For my own, typically me-ish reasons, I’ve recently started trying to design a universally offensive “Meal, Ready to Eat” (MRE) ration—a menu that would contain taboo, forbidden, and/or ritually unpure foods for as many cultures as possible, all in one bag. I’ve been calling it the “Sepoy Special.”
Of course, I set a few ground rules to keep the exercise from becoming a farce:
No human flesh, or any other ingredients that it would be a major felony to include.
Foods chosen must be actual food—no simply including feces in a bag, or inedible garbage. It has to be something that real people actually eat, or ate.
2a.Along the same lines, just dumping a bunch of awful ingredients together in a
stew is sort of cheating.
No outright poisons, or items or treatments that possess no other function but to defile (i.e., you can’t just have Pentagram-shaped cookies, sardines packed in unholy water, or pages from the Necronomicon instead of toilet paper). Legitimate ingredients that happen to be allergens are OK.
According to this lovely web page, the typical layout of an MRE bag is along the lines of:
If the entree is a meatloaf made of pork and beef, you’re pretty much covered. Add some communion wafers on the side and you can piss off Catholics, too.
Since meatloaf sounds like way to go, don’t forget to add a small assortment of domestic animal meats (both mammalian and avian) and a sampling of endangered species.
Cracker or spread: Foie gras flavored spread (mostly mystery meat, may contain up to 10% cruelty to animals).
Candy: Ribbon candy, spice flavored, stuck together in a big lump.
Accessories: Wooden ice cream paddle.
I remember tearing into some MREs my dad gave me once - some of them had fruitcake in them. I can only suppose that the fruitcake was meant as a tool for opening canned items or as an emergency E&E weapon for downed airmen. You certainly couldn’t eat it.
I think Aesiron’s is hard to top for sheer offensiveness + grossitude. Maybe toss in some balut for a snack, and/or some paadaek (Lao rotten fish condiment), and you’ve got it made.
For beverages, you could go with alcohol-free wine. It’s still haram (I think), due to having some alcohol left, and it’s also offensive to just about anybody who would regularly drink wine. Have it come in a carton for the extra offence to any wine snob.
Also, ketchup as the sole condiment. Gotta have something to alienate the food snobs!
I seem to recall some northern culture ate fertile bird eggs that had been buried until the bird fetus died and was cooked by it’s own decomposition. That’s pretty yucky to a lot of people.
