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

DO WE REALLY WANT OUR CHILDREN EATING LIKE SPECIAL OPS?

The wars of tomorrow will be lonely places. Whether nuclear, conventional, or unconventional, they will often rely on tactics developed for small units of special operations forces: reconnaissance and surveillance; partner support and training; low-intensity fighting, infiltration, prevention, and response to terrorist acts; and destruction of high-value targets, human or otherwise. In this fluid and dynamic battle environment, large garrisons, with their complicated and expensive infrastructure, will be burdensome to set up, supply, and operate. Logistics support will be shifted to small forward operating bases, which can be installed from containers in a matter of two weeks anywhere in the world, as well as to the even more minimally equipped outposts the military calls “austere.”

Army camps are being downsized for strategic and cost reasons and because the individual soldier system—everything a warrior needs to sustain her except for weapons—will soon be exponentially more powerful. During the past decade, the Natick Center has been working with MIT and industrial partners, including its old chums Raytheon and DuPont, on body armor built of nanomaterials that give warriors unprecedented capabilities and self-sufficiency: networked communications; surveillance and geographic coordination; detection and neutralization of biological and chemical contaminants; temperature and hydration control; and constant physiological monitoring with as-needed administration of medical treatment and performance boosters. At the same time, the warfighter will be frighteningly dependent—on technology, on a power source (this wrinkle hasn’t quite yet been solved), and on the communications network. He will be given superhuman powers—to see at night, to change appearance (perhaps even to be invisible), and to walk through a hail of bullets, yet have reduced agency in making decisions on the battlefield and even about his own body.

There’s not a lot of room for a hot, sit-down meal for eight, ten, or twelve in this scenario.

But there will be an even greater need for a diverse range of rugged, shelf-stable foods that can be stored anywhere and eaten out of hand. And this suits the military just fine. Because as it turns out, despite the higher processing and packaging costs, combat rations are the army’s most cost-effective feeding method. No need to set up battlefield kitchens with all their energy-hungry machines. No need to ship perishables or arrange for dodgy third-country purveyors. No veterinary inspectors breathing down your neck. No refrigerated containers. No surly cooks. No kitchen waste to dispose of, pots to scrub, equipment to scrape, and mess halls to maintain. Just tear, eat, and toss. And then run your fan or charge your phone or play Xbox on the energy the waste-to-energy converter provides from your trash.

In fact, the army is close to scrapping the meal concept entirely. “We’re looking at, is three meals a day really the way we want to feed warfighters?” says Gerry Darsch, the former director of the Combat Feeding Directorate. “Do we want to make it more of a grazing event, rather than a specific ‘this is a breakfast, this is a lunch, this is a dinner.’ … We’re looking at convenience, eating on the move, yet still providing that nutritional core that warfighters need.”

Which means that Natick will continue to do what it’s been doing, only more so.

WRITING THIS BOOK CHANGED ME. I’m no longer a home-cooking fanatic. Nor do I believe that industrial food—and by extension, those involved in its design and production—is inherently evil. I’m also way more comfortable talking about science and engineering than I ever believed possible. And at the supermarket, I see ghosts everywhere, watered-down combat rations filling shelves, refrigerator cases, and bins.

My epiphany came a year into the project, during the first ever visit of my Cuban mother-in-law, who, practically on arrival, took over my kitchen. She did things Latin American style—rising at dawn, preparing everything from fresh ingredients, making huge quantities. On the penultimate day of her stay, I asked my husband what one childhood dish did he want me to learn so that I could reincarnate the taste of his long-ago home. To my surprise—whither the Cuban soul food, frijoles negros?—he wanted a citrus, garlic, and oregano-marinated chicken. His mother wrote out a list of ingredients, and he set out for Whole Foods, returning with jars of spices, bottles of olive oil, kosher salt, perfectly globular onions, garlic, bags of lemons and limes, and two rosy chickens fed only organic grain and raised free-range.

At the appointed time, I stepped into the kitchen, tied on an apron, whipped out my reporter’s notebook, and stood at attention. Melba had unwrapped the chickens and placed them on the cutting board, backsides up like two naughty children. She slid a kitchen knife out of the block. “First you cut the legs off, así,” she said, easing the blade around the bone. She spent twenty minutes carefully dismembering the carcasses and placing pieces one by one in a glass baking dish as I scribbled furiously. She then filled a plastic bag with giblets, backbones, and wings. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Oh”—as she tossed the bag into the freezer—“We don’t need these. Maybe you can use them later?” I made a large X through the page of handwritten directions. “Two packages of drumsticks and breasts,” I wrote. A year or two ago, I would have followed her instructions to a T, convinced that doing it myself somehow made it better. It was the moment when I understood I’d gone to the other side.

Of course, a year or two earlier, I hadn’t had a mammoth project and a scary deadline. Since I began Combat-Ready Kitchen, there have been very few moments when I wasn’t working on it, if not at my computer, then in my head. In the past, the hour or so in the kitchen preparing a sit-down meal for six had relaxed me. Now I resented it. As the owner of a public health communications agency, I had always had a fairly good work-life balance (if zero recreation): I worked from a home office, I spent time with my kids, I cooked. Now my life had no balance. I researched and I wrote, and when I wasn’t researching and writing, I was worrying about researching and writing. This frame of mind did not lend itself well to the unhurried ritual of chop-sauté-serve.

My new mantra became “How quickly can I open a bunch of boxes and bags and get something on the table?” Gone were my braised lamb, my sancocho, my squash soups with tiny, garlicky meatballs. In with spaghetti, jarred sauce, and pregrated cheese. Vegetarian burritos with canned refried beans and some shredded cabbage and carrots. Frozen pizza (a lot of frozen pizza). I suddenly had more sympathy for the typical working mother’s dilemma, and more tolerance for take-out and ready-to-serve food. We were tired. We were overstretched. Something had to give, and that something was dinner. And you know what? Good riddance.

Cooking, like music before it, is a dying art, moving from the precincts of the private and personal—our great-grandparents sang and played instruments—to the realm of the public and commercial. Now when I “cook” for my family, chances are that at least half, if not all, of the components and ingredients have been processed in some way. Behind my takeout stands an officer corps of master chefs, an army of food-service workers, and a few mammoth suppliers that have cracked the prepared food nut. Behind my ready-to-eat meals stands a small city’s worth of food scientists and engineers and the vast, hyperefficient machinery of American agribusiness, food processors, packers, shippers, and retailers. And behind them, like a shadowy puppeteer, stands the one entity to which having inexpensive, portable, long-shelf-life, easy-to-prepare or ready-to-eat food is vitally important, at times existentially so: the U.S. Army.

In significant part because of military influence, food science has made breathtaking strides during the twentieth century and now the twenty-first. Understanding what makes food taste good—as well as be safe and be able to be stored without deterioration—is no longer an art, know-how accumulated through painstaking observation and assiduously passed down through the generations, but a science. That is to say, a body of knowledge based on observable facts, precise principles, and repeatable experiments. This has turbocharged food preparation. We may have been making bread, cheese, ham, and jam since almost the dawn of time, but understanding the mechanisms at work, and being able to predict and control them, is what makes industrial food possible as well as sparking the invention of thousands of new edibles. The 1956 promise made by George Larrick, then commissioner of the FDA, the agency that oversees new food-processing technology, has been fulfilled: “I can predict that the housewife of the future will practice the art of cooking only occasionally as a hobby.”¹

That describes me perfectly, and is the reason for which to all these actors I give—qualified—thanks. On the one hand, they’ve offered me unprecedented freedom: freedom from drudgery, freedom to do more of what I like and want—whether that’s watching hours of reality TV or saving the lives of children in poor countries by distributing oral rehydration therapy.* In the past, I’d chosen to cook the old-fashioned way. But creatively, writing a book was way more fulfilling than even my most inspired meals—assemblages of ingredients that pleased the eye, tickled the palate, and soothed, if only momentarily, the soul. So now I was making another choice. What’s important is not to condemn one another for our decisions on how to eat, but to recognize how incredibly lucky and privileged we twenty-first-century women—yes, I’m going to gender this—are, in that we have a choice.

On the other hand, many, but not all, industrial foods are unhealthy, high in sugar, salt, and fat and low in fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Just as bad—or even worse—to achieve stability and long shelf life, they contain numerous additives, from chemical preservatives and antimicrobials to gums and fillers. Many of these “ingredients” have never before been eaten or eaten in such quantities, and we know little or nothing about their long-term effects. But despite this and perhaps contrary to what you might expect, I am now cautiously optimistic about the possibility—and the slowly growing reality—that we can have food that is both convenient and good for us. If other values besides those that are militarily necessary were at the forefront of government, academic, and industry food research, we might be able to add yet another choice to the menu, one that caters to the concerns of women, and increasingly men, who want to put delicious, wholesome dinners on the table quickly and affordably. (The army, to its credit, wants this, too, and, in fact, has spearheaded next-generation processing techniques that, if they prove to be comparable in safety to fresh food, may help us do just that.)

IN LOCKSTEP WITH THE MILITARY’S PROGRESSION from World War II’s K rations to the War on Terror’s First Strike Rations, with its cornucopia of sandwiches, wraps, pizza, energy bars, savory snacks, and candy, the industrial food system has increasingly supplied us with items that can be eaten as is or require only heating. The Defense Department’s goal is to “provide the best possible rations to soldiers,” a task that it foresees will include “continued reduction in weight, volume and equipment energy consumption, improvements in phytonutrient validation and delivery, shelf life optimization, and the ongoing need to meet the changing needs of the military as its mission continues to adapt to changing conflicts.”² That’s as it should be. But we consumers don’t have to accept a food system coupled to military feeding.

The first step is to realize that the U.S. Army, by being almost the sole investor in the big issues in food science and groundbreaking technology and then by purposefully seeding the results in industry—both to maintain the industrial base during peacetime and to lower the cost and improve related products—to a large degree controls the general direction of the American diet. This book should help you see that. But even after my two and a half years of research, it only scratches the surface; a thorough treatise on the topic would require dozens of volumes and a cadre of academics eager to devote their careers to it.

The second step is to pry the decision-making process that guides the Combat Feeding Program from exclusively military hands and bring in actors who can consider the impact of the kinds of science and technology it invests in on the rest of us. For many years, the Natick Center’s science program was overseen by a committee organized by the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council and composed not only of Natick Center staff but of outside scientists and industry members. In the 1980s Natick reassigned that function solely to its military “customers.” It’s time to open up that decision-making process again, not only to academics and food businesses but to all those who feel its secondary effects—farmers, nutritionists, public health experts, and consumers.

A third step is to do more studies on the possible long-term effects on human health of these new techniques and products. It’s great that high-pressure processing kills bacteria, but what about other physicochemical changes brought about by applying this immense force to food molecules? The studies related to human health are just starting to appear. We may have better vitamin retention, but what about the harmful effects of increased lipid oxidation—leading to the formation of those notorious troublemakers, the free radicals? And while we’re at it, what about the two-, ten-, or twenty-year impact of regular ingestion of an infinitesimally small amount of the “generally recognized as safe” ingredients on the label or “reaction products” such as the acrylamides in the crackers your child nibbles all day? And, yes, cancer is terrible, but how about trying to understand how processing techniques and processed foods impact more systemic diseases and conditions, which, perhaps because they are more difficult to test for in the lab, have gotten short shrift?

Which brings us to a certain creaky regulatory agency long due for an overhaul: the FDA.* When its predecessor bureau in the USDA was given powers to protect consumers in 1906, and through 1938, when these were greatly expanded, the big issues in food were deceptive labeling and adulteration (bad stuff that isn’t supposed to be in there, like melamine-tainted Chinese milk). In the late 1950s, its mandate was extended to additives and colors, after which Congress declared exempt several hundred substances it considered to be generally recognized as safe (GRAS); by 2010 that list had grown to more than nine thousand items (an additional one thousand have been approved by the industry as GRAS without FDA review³). In 2011, after a decade punctuated by bacteria-related outbreaks, President Barack Obama signed into law the Food Safety Modernization Act, which strengthened the government’s ability to monitor and detect food-borne illnesses.

But many of the FDA’s scientific frameworks, regulatory approaches, and enforcement policies are still inadequate to protect the public from potential dangers in our food. The “harm” standard should be clearly defined and include low-level exposures over long periods, and how they may contribute to a whole range of diseases, not just the Big C, but allergies, autoimmune conditions, reproductive and endocrine issues, and, of course, public enemy number one: obesity and his pasty pals hypertension, heart disease, and diabetes. And to make informed choices about what we buy, we need a lot more information than an (incomplete) list of ingredients. The FDA should promote transparency about how industrial food is made and require companies to publish—if not on the label, then on their Web sites or on the FDA’s—information about their products’ processing technologies, temporary additives (that may disappear or leave only traces), new substances created in manufacturing, and migration of materials into food during processing and from packaging, as well as the possible health effects of the same. Finally, it must also require that same transparency of itself by creating public records of the regulatory process, even informal communications, and install vigilant external watchdogs over, or avoid altogether, collaborations that result in products that come under its own purview.

What would our food be like if the Natick Center didn’t exist? If there wasn’t an invisible—at least to the consumer and most industry members—force relentlessly driving consumer products toward the military ideal of cheap, imperishable, and easy to store and transport? The question is unanswerable, because, in many ways, the work done by the Natick Center is the skeleton of industrial food. “Every kind of processing that we now have, at one time or another Natick was very interested in and would have put resources into,” sums up food scientist and editor Daryl Lund. Remove the scientific and technological backbone on which the giant conglomerates adhere the last little bit of eye-fooling, appetite-tricking razzle-dazzle and everything collapses.

There’s a watered-down combat ration lurking in practically every bag, box, can, bottle, jar, and carton we buy. This food, originally designed for soldiers, is bad for our health and the health of our children—at least when consumed, as do warriors and most of the rest of us, day in, day out, year after year. We’re participating in a massive public health experiment, one in which science and technology, at the beck of the military, have taken over our kitchens. What are the long-term effects of such a diet? We really don’t know: we’re the guinea pigs.

AS IT TURNED OUT, the only person in my house perfectly happy to eat things out of cans, pouches, tubs, and boxes was me: I’d be fine munching crudités with dip, huge Greek salads, and tuna fish sandwiches for the rest of my life. My husband and I met when I ran a newsmagazine and he was an editor, and we ate almost all our meals at the dozens of inexpensive restaurants that stud Quito’s neighborhoods, from open-air cevicherías to homey comedores (diners). It wasn’t until two years later, after we’d married and returned to the United States, that he discovered my culinary talents, a matrimonial windfall that he enthusiastically accepted as his due. My children, on the other hand, grew up with me in the kitchen—literally; they sat across the cutout counter from me on stools. Although they may not be able to articulate it, the sight, sound, and smells that came as I turned to the four cardinal points of my perfect cook’s circle—gas stove, sink, counter, refrigerator—must powerfully evoke home, safety, and maternal love.

Once I’d withdrawn from leisurely cooking and the sacred rite of the family dinner, everyone found a way to coax me to feed them. My husband, taking advantage of some spouse-approved tasks such as writing invoices, requested that I fix him a sandwich; my ham and cheese was, apparently, tastier than his. At night, my elderly mother would ask plaintively from the empty dining room table, “What do you want me to eat?” Implicit in this question was that I heat up some soup for her or set out a plate of cheese and crackers. And even though I’d inured them from an early age to sharp knives and dancing flames, my younger children requested pasta and quesadillas that they easily could have prepared themselves. I realized that what they sought wasn’t my cooking, but the feeling that I was taking care of them. That I was their mother, wife, daughter. There are plenty of other ways to honor this connection, but cooking had always been one of mine. So as soon as this manuscript is shipped off to be printed, I’m heading back to the kitchen to simmer sustainably raised meats and organic vegetables in my 1920s cast-iron Dutch oven and frying pans—at least until the book comes out. And then who knows?

On my very first shift, out of the jungle came four or five little kids, maybe three to eight years old. I remember how frail and poor they were. None of the children had shoes, and all were filthy. They came out cautiously. They looked at us; we looked at them. We wanted to communicate with them, but they didn’t speak English, and we didn’t speak their native language. We couldn’t let them get close because we were carrying live ammunition and loaded weapons. They went back into the jungle after that, but came back a little later. And this time they were a big group, maybe twenty kids. I still have the picture I took of them standing with the other guy on duty.

We had MREs that we’d been given to eat for lunch. We’d been told not to feed the indigenous children. The commander said, “You’re really not helping them.” But I had a hard time looking at those children knowing that they were in need. So I opened up my MRE, and I took a set of four square pieces of cracker inside a vacuum-sealed package. I motioned to the kids, holding it like I was going to fling it in the air. But they started to get a little crazy, so instead of doing that, I had one of the younger kids come closer and I gave it to him. And then he ran off from the group into the jungle. There was a bunch of them that followed. I emptied the whole MRE and the other marine’s, too. Once the MREs were gone, the kids went back into the jungle. I was there at that location for about a month, and I did that often. I’m sure the other guys did, too, but nobody really talked about it because of the commander not wanting us to feed them.

When I got back to Camp Pendleton in the States, what I’d seen sunk into me. I had a newborn daughter, and I thought about the life I was fortunate enough to have, and the one my child was fortunate enough to have. I’d seen children I could tell were starving. Before then, I’d complained about the meals—that I didn’t like them or they made me constipated. That experience humbled me and taught me to appreciate what I have in life. There are people out there that would do anything to get what you’ve got. I never looked at an MRE the same way after that.

—Sergeant Michael Eugene Kent Jr., United States Marine Corps, continental United States and Honduras, 1985-93