Sunday, September 23, 2018
So what if the pizza is 3 years old
It looks and tastes as good as the day it was packaged. The US Army has 'perfected' a pizza MRE.
Now being shipped to military bases around the world, the newest of 24 current M.R.E. options is a humble three-by-five-inch Sicilian-style slice, scattered with melt-proof shreds of mozzarella and pebbles of mild pepperoni, sealed in a dun-colored laminate pouch.Read the article to see some of what they had to do to make it edible after 3 years. No word on whether they made it taste better than Little Caesar's cardboard delite.
It isn’t much to look at, even by free-pizza standards. But this is no ordinary slice. To qualify for M.R.E. duty, a food item has to be able to survive years of storage in a dank ship’s hold or a sun-baked shipping container, withstand Arctic freezes and tropical monsoons, stave off 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 a tall order, and the Army’s Combat Feeding Directorate, based at the Natick Soldier Systems Center in the suburbs of Boston, has been trying to fill it for more than 20 years. It took hundreds of failed attempts before the directorate finally came up with a workable version.
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