There comes a time during the planning portion of any operation where you get overwhelmed by the finances. You just get anxious due to how much everything costs. It seems like you spend all of your time taking money out of ATMs just to hand it to cashiers, or entering your credit card number and CVV into e-commerce websites. I have officially hit that phase of thru-hike planning and it is freaking me out.
Recently a lot of my anxiety has come from food. I have been crunching the numbers recently on just how many calories it takes to walk over 2000 miles. And just how much it costs to purchase one calorie of non-perishable foodstuffs. I am desperately looking for that magic website that sells beef jerky for $5 a pound or fistfuls of sunflower seeds for a quarter. During those searches I came across a website selling daily humanitarian rations for $15 a case. Since a case contains ten rations, that breaks down to $1.50 per ration.
Daily humanitarian rations are a “food gift from the people of the United States of America”. They are most usually airdropped someplace like Haiti after a hurricane or some African nation during a famine or eastern Europe after some dictator launches a regional war. The box they come in looks just like an MRE (meal ready to eat) box and the meal itself contains lots of the same things you’ll find in an MRE.
Each individual meal bag is like a salmon colored MRE bag. Quick aside, the bags used to be bright yellow so they stood out. However, cluster bombs are also bright yellow so people would actively avoid daily ration bags because they didn’t want to get blown up. So they changed them to be salmon colored. Fortunately, the guys that make cluster bombs haven’t switched to salmon yet. Although that seems like a really bad-ass tactic if one wanted to maximize the amount of little kids they blow up. Take notes, Department of War.
On to the rations themselves. The box I purchased was packaged in August 2022. Each bag contains enough food for one person for one day. This means two entrees plus several side dish options to snack on in between. Nutritional breakdown of each ration is roughly 2000-2200 calories with a macronutrient breakdown of about 60% carbs, 30% fat, and 10% protein.
Because the rations are meant to go all over the world to all sorts of people with allergic and dietary and religious restrictions, the entrees are all vegan or vegetarian. In other words: beans, beans, and more beans. A box of ten rations contains five different “menus”, each with slightly different combinations of entrees.
Because I didn’t want to waste the entire box doing testing, I only ate two different rations. The first one I chose was menu #1. For breakfast I had the strawberry toaster pastries, also known as Pop-Tarts. This wasn’t some kind of knock-off Pop-Tarts or anything, they were actual Pop-Tarts still in their Pop-Tarts foil wrapper. They tasted like strawberry unfrosted Pop-Tarts if someone sat on them for an hour.
For lunch I had beans and rice in tomato sauce. The beans in question were navy beans. This was a fabulous entree for a glorified MRE. Tasted great and quite filling. Remember that I said “filling”, because we’ll come back to it later.
In between meals the ration contained two packs of MRE crackers with peanut butter and strawberry jam. This daily ration was brought to you by the strawberry council. The most amazing thing about this ration and the other one I ate is that all four sets of crackers were completely unbroken. If you’ve never eaten an MRE, the odds of finding just one unbroken pack of crackers are up there with discovering a new star using only a magnifying glass.
The second entree was lentil stew. Also rather filling. As someone whose mother loved to make lentils, I understand that they are basically a superfood. My big problem with this stew was that it was almost devoid of taste. Fortunately, the ration came with salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper to give it a little kick and make the stew palatable.
Beyond that, there was a fig bar and a shortbread cookie for your sweet tooth. The fig bar tasted like some store bought version, far from bad but not exceptionally good. The shortbread cookie was the correct amount of sweetness but just a little dry. This ration needed to contain a powdered milk packet to dunk it in.
In addition to everything mentioned above, the humanitarian ration contained a spoon, napkin, pack of matches, sugar packet, and moist towelette. No drink packets or heaters. It also contained a weird pictogram of, I guess, describing how to eat the food inside in case you’ve never seen packaged food before. Maybe you were too busy running from a dictator’s death squads or a tsunami warning to ever try one before now.
Let’s circle back to my comment on how “filling” the entrees were. Both entrees contained maltodextrin among the first four ingredients. Maltodextrin is a food additive that comes from corn or rice or wheat. It is typically added to food to add bulk, among other reasons. It can trick you into thinking your food portion is more filling than it actually is, One reason some people do not like maltodextrin as an additive is because it has a higher glycemic index than table sugar. It may also cause gastrointestinal inflammation at high doses. Another good reason not to like it is because it causes flatulence.
Between the beans and the maltodextrin squeezed into everything, it was a pretty loud night in my apartment. It was just like that campfire scene in Blazing Saddles. The farting never ceased.
For the second day, I decided on menu #4. Interestingly, menu #4 was exactly the same as menu #1 except the beans and rice with tomato sauce was subbed out for a pasta with tomatoes and sauce entree. That entree contained lentils and maltodextrin, despite there being no mention of them in the title. It also wound up tasting very good by MRE standards and is something I could definitely eat in the future. Everything else was exactly the same: Pop-Tarts, crackers, fig bar, everything.
That night in the apartment it sounded like I had the brass section of the Austin Symphony Orchestra for a sleep over. If you ever bring any of these daily rations with you to a campsite, make sure you are going solo. Or set up your tent all by itself on the far end of the pad.
Ultimately, this review is supposed be my opinion on the humanitarian daily ration as a meal option. I would eat these. Which is a good thing because I still have eight left. I would even buy another case. A buck fifty for a full day of rations is a tough deal to beat. I ate an item from the bag every few hours or so and never got noticeably hungry, and I walked about 10000 to 11000 steps each day.
On the negative side, each bag weighs about two pounds so it may not be worthwhile to bring too many in your backpack at once. I would describe the overall taste as slightly better than an MRE, so if you can’t stomach an MRE you should avoid. Also, the lack of variety makes it somewhat disheartening to eat them more than two days in a row. And the incessant farting.
