In watching the “Food Considerations” video, a few thoughts came to me. I’m not discounting any of the ideas put out in the video. There were all solid. I just want to add a few things. A bit of outside the box thinking and adding a little bit of physiology.
First, one advantage brought up with MREs is that they come with a heater. While this is true, that very same heater can be used to heat water to cook the freeze-dried meals.
By using both the heater and the hot beverage bag together, you can heat up water for the freeze dried meals without a fire or stove.
www.mredepot.com/product-p/mre457.htmwww.mredepot.com/product-p/aq9092.htmSo, now we come to the decision of Freeze-dried over MREs.
The basic facts are covered in the video, MREs weigh more, because they contain ‘liquid’ and have already been cooked. Freeze-dried weigh less, but need water to reconstitute them. Those are the basic tradeoffs.
Now, let’s look at reality and do an apples to apples weight comparison.
I’m not going to go into details with actual numbers. I’ll just give the concept.
Let’s consider an MRE entre and how many calories (and maybe more importantly, what the makeup of those calories are) and also consider the weight.
Now we will do the same thing for a Freeze-dried meal considering both the same calories and the weight of both the meal and the water needed to reconstitute it. We can even add in the weight of the MRE heater and hot beverage bag to make the comparison even more fair.
Now, we have a more apples to apples comparison. We do lose the 'benefit' of Freeze-dried being light and packable, but do we lose all the benefits?
So, here is another piece of information alluded to in the video, however its full importance was not stated. In the video, it was stated that if your food contained mostly protein, that it would require more water to digest. That is absolutely correct, but the thing is that all food requires water to digest. If you continue to eat food without consuming water, your body (here is the physiology part) will steal water from inside your body to assist in the digestion of the food that you just consumed. This is not good any way you look at it.
www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-topics/Anatomy/your-digestive-system/Pages/anatomy.aspxSo, not only were you dehydrated because you weren’t consuming water (you ran out), now you are even more dehydrated due to eating a meal.
So, where am I going with this?
Going back to our apples to apples comparison, I’m just going to make up some numbers for you to visualize the concept.
Let’s say that the person packing MREs has the 3 liter bladder mentioned in the video for drinking water as does the person parking Freeze-dried food. Apples to apples.
However, as I mentioned before, the Freeze-dried guy has also packed the appropriate amount of water needed to reconstitute his food. So MRE guy might have 8 pounds of food in addition to his 3 liter bladder and Freeze-dried guy might have 3 pounds of food and 5 pounds of water needed to reconstitute that food in addition to his 3 liter bladder. Both guys have roughly 8 pounds "in the calculations work out that way, which I'm not sure based on the Freeze-dried meals chosen".
Both guys hit a dry spell and ran out of drinking water in their 3 liter bladders.
If the MRE guy eats, he is worse as mentioned above.
The Freeze-dried guy still has some extra water that he can drink and maybe ration a bit for some calories to get him safely to the next water procurement spot.
The trick would be in calculating the weight of the MREs in comparison to Freeze-dried meals with their required water and deciding if that extra bulk/weight was something, you were OK with. You just lost all of the weight and space saved by using Freeze-dried meals, but depending on your location, having the extra water on hand might be a good thing.
I’m sure there are some flaws in my logic and no, I didn’t calculate the weights out to see if there was a legitimate return on your investment.
I do know that the Mountain House Long Range Patrol Rations ‘generally’ have more calories than MRE entrees and calories that are more useful at that. They are also 'cubed' for ease of packing and saving space.
www.mountainhouse.com/m/category/military.htmlJust some more considerations with food. The links I displayed up above were just the easiest/quickest I could come up with via Google. They are probably not the best prices or anything like that. I just found some examples.
As always, just my opinion. I’m not trying to ruffle anyone’s feathers.
Take care,
K
