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

A ROMP THROUGH THE EARLY HISTORY OF COMBAT RATIONS

The combat ration—as opposed to the garrison ration eaten in camps—didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Like most things, it has a past, and, as with most things, its past informs its present. So let’s take a look at the very first foods carried by soldiers on the march or in armed conflict. Which, as it so happens, means going back to before the dawn of human history.

IF TO SOMEONE WITH A HAMMER, everything looks like a nail, then what does everything look like to someone with a spear? You got it: prey. The exact moment when mankind (and I do mean mankind, because women have almost always sat out this particular social institution) first lifted hand against his brethren is lost to the murky swamps of prehistory, but at some point, an early hominid gazed at the flint-headed stick in his hand and thought, “I could go track a great mastodon for a couple days, and, with a lot of luck, stab it to death, drag it six miles back to the cave, and then have dinner for me and the missus, or I could just use this on Grok, take the meat he’s got already piled up around his grotto, and call it a night.” This was unlikely to have been a long, drawn-out decision.

After that, interpersonal violence appeared with depressing regularity. In locations as far-flung as eastern Africa, southern Europe, the Canadian Arctic, and the American Southwest, early humans got busy bludgeoning, impaling, and puncturing one another. Motives? Acquisition of a few days’ supply of raw woolly mammoth and a heap of grubby tubers. A cave with morning sun and running water. A hot helpmate. Personal animosity. And—there’s no delicate way to put this—a neighbor with some mighty succulent-looking gluteals. Cutting, banging, chopping, and peeling marks on skeletal remains as well as ancient myoglobin-laden (a protein unique to human muscles) Homo sapiens poop have made it amply clear that our forebears were not averse to the occasional feast on friend, foe, or frenemy.

For the minimally minded, the Paleolithic (2.5 million-10,000 BC) and Mesolithic (10,000-5000 BC) eras offered an idyllic lifestyle: short bursts of food production (guys: hunting; gals: gathering) punctuated by long periods of lounging about doing nothing; easy-to-maintain living spaces; the stimulation of always going to new places and seeing new things. But eventually (warning: crackpot theory ahead!), the ladies became dissatisfied. They wanted something more. They wanted a place to park the offspring other than a hip. Relief from the frustration of returning to their secret berry bramble or nut-tree stand only to find that someone else had already been there. A place where they could indulge that irrepressible impulse to fluff dried grass and arrange rocks in conversation areas. And, most important, a husband who wasn’t always out with the guys on excursions that often seemed more about the thrill of the chase than a serious search for steak, delicious as it was when it materialized. (Not to mention the occasional encounter with comely females from other tribes.)

In other words, they wanted real estate.

Thus began a nagging campaign that probably lasted for centuries. “Move? Not again! We just moved last week. Break down camp. Set up camp. Break down camp. Set up camp. Then spend half the day looking for a couple hummingbird eggs and a handful of fruit. And all that with an unweaned two-year-old hanging from my teat. I just want to settle down. If we stayed in one place, I’d have more energy. I could help skin and cook the day’s catch. And I wouldn’t be snoring every time you wanted to renew our conjugal bonds.” Nothing worked. Until one day she discovered in a dank corner of the current cave a forgotten gourd into which she’d chewed and spat some wild grains to help Paleobaby transition to solid foods. It’s strangely frothy. She sips. Eureka! Alcohol has been discovered. From then on, she finds persuading her significant other strangely easy. “Honey, if we had a permanent dwelling, for argument’s sake let’s call it a house, I’d plant a bunch of grains and make that new beverage you really, really like.” In no time at all, she found herself ensconced in a cute little cottage surrounded by fields. (That man invented agriculture so he could keep a buzz on is a bona fide theory proposed by several archaeologists, including Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania and Brian Hayden at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Should you need further proof, look no further than ancient Sumer, where more than 40 percent of crops were grown to produce beer.)

Of course, just like today, not all guys were ready to give up their inner wildmen. For these, there was another option, something halfway between hunting and farming: herding. Following around a bunch of sheep and goats all day may not have been quite as macho as tracking wild animals and waving penetrating projectiles, but they still got to roam the plain, sleep under the stars, sport matted beards and layers of dirt, and dine al fresco on charred meat and milk. By contrast, their sedentary brothers had settled into a life of grueling manual labor fueled by a monotonous diet of porridge, mush, and legumes and made only just bearable by copious quantities of this newfangled fermented grain beverage. On the plus side of the farmer’s ledger: he had food stores (which necessitated the invention of food preservation, mostly by drying but also, when sodium chloride was readily available, in seawater or mineral deposits, by salting), buildings, land, and due to an increased birthrate, nubiles. On the minus side: all these things looked mighty attractive to the herders, who, with their rough-and-tumble ways and well-practiced knife skills, frequently descended en masse and spirited the pluses away.

The tension between these two lifestyle choices and the bloodshed it engendered became one of the epic narratives of the Neolithic age (8000-2000 BC). In ancient Sumer, Dumuzid the shepherd and Enkimdu the farmer vie for the favors of Inana, goddess of love, fertility, and war. The other tale, which is probably a later version of the Sumerian one, is much better known: that of farmer Cain and shepherd Abel. The first sibling rivalry—which is tastier, my veggies or your lamb chop?—ends in the first murder, a fact which should only be of surprise to the childless. After many millennia, these archetypes still echo (just think of the vitriol between vegetarians and carnivores) and spawned two opposing styles of warfare, as well as the rations that fueled them: the orderly agriculturists who ate carbs gussied up with a bit of protein and sauce and the wild mountain people who subsisted on meat and milk.

Like the turtle of Aesop’s fable, the farmers plodded on, bound and determined to make something of themselves. They bred beasts of burden. Assembled sticks into rudimentary plows. Dug ditches to bring river water to their plants. Eventually their nose-to-the-grindstone approach paid off, and they began generating extra food, which meant not everyone had to spend his day from sunup to sundown in the fields. Gilgamesh decided to dedicate himself to pottery; Anu to metalwork; Ur-Nammu, to bossing everyone around, especially in the all-important areas of water rights and land disputes. And Tizkar, Lugalkitun, and Untash-Gal, armed to the teeth with spears, clubs, and bows, to looking and acting very scary (even easier once these were topped by sleek bronze weapon heads instead of rocks). With the birth of cities came the need for organized violence—to defend them, expand them, and police them.

The goon squads had arrived.

And they needed to be fed. This was easy enough on home turf, when soldiers were generally supplied with meals by the government or given provisions—but what about on campaigns, when men were expected to fend for themselves, an act militaries euphemistically call foraging, but we civilians know as raping, pillaging, and plundering? Sure, the first few times it may have been a head rush to enter a new village and have the townspeople prostrate themselves before you, begging for their lives and proffering their worldly goods. But the routine got tired fast. Leaders quickly figured out that portable edibles allowed recruits to spend more time on the job and less time starving, miserable, and harassing the locals for chickens and turnips.

Herewith a quick tour of some of the world’s major military empires and their combat rations with emphasis on those that have most influenced the West.

THE FIRST STANDING ARMIES APPEARED with one of the first two civilizations (as measured by the blossoming of its flower, bureaucracy), that of the Sumerians (3500-2200 BC), who inhabited the fertile plains between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers from the middle of the fourth millennium. In addition to cuneiform, base 60 math, and sacred prostitution, the Sumerians, who spent two thousand years in ceaseless warfare among their fourteen or so city-states, invented some really kick-ass weaponry and military techniques. However, their rations know-how remained primitive, probably for the simple fact that most of their excursions were so close that soldiers could go home for lunch and still have time to return for a full afternoon of socket-axing and sickle-swording. (The first war ever recorded in detail, on the Stele of Vultures, was between Lagash and Umma, only eighteen miles apart.) When they brought something along to munch while doing victory laps in their souped-up chariots, it might have been beer (of which they were inordinately fond), a few barley cakes, and green onions. (Apparently, halitosis was not a big concern during classical antiquity.)

The ancient Egyptians (3200-1000 BC), who kept up with their (distant) neighbors the Sumerians in almost everything—agriculture based on flooding and irrigation, food surpluses allowing division of labor, cities, and government—were behind when it came to the arts of war. It wasn’t their fault. It’s easy to get complacent when you’re cut off from the rest of humanity by an ocean (to the north), large deserts (east and west), and a mammoth river with several churning waterfalls (south), discouraging to even the most foolhardy mariners. For over a millennium, the Egyptians did their own thing—his and hers extreme makeovers, dragging immense boulders up ramps, and oversharing on that breakthrough communications technology, paper—until they were invaded by the Hyksos, a seminomadic tribe from the east.

So much for isolationism. It took them more than a century, but with the help of some copycat weaponry—the chariot, composite bow, sword, and penetrating axe—endless training, and the adrenalizing effect of hate, the Egyptians rallied and ran the rubes out of town. Then, what with a military infrastructure already on pharaoh’s payroll, they took it one step further and went expansionist themselves, reaching Nubia to the south, and to the east, Palestine, Babylon, Assyria, and the Hittites. By 1500 BC or so, they’d rolled up so much new territory, the sons of the Nile were holding down some four hundred thousand square miles at once. To manage the flow of food and fodder to this vast network of garrisons and camps, the Egyptians invented a new profession, the quartermaster, who, using small naval vessels and oxen, kept the men in beer, bread, onions, and dried and/or salted fish—this last so important that soldiers received an allotment every three months as wages.

In fact, these piscatory provisions (also used by the Assyrians) were a rations revolution: lightweight, imperishable, and highly nutritious. Sure, you could munch bread during combat or stop and make porridge while on a long trek, but by far the most efficient thing you can eat in terms of replenishing the body’s supply of amino acids, the building blocks of cells, is some form of dried or compressed meat (or, somewhat less completely, dairy). It may well have been this portable protein that enabled the Egyptians to range so far and wide, amassing distant territory. And every great empire since has been powered by at least one reliable preserved protein that could be carried and eaten as is while marching, doing surveillance, or even during combat.

The ancient Greeks (750-323 BC) were nothing if not paramount mythmakers. Democracy? Just one tiny city-state out of more than fifteen hundred was truly democratic, and that privilege was only extended to free male landowners. Elegant architecture and sculpture? Turns out the temples and statues were painted a garish red, blue, and yellow. Their military prowess and exploits have dominated the Western canon largely because they bothered to write them down (from them we inherited our perhaps misguided notions of glory and heroism), but in point of fact the Hellenic armies—despite centuries of endemic warfare over the hardscrabble lands of their hilly little peninsula—were mostly small bands of amateurs armed only with sword, spear, and shield (they did invent an important military formation, the phalanx). Their rations, which were carried by individual hoplites (soldiers) for a maximum of three days’ march, were similarly rudimentary: several pounds of grain, sour wine, the ubiquitous onion, and, for their portable protein, pressed rotted milk from mountain-grazed goats, also known as cheese.

But there was one exception to this dilettante approach, a place where career commandos thrived: the militocracy Sparta, which led the allied Greek city-states to victory over Persia in 479 BC. Tough-guy training began at birth when weak babies were euthanized, and the ones who survived were given really rotten childhoods, consisting of early maternal separation, random beatings, and food deprivation. But when future warriors arrived to adulthood, their early privation was more than compensated for by their privileged positions as Sparta’s only citizens and landholders. After age twenty-one, esprit de corps was maintained with compulsory communal dining in local mess halls, meals that always began with the same none-too-subtle appetizer, a black broth consisting of vinegar, pig’s blood, and porcine body parts. (This soup was the butt of many classical-era jokes.) The rest of the dishes came from mandatory contributions—mostly grain, wine, and cheese—from the men’s farms, which were worked by helots, a slave class, whose disproportionate numbers—nine to one—kept their masters on their toes.

Later, Philip II of Macedon finally unified Greece (359-336 BC) and implemented several reforms that foot soldiers undoubtedly rue to this day, including prohibiting the accompaniment of wives, consorts, and prostitutes (they ate too much food and slowed down the march) and compelling each man to carry his own rations and equipment, an innovation that burdened the Greek recruit with eighty-pound packs, thirty pounds of which were two weeks’ worth of grain. (Modern American soldiers carry even more; their rucksacks, water purifiers, rations, and arms weigh a full one hundred pounds.)

It should please Italophiles to hear that the Roman Republic and Empire (509 BC-AD 476) were built on pork, specifically prosciutto (air-cured ham), bacon, and sausage. Each foot soldier, or legionnaire, marched with a string of sausage, a hunk of Parmesan or other hard cheese, and a bit of lardo for cooking in his bag. Other ingredients for an on-the-move meal were garum, fermented fish sauce (soldiers actually got a cut-rate version), and hardtack, a crispy twice-baked flour-and-water concoction, ancestor to the cracker. These staples could travel to the ends of the extensive empire—in its heyday, Rome controlled territory from the British Isles to North Africa and from Armenia to Egypt—without spoiling. Well fed, well trained, well equipped, and super buff (their centurions kept them in top form by parading them around the countryside wearing seventy-pound packs), Roman combat soldiers easily dominated the ancient world for a millennium.

Recruits ate well during campaigns—in a thousand years, nary a complaint was made about the chow—but in the garrison, they feasted. In fact, the life of the sedentary warrior pretty much revolved around food. At his disposal were vast military bodegas stocked with grain, carnaria (racks of meat), hard cheese, dried fruit, and condiments; terrains for growing vegetables and raising livestock; requisitions or purchases of food from the surrounding countryside; and, most important, regular correspondence with loved ones to badger them into sending care packages. He baked bread. He hunted hares. He demanded asparagus, cabbage, wine, and fine olive oil, and, as did one soldier in the below letter to a friend, got snippy when these did not materialize.

Rustius Barbarus to Pompeius, greetings. First of all I pray that you are in good health. Why do you write me such a nasty letter? Why do you think I am so thoughtless? If you did not send me the green vegetables so quickly, must I immediately forget your friendship? I’m not like that, or thoughtless either. I think of you, not as a pal, but as a twin brother, the same flesh and blood. It’s a term I give you quite often in my letters, but you think of me in a different light. I have received bunches of cabbages and one cheese. I have sent you by Arrianus, the trooper, a box, inside which is one cake and a denarius (?) wrapped in a small cloth. Please buy me a matium of salt and send it to me without delay, because I want to bake some bread.¹

Undergirding this military might was an agricultural productivity the world had never seen before or since—at least not until the twentieth century. The Romans considered working the land to be the noblest of all occupations; their nascent empire was built by citizen-farmer-soldiers as only the landed could belong to the army. (Later, as Rome conquered new enemies and acquired their territory, a vast system of latifundia, or slave-worked plantations, arose; their large tracts of monocrops were a precursor to our factory farms.) And what animal best complemented these verdant fields and orchards? Not the high-maintenance chicken or cow, delicious though their eggs, milk, and—at the end of their working lives—cadavers were. No, what the ancient agronomist most appreciated was the easygoing pig, which lives on scraps and forage, which drops litters of eight to ten twice a year, and which achieves a squealing full-size corpulence in a mere six months. Perhaps most important to its central role in the early Italian diet, preserving these tons of pork was no longer prohibitively expensive. The Roman Empire, which controlled the world salt trade, distributed an allotment of the crucial mineral to soldiers as part of their wages and, when necessary, artificially lowered its price in the marketplace. A whole new world of salumeria was born—and traveled with the legionnaires to every corner of the empire.

Being on a Viking longship would have been a lot like Beer Pong Night at Phi Sigma Kappa: a few dozen grunting, sweaty dudes packed into a small, none-too-tidy space; free-flowing keggage (contrary to legend, this was water, not ale); and a wholehearted belief in the supremacy of force over reason. Starting in the late eighth century until the last decades of the eleventh, the vessels, which were designed for speed and maneuverability, departed from the Scandinavian coast and set out for sea towns in France and the British Isles. On board, the men subsisted on a dispiriting diet of barley mush and butter, enlivened by the occasional slab of dried halibut or cod. Although fish were abundant and easily dried in the northern climate, the Norse were primarily an agricultural people; early warriors, all landowners, left their farms entrusted to the hands of slaves and local peasants. The repast was not prepared shipside but at numerous pit stops along the way, some at stone towers previously stocked with dried fish and meat, cereals, cheese, butter, and beer. The raids themselves were brutal and short—the Vikings were skilled at hand-to-hand fighting, and when all else failed unleashed their secret weapon, berserkers: wildmen high on reindeer piss who were fearless in battle. Although they lacked an overarching political structure and military coordination, the Norsemen dominated northern Europe for several centuries through sheer savagery.

The Mongols (AD 1206-94) were the herders’ last hurrah—and they validated the idea that the right rations make all the difference. They assembled, albeit briefly, the largest land empire ever known. (The Huns, who knocked on Rome’s door, then stomped through and wrecked all the furniture, were lightweights by comparison.) Exceedingly mobile, self-sufficient, and vicious, they were in many ways the forerunners to today’s special ops. The Mongols were consummate horsemen (the horse, until it was replaced by the combustion engine, was for several millennia the ultimate in battle transport); they literally lived in the saddle and rode for days on end simply by rotating mounts from the string that ran behind them. They were impervious to pain, cold, and discomfort—from an early age they slept on even freezing ground without blankets. But most important, their rations—protein-rich powdered milk that they turned into shakes in a saddlebag and strips of homemade jerky cured under the saddle with horse’s sweat and the weight of the rider—turned out to be the perfect warrior food (portable, convenient, lightweight, and nourishing) and may have been central to their military might. (When these ran out, the Mongols had an infallible emergency ration: hot blood drunk straight from a vein in their horse’s neck.)

After the Mongol Empire’s peak—it stretched from Siberia and Southeast Asia and eastern Europe to the Middle East and its armies killed an estimated fifteen to thirty million people—the nomadic lifestyle, with its tents and ruminants, went out of style, absorbed into the great teeming cities with their grain-based economies. Echoes remain in ancient antipathies expressed as food prejudices: the Chinese distaste for milk and dairy products, staples of the Mongols who conquered them; the Muslim and Jewish—the Semites were the original wanderers—prohibition against swine (animals unable to digest grass, resistant to herding, and not built for trekking), which was an instinctive sneer at the livestock of the enemy; and even our own fetishization of the juicy steak, a hidden reference to our barbarian past (the Angles, from whom the Anglo-Saxons descended, were cattle herders). The Mongol legacy also persists in the powdered milk and jerky that still stock soldiers’ rucksacks today.

If there was ever an argument against eating an all-vegetarian diet it’s the Aztec civilization (AD 1427-1519). By the Paleolithic era, all large native herbivores in the Mesoamerican basin had been hunted into extinction, so when agriculture began there it was not accompanied by the simultaneous domestication of livestock found in other cradles of civilization. Undaunted, the early Mexicans cobbled together a barely adequate diet of nixtamalized maize (treated with an acid-neutralizing solution that frees niacin), beans, and chilies enriched with an occasional zap of protein from iguanas, lake scum, and insects. The only two kinds of livestock were reserved for nobles: turkeys and Chihuahuas, which, given their diminutive size and extreme boniness, can only be considered a measure of their misery. Battle rations weren’t much meatier than commoner fare, consisting of maize three ways; beans; pumpkin, chia, and amaranth seeds; and the ubiquitous hot peppers. It was thus perhaps inevitable that the protein-hungry Aztecs’ gaze alighted on the one large mammal that continued to grace the Valley of Mexico: man.

What ensued was one of the most bizarre and bloodthirsty warrior cultures on the planet—and, please, if you have a weak stomach, skip this section entirely—which kept the elites (nobles, priests, and soldiers) well nourished and the masses (peasants) weak and docile. Between 1427 and 1519, the Aztecs, an alliance among three city-states, bellies growling after repeated maize crop failures, were led first by Itzcoatl and then by Moctezuma (and later his descendants) to conquer adjoining territories westward to the Pacific, eastward to the Atlantic, and as far south as Guatemala. But unlike other military imperialists, the Mesoamericans had little interest in the traditional spoils of war—property, goods, power—and except for collecting regular tributes, most of them edible, allowed their conquests to return to business as usual, with ruling structures intact. This was because they had already obtained the natural resource they most wanted: a fresh harvest of enemy soldiers.

If the everyday Aztec warrior diet lacked the soul-satisfying experience of masticating a hunk of thermally processed mammal muscle, feast days more than made up for it. War captives, after being plumped up in special holding cells, were marched up the temple steps; at the top a priest sliced open their chests with an obsidian knife, plunged his hand in, and held the still beating heart up to the sun. Once the religious ceremony was out of the way, the serious eating began. The body was tumbled to the base of the building, where it was quickly turned into prime cuts by attendants. The skull went on a trophy rack; a thigh was reserved for Moctezuma; the flayed skin was used for a grotesque game of trick or treat in which young warriors bedecked in fresh person-hide went door-to-door asking for food; the rest of the limbs went home with the victim’s captor so he could invite over all his best buds for a heaping bowl of human stew (the warrior himself was not allowed to eat his own captives). It’s estimated that, over its century reign, the Cannibal Empire devoured more than one million men, women, and children.^*

EATING AND WAR HAVE BEEN INTERTWINED since the very beginning. Animals fight over food; so do we. And while it’s easy to forget in a world where there are tempting tidbits at every turn, just ingesting enough calories not to starve to death used to be an all-day proposition. There were two distinct post-Paleolithic era strategies: herders and farmers, which eventually melded, as did the dietary styles associated with them. That the recurring conflicts over our most important resource, or the land used to produce it, were fierce and bloody should startle no one. Nature is cruel and capricious: Weather is erratic. Disasters strike. Populations increase. The obvious solution to this insecurity was to amass more subsistence, or the means to it. To support this never-ending quest, cultures evolved foods for warriors that were light and rugged for easy transport, were dried or salted for long storage, and provided optimal nourishment, often a protein. If that sounds familiar, it should. These are exactly the same qualities—with a few tweaks—that modern-day armies seek in developing and perfecting combat rations.