Then again, as you discovered, given the appropriate circumstances a society can grow accultured to eating the same thing for every meal or for most meals.
I suppose given enough development you would not have Bachelor Chow be one single unvarying product. You could have a *line *of Bachelor Chow products with variations in flavoring, consistency, mouthfeel, etc. But if indeed we are talking about something that can be eaten straight from a can/packet with no prep and with no special care for storage, right now most of our techniques are somewhat lacking for achieving this.
I had a roommate in college who ate Dinty Moore Beef Stew, straight out of the unheated can. We thought this was gross, given the congealed fat and so forth.
i had a can of dinty more beef stew and the other day h its changed so much that you might as well just open a can of the alpo" with veg formula for inside only dogs"
Haven’t armies and navies worked on this for decades, if not longer? There is even a guy on Youtube who taste-tests all the flavors; for example he said the French army rations were not bad.
I have encountered sealed packets of prepared food in supermarkets; just tear open the bag, dump the contents in a bowl, and you have, say, palak paneer for dinner. You may even microwave it so it’s not at room temperature…
Eggs, just eggs, are very very very very very very very lacking in dietary fiber.
After a couple weeks of eating just eggs and water, your digestive system will completely shut down, and this leads to some nasty complications, including death.
Definitely this. Unlike stuff in a grocery store, this stuff sounds like it is designed to keep primates (which man is) healthy. If you discount the “keep healthy” aspect, then literally anything could be “bachelor chow” including just cereal. Which wall all my college roommate ate in the two years I knew him.
Well, the bachelor chow was prepared at the factory, right? Instant potato flakes are just dehydrated and put in a box. Sure they would be gross without butter, salt or pepper but nobody said taste was a factor.
I noticed sugar was surprisingly high on the ingredients list. Guess it wouldn’t be palatable enough otherwise for the captive monkeys to eat enough to maintain body weight.
Anyone know what the stuff actually tastes like? C’mon, someone here must have volunteered in a zoo or something at one point and snuck a bite.
One could argue that the “food as fuel” mindset is the most healthy. (Sadly, I do not.) The problem with the “highly processed chunk o’garbage” food is that they are about nothing except flavor. Our bodies evolved to desire salty and sweetness, two things that are somewhat rare in the wild. If you came across them while foraging, your instinct is to chow down for that cheap energy and electrolyte. Now we have mastered agriculture and we no longer need to hunt and forge for food sources…but evolution doesn’t work as fast as technological development.
Unfortunately, along with agriculture, we also developed capitalism and a desire to sell all the excess food we now over-produce. And the most successful foods (profit-wise) are the ones designed to hit all our pleasure buttons, while being inexpensive to produce.) The tastiest foods are also some of the cheapest to produce, so the poorest citizens also have the worst possible eating habits…but the problem isn’t just limited to the poor. Advertisers have effectively brainwashed the entire country into consuming too much, just to sell more product and make profit. When I was a kid in the 70’s, a soda was something you drank one or twice a week as a reward or special treat. By the 80’s more families had both parents working and eating fast-food was more than a once-a-week phenomenon and people started consuming soda with their meals, and soda is inexpensive so sellers kept increasing the size of containers to get more customers for cheap.
Today eating healthy requires making a conscious effort to chose what to eat, rather than “listening to your body”, because Big Profit has studied what the body craves and creates product to trick your body into over-consumption. Advertisers know how the mind works, so design ads to make you crave the product. And life is so damn busy, who has the TIME to put into making meals? Who want yet another thing to have to THINK about? The fact that people on this very thread think it would “be impossible” to eat the same food for weeks at a time shows just how numb we are vs where our bodies evolved from. People that may actually starve to death still eat the same foods all the time. Boredom with food (and food variety) are luxuries that, until fairly recently, few people have had. Ask yourself, when was the last time that YOU ate a food that you didn’t like? Not something poorly made, but something that is healthy but not tasty? Like unsalted peanuts? I am eating them right now, because the doctor says my sodium consumption is too high and I need to cut down on salt. And they taste horrible, and it makes me ask myself…why am I eating them? Am I hungry? And what else have I been eating lately…when was the last time I actually felt hungry? Etc. When you start THINKING about what you eat and WHY you eat, that’s when you realize how little people like to think about the world and rather focus on the interesting, meaningless things in life. :smack:
In the mid sixties, my dad was getting some of his old WWII stuff from his parents attic and found one of the previously mentioned D ration bars. We ate it. It was bland but somewhat chocolate-like. He told me that was exactly how they tasted during the war.
I’ll go with Dinty Moore Beef Stew, a three-pack at Wally’s for $5.88, just 240 calories per pack, microwave for one minute, bring a spoon. Vegans can just slurp down half a jar of 3-Bean Salad. And burritos are usually near beer in the store cooler.
A prepackaged salad ought to work as “Human Chow”. My local, small-town, grocery store has a veggie with cheese and a chef salad always in the cold case, ready to go. The Wal-Mart one town over even has ones with fork and dressing enclosed. No fuss, no bother, minimal clean up. Two or three varieties to stave off boredom. probably only two or three day cold storage shelf life at best, though.
That’d easily cover your vitamin needs, and with the dressing, probably has enough fat. But is it enough protein? Maybe the chef’s salad-- Those have, what, cheese, egg, and ham?
Well, it says “complete”, so I think the reason for the fruit is to stop the primates going stir-crazy (a common historical problem in zoos)
Chocolate ‘stabilized with oat flour’. That’s the ‘chocolate’ that American soldiers gave to the hungry people they met while liberating France from Germen occupation in WWII. And the reason why they hadn’t eaten their chocolate rations-- I’ve got a recipe in one of my hiking books for emergency response teams. The comment is
Alternatives to plumpy-nut are BP-100, (a wheat & oat bar) and, in the Philippines, nutribun (a fortified bread)
