The problem is, you can’t buy that stuff. It’s not for sale to the public, period, no matter WHY you might want or need it. In fact, there is nothing remotely like it available to the public.
I have a severely underweight child who has trouble consuming enough calories to maintain a healthy weight. Plumpy Nut sounds like EXACTLY what would help her. Nope. Can’t get the stuff.
I wonder how long we could stay healthy on pelleted chows created for other species?
Then there was this guy.
The last day is pretty thought provoking.
You could probably make your own. From what I can tell, it’s basically peanut butter, milk, and the Niger-ian equivalent of Flintstones vitamins. A microwave, a whisk and a hammer (to smash the Flintstones vitamins) should be a good starting point.
I believe nobody mentioned it because it didn’t exist at the time the last post was made to the thread. Just sayin.
MREs got shot down for not being in easy to crunch pellet form, but it is worth mentioning that a single MRE is an entire day’s worth of food (actually, a fairly active day’s worth of food, they’re somewhere in the 1500-2000 calorie range according to a quick google search). That said, whenever I’ve been in any kind of training environment where they fed us with MREs, we got two or three a day (depending on how many hot meals they were preparing for us in the kitchen), so I dunno if those MREs are lower-calorie, or if we were particularly active (actually, with my job, I spend an unfortunate amount of time stationary…), or if the Air Force was just overfeeding the hell out of us while complaining about low PT scores.
Last I heard, they were looking at either replacing the MREs or supplementing them with more specialized rations for different situations, including some smaller ones with less packaging designed for highly mobile forces, such as troops in the early blitzkrieg stages of a conflict.
Some more thought on People Chow: I would make the pellets/crackers/biscuits in a variety of flavors, so you don’t have as much risk of a monotone bland foodstuff or a bizzare lovecraft cuisine mixture of flavors and textures in the same item. Such an arrangement might require that the diner pay a bit more attention to how he’s eating, or else it would require some more work put into packaging the foodstuff into “meals”, ie a couple of flatbread/biscuits for the carbs and fiber, a protein item or two (maybe a meat and a cheese?), and either some dedicated veggie bites, or else mix the veggie stuff in with the protein and carb items.
As I (civilian) understands it, the real problem with MREs is it’s always your mates who get the menu you like while you’re stuck with Country Captain Chicken 
Easy:
“Fruity Oaty Bar”.
We already have the commercial!
Hah, I had a scoutmaster when I was in the Boy Scouts tell me never ever eat Chicken and Rice MREs. His one and only encounter with one ended when he opened the package and it blew up in his face like a landmine full of rotten chicken.:eek:
As a result, I never touch the stuff if I encounter it, though it was probably a fluke event.
Most of the MRE items aren’t bad if you’re in the mood for it, though I’ve found that even the tastiest MREs are crap compared to any real food you might have handy. Which brings us back to: “Dogs eat dog food because they can’t go through the McD’s drivethrough”
Here’s a guy that tried eating nothing but Monkey Chow for a week and he barely made it through.
I have heard that a good diet of many foods helps us be happier, that if we have one thing every day our depression would go up. Also it is not as easy to make a pill for humans
Someone earlier in the thread mentioned “prison loaf” and asked for a recipe. The AV Club did a taste test based on a recipe from an Illinois “cruel and unusual punishment case”:
Why don’t they make zombie kibble?
so how big a baggie would we need for a one-day ration of the stuff?
I give up.
Why don’t they make zombie kibble?
I would have to agree, I know when my diet is of foods I actually like, I feel better. I can remember hospital foods of the past that were absolutely abyssimal. Bland boiled chicken, instant mashed potatoes, canned carrots, insipid lime jello … no seasonings or condiments. When I was at Yale-New Haven hospital last summer, the food was comparable to a decent restaurant. I looked online and couldn’t find a copy of the menu =( but it had real fried chicken, real mashed potatoes, I could get hummus, celery sticks and carrot sticks for snack, they had salads - the cobb salad was excellent. I would say above dennys quality, but not up to applebys. Really for a hospital quite amazing.
Though a good people kibble would be nice now and again, especially for on road trips when you dread McDonalds because of the nasty tummy results from the damned fried foods!
Trail Mix is the human equivalent to kibbles for dogs.
Serious backpackers put a lot thought into trail mix. You burn a lot of calories and they have to be replaced. Convenience is another issue. Needs to be in a bag, reasonably dry and not sticky. gorp (“good old raisins and peanuts”) is the answer.
here’s one example
you CAN make people kibble. The problem is, they stop kibbling as soon as you turn your back.
I couldn’t find it by googling, but a while ago I read about a type of gruel that was developed for relief efforts. It was cheap, nutritious, easily digestable, and easy to transport. Given the specialized nature of it, I don’t think it would catch on with backpackers and the like.