Not a typo, I remember wondering why they were so expensive since it was a military town and MREs weren’t hard to get. The clerk said it was because they were made with flavor and texture in mind. Not a difficult stretch to imagine civilian prepackaged food tasting better than military issue of the time.
Keep in mind these weren’t military MREs, no ham steak and vegetable crackers with tobasco sauce and koolaid mix with chiclets for dessert. These were civilian “mre” packs. Meaning they said MRE but they were, i dunno, prepper stuff? Eagles and flags on the package (but subdued cause camo!!1!). It was just weird, finding them in a shop in a military town, in my mind, thats why I still remember it.
Yeah, askin’ ain’t gettin’. Even now, the HDR’s are available at $50 a case shipping included delivered. Not a bad deal, actually.
What I’d like to see is irradiated meat available. Fresh beef, chicken, or pork in a retort pouch with no refrigeration required and long shelf life. One thing nobody has ever perfected or even pretty gooded are eggs. Whether they are dehydrated or freeze-dried, cooked or raw, the results are a bit less than optimal. This is kind of a shame because they are good source of protein, vitamins and minerals.
I had a nifty plastic egg carrier, held a half dozen. It was a bit of a pain to keep them from breaking. The problem was, paper thin uncoated aluminum cookware is not at all like making scrambled at home.
As of 2017 the US has permitted the irradiation of meat, but I don’t know if they’ve approved high enough doses to allow non-refrigeration of the sealed pouches. You might want to look into a bit further, because what you want might actually be available.
What I read, USDA has been reluctant to approve this historically, at least in the case of ground beef, because of fears that sanitation levels would decline. Cleanliness standards would decline, so the thinking goes, because they could simply nuke all the nasties on the tail end of processing.
Maybe I’m misremembering but I recall that Mountain House used to sell freeze-dried pork chops, raw. I couldn’t afford them probably. I used to buy their breakfast sausage patties, cooked. Those were pretty tasty. Truth be told, cooked sausage should keep very well a few days on the trail, just needing a reheat.
I did a 5 day hiking trip, with the plan to bring mostly dried goods and do some proper cooking - rehydrating dried goods and cooking in a teflon pan. This failed spectacularly and I mostly ended up living on power bars and some pemmican that I’d made.
There were a variety of issues:
We were hiking in the desert so the temperature went from blazing hot to freezing in about the space of 15 minutes, as the sun set. So once it came time to set up camp, there wasn’t any time left after the tent and everything were set up to be anywhere but inside your sleeping bag.
Restrictions on leaving delicious smells behind mean that you can’t clean.
Likewise, restrictions on using cleaning products in the wilderness mean that you can’t clean.
For long-distance hiking, with a sufficiently large enough supply of water on your back, you really need a lot of calories if you want to be able to maintain weight. Fatty products like peanut butter are popular because they’re ready to go and give you the most calories per weight carried.
A common cooking method that I witnessed was to put some food in a sandwich bag, seal it, and boil the sealed bag in a pot of water. You squeeze the food out of the bag into your mouth, re-seal it, stuff it in your bag, and throw it away at your next opportunity. You can put the boiled water back in your drinking supply. There’s no cleaning necessary.
If I was to do it again, I don’t know that I would go the peanut butter route but an oil-forward, bag-cookable option would probably be my go-to.
Pemmican is a pretty solid baseline, though. The fancy meals are for variety and nutrition.
I don’t recall that, and I’ve been a Mountain House customer since the mid-1970’s. But I also have never been familiar with everything out there, and being of Jewish background pork has seldom been on my menu in any case.
One method that works with cast iron and not much else is to use fire to burn off food residues. On the other hand, cast iron is heavy as feck and not suitable for backpacking.
I didn’t go to mountains. I went to deserts. I can’t carry more than several hours of water if I’m toting it on my back. 99% of the time we didn’t camp in campgrounds. The only time we did was in Yosemite. We went way off the trail to the middle of desert areas. No one any where around. Certainly no engine noises, pavement, or crowds. Do you automatically assume car camping equals campgrounds? Because it’s not for me nor for any of my friends. It’s really weird to me to see what you conjure up when you hear “car camping.”
My definition of car camping is that all your stuff is in a motorized vehicle. You may sleep in a tent next to your vehicle, but you are only a few feet from it. I do not understand what your definition of car camping is, but I have never spoken to anyone who didn’t have this definition.
I have car camped far away from vehicular traffic, because I was in an unpopulated area and drove off the highway down a marginal road to who knows where. I did this on occasion in Wyoming, in Nebraska, in the Mohave Desert, and also on the Navajo reservation, probably in New Mexico. But it isn’t the norm for most car campers.
Well, until we set up camp. But it’s not in some trashy campsite with pavement and garbage and any other people around. That’s what I was objecting to. Not that the tent is within 20 feet of the car.
Most of my camping, as I said, is far from the highway. Hours away some times.
Ah, I think the difference is, that when I am camping out of my car, I am going somewhere, and the car camping is equivalent to finding a motel on a multi-day trip to a destination. It has rarely been an end in itself. That’s when I backpacked.