I’ve been buying a couple of cases of MREs from eBay every year for a long time. I buy them in the fall to have something around for power outages in the winter. What doesn’t get eaten over the winter I use up on days I just don’t feel like cooking or take on camping trips; I have thrown a couple of MRE backyard cookouts, too – lots of people are curious and enjoyed the experience.
I buy the real military cases; tried the civilian versions and strongly prefer to spend the extra bucks for the real thing. Prices go down as they get older; newer ones go for a bit more $ per case. Look for the bright orange sticker to indicate the case has been stored correctly, not exposed to heat for long periods. I usually look for sellers who have sold many of the cases over time but have taken a chance on sellers without MREs in their history if the price is right; they usually come from places following natural disasters where the National Guard has passed them out. Never had a spoiled one.
Note that they are mostly very low in fiber; if you intend to eat them several days in a row consider adding an apple a day.
My parents sent me to a two week “adventure” camp over the summer when I was 15. It turned out to be run by a nearby military academy. Every day, our lunch was an MRE. And yes, I too developed a taste for them.
That was nearly two decades ago, but I remember fondly. I’ll occasionally browse Amazon or eBay to see what’s out there, but I have yet to pull the trigger and actually make a purchase.
Oh, and I don’t remember mine having the little heating pouch. Is that relatively new?
MREs really aren’t that bad. What they are is monotonous. But some of the meals are actually pretty tasty for what they are: canned meals without the can. Sitting at the dinner table they are disappointing. Eaten around a campfire 20 miles from the road they are a decent meal. I keep a few of the TOTM variety in my filing cabinet at school, just in case.
This, especially if you buy the [del]lack of[/del] variety of civilian ones I bought that had almost the exact same non-entree items in each of the 12 packages. But the actual entrees taste better than other prepackaged long-term-storage brands, but on the downside they have more water so they are heavier if you want to take them hiking.
Yeah, in the Canadian versions we referred to the omelette as “lung in a bag”. My DI ate one cold to prove how delicious they were. Blergh. At least the American MREs used to come with a small bottle of Tabasco to liven things up.
As food you need to get the job done they are OK but I know guys that were eating them for weeks a t a time and they can tell you that they get pretty monotonous pretty quick.
That might have something to do with a joke in an old episode of the sitcom NIGHT COURT. Dan was talking about his duties as a military reservist - “You know, two days a month, two weeks a year.” and Bull comments “Yeah, just like going to the bathroom!”
In my personal experience (1999-2007), MREs have an undeserved bad rap. A couple of the meat products (literally labeled “meat product”) were gross, but I found most of them were perfectly edible. I actually found the pasta MREs, with liberal usage of the included hot sauce, fairly tasty. imho, the vegetarian MREs were almost always better than the ones with meat (or "meat product), and almost always had better sides and deserts.
I know you wrote you are not a prepper, and this has been alluded to in a couple of posts already, but one thing to keep in mind is that MREs actually have a relatively short shelf life, so they’re actually not a very good choice for survival rations unless you change them out and restock every couple of years.
It seems that for the last few years people having been eating/trying MREs for fun. I get the feeling a lot of people do it to be funny (on the assumption that it’ll be awful), but everyone I’ve seen do it seems quite happy with the food…happy enough that I’m curious if what they’re getting are actually MREs or ‘good’ food packaged like an MRE.
BigCliveDotCom just did a video on a bunch of them.
IMHO, for preppers sheltering in place, MREs are a poor choice. Ordinary, commercial canned goods and bottled water will give you as good or better quality, and hugely improved variety at a much lower cost. If you’re on the move, trying to reach an evacuation point or safe zone, MREs may have a weight advantage. Even then civilian hiking/camping foods will probably work as well or better.
one of our camping buddies brought MRE’s because he wasn’t willing to cook a camp meal. If you’re lucky you get a tasty cookie cracker type thing, but the meal is just something like Campbell’s soup in a bag.
I ate lots of what I guess I would call three generations of MREs.
The first generation were pretty uniformly terrible. Omelet with ham, corned beef hash…ecccch. Dehydrated fruit for dessert. Nasty crumbly brownie-ish things.
The second generation were better. Lots of good entrees: chicken and rice, beef stew, hot dogs. One that wasn’t very popular that I liked was pork chow mein. I ate that one pretty much whenever I wanted because someone would usually trade. Then you had pound cake which was good, too. And real fruit.
The next generation added the vegetarian meals, which I didn’t care for. They also discontinued some entrees I liked and replaced them with some losers.
I never heated them up, either. Hated the smell of the heaters which clung to the food package while you were eating.
The dehydrated pork MRE must have created in Hell’s Kitchen. And I don’t mean Clinton. I mean Ba’al Zebub serves this to the damned in the third circle of hell!
I recently bought a case of all 24 flavors of MREs as of 2018 because my family and I do a lot of camping and kayak trips, and I thought it would be fun.
I was first introduced to MREs in the 90’s when I was a graphic artist and did graphics for one of our clients who did MRE packaging (I fixed a mistake another artist made showing a person eating an MRE with a utensil in their left hand- BIG faux pas in certain countries). The client gave me a couple to try. I took them camping and was surprised how not terrible, actually decent tasting they were. The tiny Tabasco sauce bottle included was adorable (now the hot sauce just comes in foil packets like ketchup).
is it true they don’t last all that long? I thought they were designed to last for many years. I’ve watched Steve1989’s YouTube videos too, and the mid-to-late 80’s seem like the turning point- he opened one from 1982 that he described as smelling kind of off, but he judged a corner beef and cabbage MRE from 1987 as fine and ate it with great enjoyment.
Whether or not Steve 1989 would eat it is not a good measurement of how good or safe it might be. I’m quite sure he’s developed his gut to the point where he can digest ebola soaked asbestos with a compost and kerosene chaser with minimal effect. The he would say “Nice!”.
As for shelf life, there’s a big difference between safe to eat and palatable to eat. As a rule of thumb, they can be stored for better than three years at 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Higher temps speed degradation and lower temps slow it as long as the pouch isn’t subjected to freeze/thaw cycles. There is a little red sticker on the case that changes color if they are exposed to excessive heat. Even after such heat abuse though, as long as the pouch isn’t breached, the meal inside will probably be safe to eat even though the texture has dropped from “cat food” to used cat food.
I always kinda liked MREs. Not the omelet one though.