How The Military Designed Our Food

If you are an average American, you are extremely familiar with energy bars, frozen food, and soup in a can, but do you know where each of these technologies originated?  If you said “The military because they helped design our food”, you would be correct!  You are also great at reading because that is the title of this episode.  So why is the military interested in food?  Well it turns out that the history of feeding soldiers go back a far as human conflict.  As you move an army, you have to feed an army, which means you have to transport a LOT of food.  Since food is perishable, armies all over the world had to figure out ways to stop spoilage.  It also has to be easily portable, as well as nutritious.  So how did they do that?  From bottled soup to shelf-stable pizza, author Anastacia Marx de Salcedo has chronicled this evolution in her book “Combat-Ready Kitchen”.  We discuss the first energy bar, which was actually a disgusting chocolate rectangle created by Hershey, how an apricot cereal bar became the first item eaten in space, how flash frozen food was created by a man named Clarence Bullseye, as well as how all of this food tech trickled down from the military to the consumer food makers.  It all starts at a place with the coolest name in government: Combat Feeding Directorate in Natick, MA. 

*Bonus* Cheese Powder and Restructured Meat

If you have a pulse, chances are you have eaten a snack food that was covered in a nuclear orange, cheese flavored powder.  You have probably also eaten the BBQ drenched, pork ribs-shaped meat patty known as the McRib.  These two items are actually the culmination of who bits of advanced technology:  Dehydrated cheese and restructured meat.  Learn more about your two favorite food items in this bonus episode.