Portable Food: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2022 - Tapa blanda

An Army Marches on Its Stomach: Portable Foods in War and Peace

Johanna Mendelson Forman

The early twenty-first century has not been peaceful. From the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the ongoing conflicts in Syria and Yemen, to the frozen conflicts in Africa, the common challenge in all of these crises has been access to food. For militaries engaged in fighting and for civilians who are in harm’s way, how to get people fed is both a logistical and a humanitarian problem.

As I write this paper, we are witnessing the brutal fighting in Ukraine after the unprovoked invasion by Russia in February 2022. This conflict involves thousands of foreign troops and local forces that need adequate calories to fight. Civilians fleeing this conflict must have enough food and water to survive.

One thing that has not changed over time is the concept of portable food. Since organized warfare began, in addition to weapons, food has played a leading role in whether a military force will be able to prevail. Without the requisite calories, success in battle is jeopardized. Napoleon Bonaparte’s oft repeated refrain that ‘an army marches on its stomach’ reflected this challenge. He demanded new technologies for preserving foods to make them portable.

The story of food portability in modern times is really a history of technologies that ensured that armies were well-fed when on the battlefield rather than left to forage for their dinner. Starting in the early nineteenth century, the continued efforts to transform our daily bread into a feast with a three-year shelf life has driven research and enhanced the notion of a portable meal.

Ironically, the invention of portable meals for the military has also become a part of more popular culture related to war – the predilection for portable foods by survivalists. Starting with the Cold War, when citizens filled their nuclear fall-out shelters with military meals, to more recent times, when people are preparing for increased natural disasters due to climate change, a growing industry of portable meals has become a feature of online advertising and YouTube videos.

This paper will explore the origins of portable meals for the military, examine the technological advances that have made it possible for longer field engagement in conflicts, and review the expansion of portable meals to the civilian population. Meals Ready-to-Eat (MREs) have become the gold standard of portable meals used by armies around the world, in part because of the investment that the US government made in

An Army Marches on Its Stomach

the twentieth century to create foods that were both nutritious and easy to carry. Today, food portability has expanded to the needs of civilians in conflict regions, with the creation of humanitarian rations to help offset starvation and malnutrition. It is an important component of the portable meal industry, but also a reflection of the ongoing global impact that migration from war and climate has on daily access to food. The war in Ukraine has brought renewed attention to the challenges that modern

armies, even a great superpower like Russia, have in provisioning their troops.
I will touch upon this subject, albeit briefly, because of the anecdotal evidence that the failure to adequately supply the Russian army has contributed to its inability to achieve military objectives, despite its numbers and weaponry. Reverting to plunder and foraging, the Russian troops demonstrate how difficult logistics can stymie an army. Finally, I will examine another dimension of portable meals – their attraction in popular food culture, where consuming meals over social media feeds has become a way to demonstrate what I would call ‘battlefield terroir’, with different nations’ portable meals

gaining a following in yet another dimension of our contemporary food-crazed culture.

The Origins of Portable Military Meals

Chinese warrior and philosopher Sun Tzu (500 BCE) advocated foraging for food or
stealing it from an enemy as the way to feed his armies. Ancient Egyptians also encouraged foraging, even as they introduced a strategy of food storage depots along the campaign
route. But foraging and plunder alone was not a sustainable means of providing warriors
with adequate calories, even if they had enough weaponry.1 It took the Romans to create 241 a better organized supply and logistical system for their army. The Romans’ success in imperial conquests is a result of a much more sophisticated way to provision their soldiers.

The Romans also discovered the importance of portability: ‘The load carried by Roman legionaries when marching to battle has been estimated at about 20 kg. with soldiers expected to maintain a marching pace of about 4.5 kph for distances of about 30 km.’ In addition to their military equipment, ‘each Roman legionary would typically carry several days of food, as well as cooking equipment and a bladder of water’, and also some salt, dried bread, wine, and salted meats. What is clear is that Roman armies ate a varied diet of proteins, legumes, and cheese. Grain was believed to make up the bulk of a Roman soldier’s diet.2 The typical Roman ration contained about 3400 kcl and weighed about 1.3 kg.3

Rome’s technological contribution to portable meals was the addition of salting to preserve foods. This made it possible to have more variety. Garum, a fish paste that was used as a salting ingredient, was one source of preservation, but it is not clear whether this substance was carried with legionaries into battle.4

The Technologies of Portable Food

From the end of the Roman empire through the Middle Ages, 1500 years, there was no major advance in food technology that would allow for greater food portability.5 It was not

Portable Food

until the nineteenth century and the ascendance of Napoleon as emperor that the quest for greater technology to enhance portability emerged as an essential part of military strategy. During the nineteenth century, militaries usually travelled with their supplies

and cattle. In the American Civil War, for example, herds of beef cattle followed the army. Milk also made it to the battlefield, thanks to the invention of the condensed variety by Gail Borden in 1856. And desiccated potatoes and vegetables, a precursor to dehydration, made these items portable.6 Coffee, an indispensable drink and stimulant, was given to Union soldiers just before a battle, as a way to get them ready to fight. The Confederacy was deprived of this drink because the Union blockade of the South made it difficult to procure supplies for soldiers.7

The twentieth century saw vast advances in food technology that allowed for different forms of portable foods. But it was not until World War II that the rations we know today were developed in laboratories dedicated to military use. The goal was to have foods that would meet emergency needs in the trenches (Trench Rations), leading eventually to the MREs that are now the gold standard for modern militaries – a product of large investments in the search for foods with a long shelf life.

The invention of retort pouches for packaging food was the most significant technological advance after canning. It allowed for a lightweight, easily transportable means of carrying food to the battlefield. The Natick food labs developed this invention in the 1970s. These pouches allowed for the mass production of MREs as they could keep food preserved for long periods of time, were easy to sterilize once filled with food,

242 and, most important, took up little space in a knapsack.8
The MRE programme was a transitional moment in the history of military feeding.

It eliminated the need for field kitchens in remote areas while also allowing a soldier to carry enough nutritious food to sustain fighting. MREs were highly portable. According to Cara Eisenpress, who researched this shift in feeding, ‘its success rested on two facts: MREs weighed less and contained more variety and nutritional benefit than World War I’s Trench Rations (bread and sardines), World War II’s K-rations (canned meat, chocolate bars, chewing gum) and C-rations (bread and coffee), and Vietnam’s Long- Range Patrol (freeze-dried chicken stew and escalloped potatoes)’.9

The road to MREs was prepared by a variety of portable rations developed for combat during World War II:

• C rations. These were intended for 3-21 days in the field, each containing 3700 calories. Each one had six 12 oz cans: three meat and three bread. Sugar, instant coffee, and candy were in each pack.

• D rations. These were for survival only. They contained ‘unpalatable chocolate bars’ in gas-proof wrappers that could withstand up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

• K rations. These were a ‘lightweight’ nutritional blitz ration for paratroopers, tank soldiers, and others who needed something more substantial than D

  rations or less bulky than C rations.10

An Army Marches on Its Stomach

The lessons learned from World War II, where the United States found itself feeding 11.4 million people in 1944 when the allies invaded Germany, provided expansion of the Combat Feeding Directorate, and ultimately resulted in a dramatic shift in the way militaries were fed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

From the Korean War to Vietnam, military food continued to benefit from technological advances and improved logistical capacity. The old role of the Quartermaster Corps, the logistical and supply centre for any modern military, has expanded to a more efficient and interservice effort to deliver food to the field. While this paper focuses on portability, I would be remiss if I did not mention the importance of the quartermaster in history. In the United States the role of quartermaster started with the American Revolution when Congress authorized a quartermaster for the Continental Army. These soldiers become the chief procurement officers, responsible for everything from clothing to food to weapons supplies. Today, however, so much of what is done by the Quartermaster Corps revolves around contracts with private sector contractors that support the military food programme in war and peace.

During the Vietnam War, portable combat rations – Meal Combat, Individual, or MCI – were used as a balanced nutritional descendent of the C rations of World War II and Korea. This was an improvement that took advantage of new dehydration techniques. But the real revolution in portability was the Long Range Patrol ration, or LRP. Lightweight and compact, it had a flexible package because no cans were used. There were eight freeze-dried, precooked entrees that could be eaten by adding water or dry, like popcorn. A LRP also contained instant coffee and creamer, sugar, toilet paper, matches, and a plastic spoon. It was enough food for ten days.

During the Gulf War, Meals Ready-to-Eat were the food that transformed portability, not because of the variety of meals offered, but because of a new technology that changed the safety of food packaging – retort technology that used polymers filled with nanoscale particles to replace laminated retort pouches.11 This was a major advance in the safety of packages as it avoided the dangers of consuming plastics when a meal was heated, or when food was stored in all-plastic containers. Thus, the dangers of contamination of foods by plastics was resolved through another technological advancement.

There will continue to be challenges to getting food into the field. But each new conflict will also benefit from the most advanced technologies in food preservation that continue to make meals portable, nutritious, and palatable.