A Breakthrough for U.S. Troops: Combat-Ready Pizza
<i>Soldiers have always groused about their chow, of course. Generations of generals have repeated the adage that armies march on their stomachs, but few ever mentioned taste buds.</i><p>Adding to the anecdotes here:<p>My dad was an E-8 in the army. He told a lot of stories about cutting through the bureaucratic BS to look out for the welfare of his people. He was very savvy about the fact that simply being in charge actively created obstacles to him knowing what was really going on at the lower levels.<p>One of his stories that sticks with me:<p>He inspected the chow hall by walking in unannounced and taking the tray from the guy coming off the line, then telling the staff to get the guy a replacement tray post haste so he wasn&#x27;t unduly screwed over in the process. This meant they couldn&#x27;t set aside any special cuts of meat or whatever just for The Sarge. He knew he was eating what they ate because he was eating a tray prepared for one of the troops, not for him. He gave them no warning so they couldn&#x27;t have this day be the day everything was better or whatever.<p>I&#x27;m not convinced MREs are an improvement over the old rations. I&#x27;ve eaten MREs. They are pretty bad. I&#x27;ve heard stories from my dad about the old rations and some of it was apparently okay.<p>I&#x27;m not a fan of microwave meals either. MREs strike me as sort of like that. It is some new fangled means to do x, y or z that actually lowers food quality. Though I have read that in WW2, there were two different bugs that so regularly infested the flour with which biscuits were made for soldiers, that soldiers could tell you which bug they preferred to end up eating because one of them made the biscuits very bitter. So maybe it isn&#x27;t quite as simple as I like to imagine.<p>Anyway, this looks like a good thing to me. The article mentions that pizza is &quot;ubiquitous&quot; in the US. That&#x27;s actually understating it&#x27;s popularity.  From what I gather, it is actually the most widely eaten food globally and they do things like put fish on it in Japan.