelle Richardson, a food scientist at the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center.
Anyone who’s ever done any sort of military service likely has a story or six to tell about MREs, which are to food what the Our Lady of Perpetual Motion’s CYO team is to NBA basketball. Give a soldier an MRE and at least he won’t starve. Give that soldier a can of Sterno and a P-38 can opener, and that’s about as close he’s going to get to a feast.
It’s been said many times that an army travels on its stomach, and it would be difficult to imagine anything more demonstrably true. How do you feed an army well enough to keep it in fighting condition? With an army on the move, feeding it quickly becomes a logistical nightmare. The challenge has always been figuring out how to create nutritious food that’s easy to transport…and doesn’t taste like sawdust. If you’ve ever been blessed to partake of an MRE, you understand the distance between portability and taste. Creating food that will remain edible for an extended period is challenge enough, but “edible” doesn’t always translate to “tasty.”
The latest (and most prized) American food science triumph is a pizza that can remain edible for upwards of three years. Pizza has always been just out of reach when it came to MREs. There didn’t seem to be a way to make a pizza that could survive the ravages of time and decay. It was an either/or choice: a pizza that lasted without spoiling and tasted like cardboard in a red sauce…or something that soldiers would actually eat.
Now that we’ve perfected an MRE pizza, maybe we can finally devote our attention to the remaining inevitable challenge: invading Canada.
