4 ms·

Yep, thanks, I've seen them before. It is interesting to me however, that without explicitly asking for reviews on taste, former armed forces members only talk

Yep, thanks, I've seen them before. It is interesting to me however, that without explicitly asking for reviews on taste, former armed forces members only talk about taste. This seems to signal to me that packaging, weight, volume, digestibility, etc. are either all moot or simply shrugged off as "you take what you can get". This surprised me, because I was actually expecting someone to pipe up and say, for example, "taste was great, but it was too heavy so we ended up field stripping them and only taking the entree", or the packaging was too loud or too unwieldy to pack out, etc. I had expected some of that kind of response, because at least the US Army Natick Labs seems to pay a lot of attention to these other factors as well. And one constant appears to be armed forces members like to complain, so I was surprised they didn't comment about anything except the taste/palatability. Seems like someone has been working with Natick on a way to shake loose unbound water using sound waves [1]. [1] http://www.betaboston.com/news/2015/01/20/natick-lab-strives-for-durable-delicious-military-rations/ http://www.betaboston.com/news/2015/01/20/natick-lab-strives...

RealityVoid 9y ago
Maybe it's because expectations. If you want to complain about food, what will you complain about? Taste, texture, aspect. I guess that's what they complained about because that's what they are used to seeing when they see food. Show them a gun sling or whatever, and I guess they'll start seeing other things, more in tune with its purpose.
Semiapies 9y ago
This is probably primarily because there's been many decades of work by governments and private companies on the packaging and design of these meals to make them lighter, less hassle, more practical, etc. If you watch an unboxing of a modern meal from some of the YouTube channels linked, they're actually impressively compact, easy to deal with, and thoughtfully engineered. (Even examples from some developing nations seem pretty respectable. A lot of countries even put contact information on the packaging to solicit user comments!) Much of the food is put into small bags, meant to be thrown in a pocket or pouch to snack on later. It's even common in Europe to just put snack foods in pretty standard branded packets, which is a well-tested solution. Military personnel tend to cheerfully gripe about anything that was annoying about their service—it's an almost universal bonding thing across cultures. When it comes to packaged meals, the griping seems to focus on 1) how it tastes and 2) whether it gave them digestive problems. I think, admittedly as a layman on military packaged food, that the state of the art of packaging design/engineering is pretty solid.

RealityVoid 9y ago

Maybe it's because expectations. If you want to complain about food, what will you complain about? Taste, texture, aspect. I guess that's what they complained about because that's what they are used to seeing when they see food. Show them a gun sling or whatever, and I guess they'll start seeing other things, more in tune with its purpose.

Semiapies 9y ago

This is probably primarily because there's been many decades of work by governments and private companies on the packaging and design of these meals to make them lighter, less hassle, more practical, etc. If you watch an unboxing of a modern meal from some of the YouTube channels linked, they're actually impressively compact, easy to deal with, and thoughtfully engineered. (Even examples from some developing nations seem pretty respectable. A lot of countries even put contact information on the packaging to solicit user comments!) Much of the food is put into small bags, meant to be thrown in a pocket or pouch to snack on later. It's even common in Europe to just put snack foods in pretty standard branded packets, which is a well-tested solution. Military personnel tend to cheerfully gripe about anything that was annoying about their service—it's an almost universal bonding thing across cultures. When it comes to packaged meals, the griping seems to focus on 1) how it tastes and 2) whether it gave them digestive problems. I think, admittedly as a layman on military packaged food, that the state of the art of packaging design/engineering is pretty solid.