COMING UP NEXT FROM THE HOUSE OF GI JOE - Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat(2015)

Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat (2015)

Chapter 13

COMING UP NEXT FROM THE HOUSE OF GI JOE

They have chiseled chins, keen eyes, gleaming teeth, and impeccable haircuts. Depending on their specialty, they might be bespoke-suited, button-down and khaki-clad, or supercasual in jeans and an edgy shirt. Their speech is peppered with terms like IPO, Series A, burn rate, and M&A. And their net worths—let’s just say healthy. Venture capitalists live at the intersection of macho and money, and they like their companies as fast and risky as the Porsches they inevitably drive.

Businesspeople often reserve their greatest scorn for the idea of government funding of innovation. Inept. Plodding. Unprofitable. “Let the market choose!” they say. In this they assault their own bloodline. Venture capitalism, which began in the years immediately following World War II, seeks to find entrepreneurs with great ideas or embryonic companies with game-changing inventions. Then, in exchange for shares, it supplies them with enough money to get through the difficult period while their products (they hope) gain traction in the marketplace. The final step is to sell the successful enterprises to larger businesses or invite in investors, filling everyone’s coffers in the process. This approach is directly inherited from Georges Doriot, the “Father of Venture Capitalism,” who cut his cash cowboy teeth developing better equipment and supplies for the Quartermaster Corps. He then went on to found the firm American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC), which, among other things, shepherded the enormously successful computer manufacturer Digital Equipment Company, itself built on the army’s early and deep research in information technology, from a start-up to a behemoth—a five-hundred-fold return on initial investment. (Electronics, another heavily military-supported field, became ARDC’s other technology sweet spot.) The business journalist Spencer Ante summarizes Doriot’s approach in Creative Capital:

When Doriot became head of the Military Planning Division in the Office of the Quartermaster General, he began running, in a sense, his first venture capital operation. The purpose of his division was to identify the unmet needs of soldiers and oversee the development of new products to fill those needs. In order to pull off this engineering miracle, Doriot perfected the art of finding the right people for the right technical challenge, and then inspiring them to invent the future. 1

The wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), headed by the former MIT dean and Carnegie Institute president Vannevar Bush, faced staggering scientific and technological challenges, from creating the first atomic bomb and developing synthetic rubber to studying the physiological effects of starvation (research conducted by Ancel Keys, inventor of the K ration). Much of this work was done by universities, industry collaborators, and government laboratories. At first from necessity, and then probably because it worked, OSRD funded multiple organizations to take on the identical or closely related aspects of the same problem, helped them to resolve issues when they arose, and, at the end, winnowed the choices to one or a few approaches. Doriot, whose Quartermaster Corps assignment fell under the agency’s umbrella, would certainly have followed suit.

This system—championed, if not invented, by Doriot—is used every day in modern venture capital firms when they review the field, do due diligence, and select a couple of strong prospects; provide financial, managerial, and technical support; oversee and assist leading players; and—the prize!—sell the successes or take them public. It’s also the standard operating procedure for DOD research endeavors, one handed down intact through generations of military technocrats. There are, however, some crucial differences between public and private sector methods. The government focuses on basic or early-stage applied research or on the development of technology that, at that moment, has a clear military purpose but not necessarily a consumer one. To best support fledgling efforts, the armed forces finances specific research or projects, is relatively unconcerned about marketability, and is willing to support work over a longer time frame. Goal: functionality. Venture capitalism comes in after the developmental heavy lifting has been done and provides enough financing to fine-tune the product, run the business for a short to medium time frame, and push it into the marketplace. Goal: profitability.

In point of fact, military and government funding of research and venture capitalist support of new technology firms are deeply complementary. This innovation one-two has already happened in computing, communications, and electronics, where after the science and technology infrastructure was laid by the army, businesses sprouted and prospered. And allowed you, the consumer, to enjoy computers, the Internet, jet planes, wireless communications, smartphones, global positioning technology, and much more. The venture capitalist who wants to know where the growth areas of tomorrow will be should watch where the military puts its money today—both because its investment likely signals the presence of an undeveloped or underdeveloped technology sector and because the approaches it knights are more apt to prevail, a nexus that spells earnings. As Doriot’s partner in ARDC, the renowned financier Merrill Griswold, pointed out, “venture capital [is] most successful where it [is] able to pioneer new economic spaces.”2

Of course, Doriot wasn’t the only one to apply wartime knowledge and skill to peacetime moneymaking. Less well-known former Quartermaster Corps subsistence research staff also turned their World War II experiences into business enterprises, as owners, investors, or executives. MIT’s Bernard Proctor returned to Cambridge to oversee the army food irradiation program; he also took out a patent on the equipment, should it ever be commercialized, and bought stock in a number of military food research-related ventures, including potato dehydration, condensed milk, orange juice, and soda. In fact, he helped the company Cantrell & Cochrane iron the kinks out of a revolutionary new product: a highly corrosive, pressurized liquid in a tin cylinder, aka canned soda.3 Another alumnus who profited from his army ration research experience was the biochemist George Gelman, the first director of the Quartermaster Food and Container Institute for the Armed Forces; shortly after leaving the service, he cofounded with Jerry Sudarsky the California company Bioferm, a producer of vitamin B12, insecticides, and monosodium glutamate (MSG), which was later acquired by International Minerals and Chemical. “George Gelman … is a millionaire today,”4 recounted Emil Mrak of his former colleague. Business possibilities related to the science and technology involved in feeding soldiers continue to this day.

A sampling of what’s coming up next from the House of GI Joe follows. These vignettes describe projects ongoing in 2007, the year in which we looked closely at the Combat Feeding Program’s activities, and are most of the important ones of the first decade of the twenty-first century. They fall into categories as diverse as shipping, storage, household appliances, personal devices, food safety, and dietary supplements, and are organized roughly by physical size from smallest to largest.

Pathogen Biosensors

Biosensors, bits of cells harnessed to electrical signal transmitters, are tiny alarms or measuring devices. They turn diagnoses that once took weeks of costly laboratory analysis with specialized equipment and trained personnel into tests that can be performed for pennies, on-site, in minutes, and by anyone. Two of these, the blood glucose monitor and the home pregnancy test, have been used for many years, but the military didn’t get interested in biosensors until the 1980s, when the confluence of enzyme immobilization techniques, cloning, and genetic engineering gave our enemies the potential to mass-produce biological weapons.

The United States, constrained by the Geneva Protocol, and then by President Nixon’s signing of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972, could not retaliate in kind. But we could protect ourselves by figuring out how to detect accidental or weaponized pathogens. To provide “better defense against the threat of chemical and biological warfare,” the army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center organized the very first conferences on biosensors, one in 1985 that was attended by a scant two and a half dozen people, primarily army contractors, and another in 1988, which attracted a larger and more diverse audience, including many academics and industry members. By the early years of the twenty-first century, the private sector, seeing the potential in a technology that had applications in medicine, pharmaceuticals, food, and the environment, had taken up the baton. A journal on biosensors was founded, a yearly conference was held, and the global market was calculated in ever-increasing billions instead of millions.

However, the military still didn’t have its pathogen detectors, which it now planned to use to test the military food supply in addition to identifying bioterrorism agents. It continued to fund their development during the 2000s through various basic and applied research contracts. One of those was as a small part of a $3.2 billion advanced electronics contract—mostly for air defense technology, air traffic control, and communications systems—between Hanscom Air Force Base’s Electronic Systems Center and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, from which, finally, came a rapid pathogen detection system called CANARY (patent application PCT/US2006/045691). Microchips are coated with arrays of white blood cells genetically modified to include a luminescent protein from fish; when a pathogen is detected, they light up, emitting photons. That system is now used in numerous commercial products, including the food pathogen detectors BioFlash-AF and Zephyr made by Maryland-based PathSensors. Another was a partnership with Michigan State University on a Department of Homeland Security contract, which developed nanofibers that could both capture pathogens and convey information about them to a reader. The result of this was a Michigan State University patent (patent application US 12/715,929) that was then licensed by nanoRETE, a start-up founded by the study’s lead researcher (and patent holder). One of their first contracts was an air force Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award to apply their novel technology to tuberculosis detection; food pathogens are sure to follow.

Performance-Enhancing Ingredients and Novel Delivery Systems

Who doesn’t have an acquaintance who swears by ginkgo biloba for his recent-onset senior moments, attributes her ability to refuse seconds of white chocolate raspberry cheesecake to green tea extract, or—seemingly paradoxically—downs gallons of saw palmetto tea at dinner to minimize his nocturnal perambulations? The military came late to the dietary supplement party, but when it joined, it joined with a vengeance. After the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 was passed, which stated that “the Federal Government should not take any actions to impose unreasonable regulatory barriers limiting or slowing the flow of safe products,”5 the industry ballooned, growing from $4 billion in annual sales to $28 billion in 2010. The Combat Feeding Program, in partnership with the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, which works on soldier nutrition, caught the fever. “The intent of the project is to take a look at naturally occurring food components that enhance cognitive or physical requirements on the battlefield,” says Gerry Darsch, the Combat Feeding Directorate’s former head. Since the early 2000s, a special team, the Performance Enhancement and Food Safety Team (PEFST), has conducted, commissioned, or been involved with numerous studies that identify bioactive substances, correlate their intake with a physical or cognitive change, attempt to elucidate their mechanism of action, set dose parameters, discover the best delivery routes, determine shelf stability, and taste-test them with civilians and soldiers. The result is a whole new set of rations, ones that not only satisfy hunger, but are doused with extracts and additives intended to improve performance.

The first round of ration supplements was developed over the period from 2000 through 2005 by the Natick food and environmental medicine departments and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which has received more than $40 million in Congressional Special Interest funding to work with different army centers since 1988. Their first projects focused on fatigue fighters, which they originally thought to deliver via transdermal patch, an idea that was quickly discarded when the team realized the molecules they wanted to transmit—proteins, carbohydrates, and fats—were too large to pass through skin. Efforts were shifted to buccal absorption through the cheek wall, which was achieved by holding a lozenge or gel in the mouth or by chewing gum, a chew, or a bar. A gel was developed composed of glucose, maltodextrin (a complex carbohydrate that digests more slowly), and a tiny bit of fat and protein that had a biphasic effect on blood sugar—a spike and then a rebound—making its impact last longer than that of commercially available products. The Natick Center also developed a maltodextrin-fortified applesauce, Zapplesauce, and a powdered energy drink, ERGO. In addition to carbohydrate loading, the PEFST group experimented with good old caffeine, which is considered critical in the military because they are often in “situations in which extended alertness is paramount” and “caffeine reverses sleep-deprivation induced degradation in cognitive performance.”6 The team found that buccal absorption was the quickest and most efficient way to get the psychoactive drug into the bloodstream, so they added it to chewing gum—it’s now a standard part of the ration—and to the dense HooAH! energy bar, which was developed in a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the candy maker Mars in the early 2000s.

Between 2005 and the present, Natick extended its dietary supplement research to protein encapsulation, probiotics, amino acids, and phytonutrients. In 2007 it began adding encapsulated protein to the First Strike bar; this technique preserves flavor and prevents discoloration. It has continued to work on shelf stability for probiotics—including the construction of the first-ever “simulated digestion model” to estimate their absorption by the gut—and amino acids, and has been developing nanoscale carriers for micronutrients to add to ration components. Once fielded, this should be an important addition to the soldier’s arsenal against food-borne illnesses; 76 percent of troops have at least one episode of diarrhea when deployed abroad. But what may have the most lasting impact on the consumer market is its phytonutrient research—although not in the way you might expect.

Plant flavonoids have received a lot of attention in the last couple of decades and have spawned a multimillion-dollar industry that sells the compounds in capsules and tablets. The Natick Center was curious—but cautious. As they observe, “There are many products on the market purported to have physiological benefits that may be of interest to the military. However, these products are typically classified as dietary supplements with little or no supporting research published in peer-reviewed journals.”7 Found in many fruits and vegetables and some grains, quercetin, the most common of these flavonoids, was touted as a way to increase energy. In 2006, with the assistance of the Rutgers University Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy in New Jersey, Natick began to test the compound’s ability to delay onset of muscle fatigue and reduce muscle recovery time. “The results of clinical studies were intriguing, to say the least,” says Darsch. “However, the consistency of the clinical studies seemed to be lacking… . So we brought the best scientists who’d been studying the effects of quercetin to Natick, [from] the American Institute of Biological Sciences. Some people felt it had ability to enhance mitochondrial biogenesis [growth of new mitochondria] within the cells. Mitochondria are like little engines in the body, an energy generator. We saw all sorts of data, some of it compelling, some of it not so compelling. As a result of bringing all of these world-class scientists together, we were able to have everybody present their respective information, and at the end of the day, it appeared that the effect of quercetin was individually specific.” The Natick group added quercetin to a chew, the First Strike bar, and Tang in a follow-up study. Their results confirmed the findings of the conference: quercetin had a positive effect on some subjects, but variations in the bioavailability of the compound in the different food media, overall absorption, and enhancement effects were too great to be a reliable source of fatigue relief. The army discontinued the project.

Today, the army’s fortification program largely relies on the old standbys: vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, proteins, and caffeine. But it uses these liberally; in fact, in ration lines such as the First Strike, at least half the items have been fortified. Take Menu 1. Unadulterated—supplement-wise—are the shelf-stable pocket sandwiches, filled French toast, pretzel sticks, peanut butter dessert bar, sweet BBQ beef snack, and teriyaki beef snack. Pumped up are the jalapeño cheese spread (fortified with vitamins A, B1, B6, and D, and calcium), wheat snack bread (added calcium), chocolate Mini First Strike bar (just about everything), Cinnamon Zapplesauce (extra carbohydrates), nut and fruit mix (extra vitamin C), carbohydrate-fortified beverage, chocolate protein drink, cinnamon-flavored caffeinated gum, and sugar-free beverage (extra vitamin C).

Natick’s caution when it comes to supplements is a good thing. With a mandate to use only peer-reviewed research, their investigations tend to be slow and careful. In the case of quercetin, which has an almost fanatical following in the supplement market, the Natick Center assessed its effect on the body, determined the most efficient medium for its delivery, and worked to understand its mode of action before ultimately deciding that the hype was unwarranted. In holding dietary supplements to a higher standard than those mandated by the FDA, they provide a public service. The world of over-the-counter “natural” medicine can be dangerous. High consumption of certain dietary supplements has been linked to severe illness and even death. Green tea extract can cause liver disease, and geranium extract, a stimulant, may have been the factor in the death of two soldiers in 2012 (a possibility that caused DOD to investigate it and ban its sale in base outlets). Fifty-three percent of soldiers use dietary supplements (a higher rate than for civilians), which gives the army a good reason to research these substances carefully and publicize the results. In response to the base deaths, the military launched a safety campaign that, among other things, gives soldiers access to a database where they can look up safety studies and adverse event reports on fifty-three thousand items. It would be great if this were open to the public. But meanwhile, the safest thing would be to follow Natick’s example, and stick with the tried-and-true. Coffee run!

Extending the Shelf Life of FF&V (Fresh Fruits and Vegetables)

Even for modern warfighters, whose family dinners, like those of most Americans, were far more likely to have come from hastily heated bags and boxes or takeout than fresh ingredients cooked from scratch, an apple, a banana, a tomato, or a cucumber is a taste of paradise after long months on the battlefield. “Fresh fruits and vegetables are a morale enhancer, particularly for warfighters at forward operating bases who just don’t get an option to eat anything resembling them,” says Gerry Darsch. For this reason, the Defense Department pays billions of dollars through its prime vendor contracts to ensure a steady supply of fresh foods and staples. It costs so much not only because of the difficulty in transporting these items from third countries through war-torn nations to bases and camps, but also because the prolonged journey means more deterioration and spoilage, often rendering the product unusable.

Fresh fruits and vegetables are the most delicate of foodstuffs: easily bruised, they begin to decline the moment they are picked and respire, along with water vapor and carbon dioxide, the “death hormone.” “Ethylene is a chemical compound that is emitted from fruits and vegetables that accelerates the ripening process. If you control it, it’s a great thing. However, if you have a mixed load of FF&V, it can become your worst nightmare,” explains Darsch. One of the goals of the Natick Center in the latter part of the first decade of the twenty-first century was to figure out a way to extend the shelf life of these perishables.

Unlike commercial produce vendors, the military usually ships an assortment of produce to serve in mess halls. Different fruits and vegetables have very different rates of ethylene production, so heavy respirers can hasten the spoilage of container mates. For example, the climacteric fruits, such as apples and bananas, that ripen after harvest are prolific ester factories—one part per million can condemn to the compost heap a whole shipment of lettuce in a single day. Until recently, ethylene levels were kept in check by using special filters for air purifiers in cold rooms, sachets and blankets placed by hand in boxes or chambers, and clay-based sorbents that work like kitty litter to remove gases. All of these methods are expensive and logistically difficult.

To find a way to reduce the presence of ethylene, Natick took its time-honored gladiator approach: it built up a couple of rivals, had them come up with a prototype, and then let them duel for the prize. It awarded two SBIR contracts, one to MicroEnergy Technologies, Inc., in Oregon and the other to Primaira in Massachusetts. Ultimately, MicroEnergy’s solution, which combined electrocatalysis with an electrochemical sensor was “effective, but from a logistics perspective, that application, to be at its finest, in terms of return on investment, really had to be done right in the field where the fruits and vegetables were harvested,” says Darsch. Primaira, on the other hand, focused their efforts on the creation of a small ultraviolet ozone device—with three hundred times more ozone than other machines—for cold rooms and containers that would break down any ethylene encountered to water and carbon dioxide. The apparatus was cheap, easy to use, required minimal power, and created no dangerous waste products: an investor’s dream. “The UV light further acts to sanitize the air in the container by inactivating microbes, spores, and fungus,” notes the army’s write-up of the project.

From the outset, the Natick Center knew its ethylene zapper, which offers a seven-day extension over traditional methods, would have a market in commercial warehousing, transport, and retailer storage of produce. “We feel very confident that it’s going to add considerable value not only to the warfighter but to the commercial logistics chain whose job it is to move things across the country. So we’re kind of excited about that,” says Darsch. It didn’t take long. In early 2014 Maersk Container Industry, a specialty manufacturer of refrigerated containers, announced a partnership with Primaira to install the device, dubbed Bluezone, in their products. One of their first targets will be the $14 billion global fresh-cut flower business. Ninety percent of the intercontinental flower trade is shipped by air, which greatly increases the cost of production; if this could be done in reefers, it would revolutionize the industry. “We are still working on the final design, but we are convinced that the Bluezone and Star Cool combination represents economic and environmental upsides so far unseen in container transportation,” says Soren Leth Johannsen, chief commercial officer of Maersk Container Industry in Food Logistics magazine.

Another important issue with the salads and fresh fruits served in mess halls is the potential presence of pathogenic bacteria. The produce provided by DOD’s prime contractors to foreign bases often comes from neighboring countries—in which livestock, crops, and facilities-deprived laborers may intermingle. By 2005, the Natick Center began to research the possibility of inoculating fresh plant products with viruses that infect Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7 (the potentially deadly strain), and Shigella, all mesophiles that thrive in human intestines and are spread via fecal contamination. They granted multiple SBIR and Small Business Technology Transfer awards to Intralytix, a biotech company based in Baltimore, Maryland, that specializes in genetic engineering of bacteriophages (viruses that infect specific bacteria). The company developed separate products for each bacterial menace; they could be sprayed singly or in a mixed cocktail on suspect fresh foods.

By 2009 Intralytix was into its third cycle of awards from the army; the last round was intended to help the company commercialize its E. coli product—paying for everything from business plans and investment planning to “facilitation of meetings with potential private or government customers.”8 In 2011 the company’s E. coli spray was approved by both the FDA and the USDA for use “on red meat parts and trim intended to be ground.”9 The chief scientist of Intralytix, Alexander Sulakvelidze, explained in an e-mail, “Even though no patents resulted from the work funded by Natick, their support was instrumental in getting critical efficacy data, securing regulatory approvals for EcoShield, and helping with its large scale-up production—all vital components for the commercialization.” A few months after it received regulatory approval, the company entered into a multiproject agreement with Procter & Gamble. In 2013, its SalmoFresh anti-Salmonella spray was given GRAS status by the FDA. This is just the beginning. Given increasing consumer concerns about food-borne illnesses—one of the impetuses behind the Food Safety Modernization Act—the demand for products such as those developed by Intralytix should only increase.

Individual Beverage Chillers

You’re hiking through the sand, lugging 130 pounds of gear, sweltering in the midday sun. You take a refreshing sip from the hose of your CamelBak hydration system—and gag. Just try replacing the up to two liters of fluids lost per hour in desert climates when all you have to drink is hot disinfectant-flavored water. Heat-related dehydration is responsible for between fifteen hundred and two thousand cases of heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and death per year in the services; untold illnesses; and a generalized decline in warrior physical and cognitive performance. The simple fix is a nice, cool drink.

To encourage soldiers to take more fluids while in action, the military decided in 2004 to chill individual water packs; it entered into the first of two SBIR contracts with Creare, an engineering company in Hanover, New Hampshire (from FY 2000 through FY 2012, the firm earned a cool $159 million in DOD contracts). The engineers came up with a small battery-operated refrigeration system that could be attached to an existing water system, cooling just the reservoir before the liquid goes into the drinking hose. Around the same time, Natick entered into a CRADA with the military supplier BCB International to develop a version of the chiller that didn’t need a power source at all; instead, it worked through a series of twelve evaporating wicks. Neither design was perfect: the water could only be cooled by 35°F-40°F, bringing the temperature down to merely tepid, but at least it was drinkable. In 2010 both models were field-tested by marines in the Mojave Desert. BCB’s invention, the Chilly, left the Creare device in the dust, winning the approbation of more than two-thirds of the evaluators; now trademarked, it has already made inroads in the commercial market through sales to the next generation of adopters—skiers, cyclists, hikers, and long-distance runners.

Solar-Powered Refrigerated Containers

The extended twenty-first-century American sojourn in the Middle East could well be called the containerized war. These corrugated steel boxes, the inspiration of a North Carolina trucker who was vexed by the amount of time it took to load and unload boxes by hand, made seamless the transfer of goods from truck to train to ship. By the end of the twentieth century, the classic “disruptive technology” had achieved world domination, and the numbers of containers only continue to grow—in 2012 there were 32.9 million. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. Armed Forces use containers for just about everything: they serve as maintenance shops, dog kennels, laundry units, weapons rooms, and clean rooms, and are the way all goods are shipped, stored, and, of course, refrigerated. Because of their cooling machinery, refrigerated containers, called reefers, cost as much as ten times more than a regular container (up to $30,000) and are expensive to run, as they must continually be fed electricity to maintain the cold chain. The army has solved this problem on its bases by using portable generators that run on JP-8 (a less combustible jet propellant that fuels all army equipment), but over the course of a year, each refrigerated container can suck up seven thousand to nine thousand gallons of fuel.

Thus, there was nothing particularly environmentalist about the army’s embrace of sustainable energy. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, fought in and over the land of petroleum, have had the most expensive fuel costs ever, in both financial and human terms. Seventy percent of the vehicles in convoys were fuel trucks; each burned seven gallons of fuel for every one it delivered to a base; en route they were at constant risk for attack and required protection in the form of air cover, tracking devices, and video monitoring, which upped the costs even more. The solution? To hell with the supply chain. An Iraq War commander, Commanding General Richard Zilmer, chief of Multi-National Force West, sent a memo to the Pentagon in 2006, urging it to find sustainable sources of energy: “By reducing the need for [petroleum-based fuels] at our outlying bases, we can decrease the frequency of logistics convoys on the road, thereby reducing the danger to our Marines, soldiers, and sailors.”10

The Natick Center’s solar-powered refrigerated container was in the right place at the right time. Two different companies had been contracted to develop the technology and equipment. Starting in FY 2004, an SBIR award was given to Mainstream Engineering in Florida, a refrigeration and energy engineering company and longtime DOD contractor, to investigate the feasibility of mounting photovoltaic cells on container roofs, to demo a new cooling and energy storage system, and then to build a single prototype solar-powered reefer. SunDanzer, a tiny company specializing in solar-powered refrigeration in Arizona and started by a former NASA contractor (DOD quickly became its biggest and practically only client), was awarded an SBIR contract in FY 2006 for the same purpose and another one to create a $3,500-per-unit passive-cooling retrofit for the containers used to store semiperishables (U.S. Patent 6,253,563, originally assigned to NASA). (There was also a 2007-10 contracting blip, a hallowed tradition known as the congressional plus-up—the Pentagon’s own private term for the numerous earmarks its friends in the House and Senate tack onto its budget—that resulted in an almost million-dollar Broad Agency Agreement with a third company, Advanced Technology Materials Incorporated in Connecticut, to develop a solar-powered adsorption refrigerator in a Quadcon, an army-developed minicontainer a quarter of the size of a regular one. Despite a scintillating ninety-two-page report, its prototype failed to meet minimum performance standards, and the project was scrapped.) In 2010 SunDanzer was chosen to finalize development of the integrated solar-powered container system, and the equipment is scheduled to be incorporated into field kitchens in FY 2016. (Mainstream Engineering, the first contractor, was also graced with a $40 million contract for the production of new insulated Tricon containers equipped with the company’s new high-performance/energy-efficient refrigeration unit, but without the solar energy component.) If the technology gains traction in the commercial marketplace, there are more than two million reefers circling the globe just waiting to be liberated from the power grid.

Waste-to-Energy Converters

Just like you, the army has bills. And just like you, the bills it hates the most are the humongous ones it has for fuel and garbage disposal (done the traditional way by burning or landfill). Each soldier generates approximately eight pounds of solid waste daily, 80 percent of which is food related. Was there a way to efficiently and economically turn their garbage into a power source to run the many generators—twenty-seven per 550 soldiers—that dot each base?

The idea, of course, is nothing new. People have been burning garbage since ancient times and, starting in the late 1800s, have done so on a large scale in machines designed for the purpose. Engineers quickly figured out how to capture some of the heat energy by turning it into steam, which could then be used to drive a turbine, but energy recovery didn’t really take off until after the oil price shocks and the “give a hoot, don’t pollute” activism of the 1970s. There are now about 450 waste-to-energy incinerators in Europe and 100 in the United States. But while torching trash reduced the burden of waste disposal for municipalities, it still generated toxic compounds, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and a great deal of ash. Even worse, it’s a really lousy way to harvest the energy locked within.

Several promising new energy recovery technologies had appeared by the 1990s; they were based, as is combustion, on the effect of high heat and air on organic material—sort of deconstructing fire into its by-products (gas, oil, char). Combustion, the old standby, occurs at 800°F-1,200°F in an oxygen-rich environment. This bathes every component of the fuel in oxygen, producing a whole family of little “-ides”—carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide—and water, none of which can be burned, so any energy transfer has to happen through water vapor. Combustion’s efficiency is a flaccid 15-25 percent. Gasification also happens at 800°F-1200°F, but in an oxygen-limited environment that forces more of the components of the fuel to become a flammable gas called syngas; it burns with an efficiency of 30-40 percent. Pyrolysis occurs at lower temperatures, 300°F-600°F, but in the complete absence of oxygen, so the organic material is rendered into a flammable bio-oil. When ignited, it burns with an efficiency of 35-45 percent, but it’s highly corrosive, so isn’t suitable for engines. A final option, one not dependent on the application of heat to biomass, is supercritical water depolymerization. Intimidating polysyllabic name notwithstanding, it simply means subjecting water to both high temperatures and high pressure. This pushes the water molecules close as if they were in a liquid, but because they are excited by all the thermal energy, there is much less hydrogen bonding. The excess of available hydrogen turns supercritical water into both a strong acid and a strong base, so it can dissolve just about anything, even the plastics and paperboard that riddle our rubbish.

Finding a workable waste-to-energy conversion model was an army-wide goal for the twenty-first century; multiple research agencies, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, and Natick, took up the challenge. Eight prototypes were eventually developed; in 2007 four of these, the ones most suitable for use in field kitchens, were under consideration by Natick. The first was a DARPA project with General Atomics, a major California defense contractor—they were awarded $2.4 billion in government contracts in 2012 alone—to develop a converter using supercritical water. The other three were Natick initiatives funded through the SBIR program: two gasifiers—one from Community Power Corporation (CPC) in Colorado and one from Infoscitex Corporation in Massachusetts—and a pyrolysis-based model built by Green Liquid & Gas Technologies in Florida. All four companies had presented prototypes, and the Combat Feeding Program selected two, CPC’s gasifier and General Atomics’ supercritical water depolymerization process, for further refinement and field testing. In 2010 the army asked CPC to produce its BioMax system (U.S. Patent 7,909,899), which uses air to push the gases downward for collection instead of up, thereby reducing emissions, for further modifications and yet another field test. At the same time, they asked Infoscitex Corporation to develop on its own a prototype using the same process, combined with its initial innovation of using shredded (rather than pelletized) waste, which is cleaner, faster, and more efficient (U.S. patent application PCT/US2011/001972). While neither model has been fielded yet, both companies have entered the commercial market as an environmentally friendly alternative to incineration or trucking waste to landfills.

THE ARMY CALLS THIS “HIGH RISK, HIGH PAYOFF” research and development. While each of these inventions has the potential for spin-offs in the broader realm of resource conservation, bioengineering, nanotechnology, food preservation, and human health, and perhaps to impact the consumer food market in the years and decades to come, there are no guarantees. Some approaches and companies will succeed; others will not. But for the venture capitalist who is willing to invest at the very edges of science and technology, the opportunities await.