Our good friend BadTux, the renegade motorcycle mechanic, has regaled us with a learned discourse on the variety of culinary experiences in the US Army’s MRE’s (Meals, Ready to Excrete.) Start here and scroll down. He reviews about eight different meals. Ignore the posts about moto and Jeep modification and cats. We’re not interested in mechanical matters, and cats are not part of the menu, around here, at least.

BT has waved his flightless fowl experience in our faces, sneering at our amateurish fumbling with canned Ravioli in red colored sauce reinforced with cornstarch for the last time.

Tony Karon, the Rootless Cosmopolitan, discusses field combat rations of other armies:

Which army would you be in if your Meal Ready to Eat pack contained the following:

Potted Meat of Mackerel Stewed Beef Indian chicken and rice

Nope, as “squaddie” as that sounds, it’s actually one of the menus dished out in French ration packs. Of course there’s more familiarly “national” fare in there, like sauté of rabbit, mutton stew flageolets, stewed lamb “Navarin,” duck and liver paté and earthenware dish “cassoulet.” (Earthenware dish? Blimey, it’s in a can!) But rumors that it contained a small bottle of wine are not true, although they may have been in the past. And check out the gorgeous little cooker.

Mutton stew flageolets… mmmmmm that has to be wonderful. The flageolet is a bean and quite tasty when cooked and eaten fresh. Freeze dried and set up for a three year shelf life – I dunno. Lamb Navarin should be good, if prepared with generous amounts of garlic and thyme – even if they really did put tomatoes in it. And a field stove – zut alors!

It has to be better than the muck they served back in the 70s. Two year old sausage and four day old boules will make you want to fight – if you ever can pull up your pants.

Now would it be a function of being a non-combatant army that makes the German Army’s Einmannpackung include a vegetarian option: Stir fried vegetables with tofu. The rest of the main courses seem to reflect a history of Wehrmacht WWII conquests — Cevapcicci (Yugoslavian Sausages), ghoulash (which is Hungarian, after all) and Lyon sausage. Nuff said.

Back in the day, the Bundesheer’s field rations included several types of dry sausage, some nice canned chicken stew, and lots of the ubiquitous pea soup. This review contains the best combat ration joke I’ve ever heard.

The Russian equivalent is predictably more lacking in choice, and offers some idiosyncratic variations on the standard meat and veg stew by including barley porridge and buckwheat rice. Including an alchohol based cooking system doesn’t seem like a good idea given some of the truly miserable locales in which this army is deployed — hey, if I was on guard duty in Grozny, I’d be drinking the fuel sweetened with the jam or something and diluted…

Barley porridge? Sign me up. I wonder if the multivitamin drops are an unintended comment about the quality of the food? Second best ration joke, although rendering the fuel tablets into liquid seems like a lot of work when an inventive mind can find vodka or arrack just about anywhere in Eastern Europe.

The British Army caters to a fast-changing and diverse nation in its combat rations. According to this story, the standard ground beef mince meal now comes with three alternative flavoring sachets — bolognese, chili and curry.

Access to the story about the “standard beef mince meal” is forbidden. Thank you, g_d.

A tip of the camouflaged toque to Matt Yglesias for the lead.