From Mental Floss, Oct. 11:
The U.S. military has a fraught history with food. During the Civil War, soldiers munched on tooth-cracking hardtack and salt pork. By World War II, it was SPAM and M&Ms. During the Cold War, the military introduced the world to survival crackers, a.k.a. Doomsday Biscuits.
But there’s always been one problem with most of the items on the
menu: Few tasted very good. Hardtack regularly contained worms. Soldiers
liked to call SPAM “ham that failed the physical.” The Chicago Tribune once claimed that survival crackers were “better as weapons.”
The challenge facing battlefield rations—called “Meal, Ready-to-Eat,” or MREs—has always been multifaceted. The Seattle Times
explains it nicely: "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 sun-baked
shipping container, withstand Arctic freezes and tropical monsoons,
stave off assaults by insects, and remain intact through a parachute
airdrop or a free fall from 100 feet.” Taste, as a result, has been
woefully neglected.
In 2002, researchers at the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in
Natick, Massachusetts took the first tangible steps toward fixing that
by concocting the world’s first “Super Sandwich.” Resembling a hot
pocket, the prototype—which contained fillings like pepperoni and
chicken—could last up to two or three years in temperatures of 78
degrees without spoiling or getting soggy. (At 100 degrees, its shelf
life dropped to six months.)
For the food scientists working on the problem, the enemy in the battle to make the Super Sandwich was water—specifically, water activity.
Put simply, water activity is a measurement of how easily moisture
migrates from one food product to another. The higher a food item's
water activity, the more likely it’ll give away moisture. The lower the
water activity, the more likely it’ll absorb water.
Water activity is a huge hurdle for foods that contain multiple components.
Take Raisin Bran, for example: Raisins are moist and have a relatively
high water activity. The flakes, on the other hand, are crunchy and have
a low water activity. Under normal circumstances, these two components
will trade moisture, with the raisins turning hard and the flakes soggy.
The same problem faced the Super Sandwich....MORE
