M.R.E. stands for “Meal, Ready-to-Eat.” The US military has been using some form of pre-packaged meals for soldiers since the Revolutionary War, starting with freshly made foods like beef and peas, evolving to canned foods by World War I, and the plastic-wrapped pre-cooked MREs eaten by today’s soldiers.

Having heard about how horrible some of these meals can be from some friends who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, I felt compelled to run a little taste test to better understand the types of meals a person that gets shot at all day looks forward to scarfing down. It is, quite literally, the least I can do to better understand what they went through overseas. Because I’m a pussy and I don’t want to be shot at.

My friends and I purchased 7 MREs in total, each sampled over the course of a few hours on a Friday night, because eating out of plastic sacks filled with brown and yellow semi-solid mash is our idea of a party. Each meal comes packed with the main course, maybe a side dish or two, and usually some kind of crackers or bread. Some also offer a pouch of instant coffee mix and some kind of dessert, like these things…

Born and Baked in the USA cookies are animal crackers for people that want the sweet crunchiness of animal crackers but think giraffes aren’t patriotic enough. I ate three cookies — Uncle Sam, a bald eagle, and the American flag. By chewing and eating such iconic figures of American patriotism, I’m pretty sure I’ve had my citizenship revoked. The cookies are good, but I felt strange chewing on an American flag. It felt like a McCarthy era test of allegiance, and any option I chose – eat the cookies or don’t eat the cookies – meant I was commie scum.

The Menu:

Spaghetti and Meat Sauce

As you can see, the MRE spaghetti and meat sauce looks like a delicious plate of spaghetti and meat sauce that was eaten by a dog that felt bad for eating your meal, so it passive-aggressively shit it back out on to your plate while staring you down the entire time. It pours out of the pouch the way entrails goop out of a body in a slasher flick.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t half-bad. Granted, it tasted like the can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meat balls that you gave to a holiday food drive after it had been sitting in your pantry since the Clinton administration, but if I had spent the past day getting shot at by insurgents, MRE spaghetti and meat sauce would be a feast.

Ravioli

MREs can be eaten cold, but most come packed with a heating pad that you wrap around the sleeve of food for a few minutes. Within a couple of minutes the pad becomes untouchably hot, yet somehow manages to make your food only about 1 degree hotter than if you had just cracked open the sleeve and slurped it out, like it was a tube of leprosy-flavored GoGurt.

Like the spaghetti, the ravioli wasn’t bad, either. It was essentially Chef Boyardee-esque in taste, and wall-after-a-shotgun-to-the-mouth in looks.

So far, we’re two-for-two. Things were looking good by this point in the night. And then this happened…

Chicken Fajitas

The picture above isn’t blurry because of shoddy camera work. What you’re seeing is a radiating aura of evil interfering with a digital camera’s internal wiring. If you mess with the saturation levels of this picture in Photoshop, you will see the faint image of two demons kicking an angel to death.

I knew this thing was going to be atrocious the moment it slipped out of the sleeve and everyone in the room, including myself, felt obligated to mention that it looked exactly like a can of cat food. Those white nuggets floating around are supposed to be chicken, and those red and green specks are supposed to be bell peppers or some shit. And that brown blob at the top of the plate was supposed to be refried beans. I don’t f*cking know. Look, I have a very strict rule when it comes to foods: something that looks like vomit or poop might look gross, but it might actually be good. But if something somehow manages to look like both vomit and poop at the same time, it’s probably not worth it. This thing looks like bathroom at a chili cook off for the damned.

As for taste, it’s hard to say. But I should start off by saying this: I’ve always been very picky about food. Since I was a kid, if I don’t like the taste of something, I skip right over the spit-it-on-to-the-plate phase and jump right to the everybody-vomits-on-each-other scene from Stand By Me. After placing this wet mess on to a tortilla and taking a bite, I barely tasted anything after my gag reflex booted it out of my face faster than my brain could figure out why I was doing this to myself. From what my Marine friends have said, the chicken fajita tasted like fermented death in or out of a combat zone. Meaning, even when life is at its most horrific, there’s always something that can make it all that much worse. In this case, it’s cat food in a plastic sleeve.

Omelet  

The MRE omelet may look like particle board that got soggy as it marinated in a piss bucket, but it tastes like congealed animal fat that had been yelled at disparagingly for most of its childhood.

And, yes, I structured that sentence as though the second part of it was the upside, because it was. That’s as up as I can get with the MRE omelet. I gagged twice during this taste test. Once during the chicken fajitas, and again while trying my hardest to swallow the omelet. The closet I came to vomiting came with the omelet.

You know that slimy top layer of solid fat and meat you see when you open a can of chili? You know the tension on the surface of that layer of fat and meat that you have to break through with a spoon? That precise sensation of tension is what I had to chew through in order to actually taste the omelet. As I chewed, the “egg” quickly lost its grip on reality and began to change shapes and morph in to new, unearthly, unnatural forms, as if a regular omelet had been thrown in to the event horizon of a black hole where all time, logic, and the laws of physics are destroyed.  It transcended all known forms of shittiness and developed itself in to a new standard of bad that only aliens from distant galaxies have developed words to describe. There has to be an elite task force of deadly pig mutants that the US military feeds this to, because I can’t imagine a human willingly spooning this shit in to their mouths. And first thing in the morning, no less!

If I had to start my day by eating an MRE omelet, I would never start my day. I would crawl back in to my bed and weep loudly as I wondered if MRE omelets were apart of some sick CIA experiment to find out if breakfast-induced insanity can ignite a human’s latent ability to kill telepathically.

Oh, and the omelet came with a packet of nacho cheese. Be honest, if you hadn’t seen the picture of the omelet above, would you have been able to tell where the omelet ends and the cheese begins?

The makers of this MRE provided the cheese for the same reason death row inmates are provided an alcohol swab before a lethal injection.

Buffalo Chicken

No one would blame you if you mistook this picture for a celebrity vagina shot. If you were to put this alongside the Lindsay Lohan vagina shot, I’d have a hard time deciding which one was more appetizing. But, seeing as I’ve actually tasted the buffalo chicken MRE, I’m going to assume that Lindsay’s vagina doesn’t taste like spicy, soggy garden mulch…although I’m not ruling it out.

Everyone that sampled the buffalo chicken agreed it was the worst of the bunch, except me. That’s not to say it wasn’t awful. It was. Imagine the flavor of a buffalo wing. Now imagine that same flavor if it had its legs broken and its house burned down by vengeful bookies.

The sad part of it is, we all thought the buffalo chicken was going to be good. How you can you f*ck up buffalo chicken? You take some chicken that doesn’t even have to be high quality – shit, it can barely be considered chicken in the eyes of a god – but as long as you slather it in generic buffalo sauce, everybody’s happy. I can slather buffalo sauce on the body of one of those dogs from those depressing Sarah Mclaughlin commercials and it would make the sadness more palatable.  Yet, somehow, the makers of the MRE defied the laws of culinary chemistry and found a way to screw up buffalo chicken. For that, they deserve the Medal of Honor. The feat they have accomplished is astounding.

Macaroni and Chili and Sloppy Joe

I’ve grouped the macaroni and chili and the Sloppy Joe in to one entry because they’re basically the same thing, just one has macaroni in it. Both were good. There really wasn’t anything overtly horrible about either of them. But, then again, there wasn’t anything great about them, either. They were serviceable. We all took a few bites of each and said, “Hey, that doesn’t make me think terrible, homicidal thoughts about the person that thought this taste test was a good idea,” which is good, because that person was me.

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By civilian standards, MREs are a full-on assault on all things flavorful. You can buy some of your own at any local military surplus store for only a few bucks each, even though you shouldn’t, for any reason, other than maybe the apocalypse. If you’re stocking up for the end of the world, MREs will be worth more to horny marauders than your pretty, soft, supple lips. Unless you’re in combat or just got done fighting off a horde of the undead, MREs should be avoided at all costs, unless you think you swear too much and you’re looking for a more mature alternative to washing your mouth out with soap.

The lesson to be taken away here is, never eat anything that looks like it’s a secret government intel package regarding the assassination of a foreign dignitary.