99% Invisible - 186- War and Pizza

Episode Date: October 28, 2015

Households tend to take pantry food for granted, but canned beans, powered cheese, and bags of moist cookies were not designed for everyday convenience. These standard products were made to meet the needs of the military. Reporter Tina Antolini, host … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. A few years ago, on Estacia Marx till Salcedo was making lunch for her kids. And so like most moms, I do a lot of lunches. And when I do that, I usually try and find a balance between healthy and not so healthy. On the not quite so healthy side, she might pack some cheesy crackers, and on the healthy side, she'd make her kids a sandwich. Or at least, she thought the sandwiches that she was making were healthy, until she looked closely at the ingredients. I realized that I'd pulled the package deli me out of my fridge, that the bread came

from my bread box, and I've been sitting there for a while, and I've been sitting in the supermarket, and then had been manufactured way back when. And Anastasia got to thinking, it is kind of unnatural for food to last this long. Is this really a healthy lunch? That's Tina Antillini, host of the podcast Gravy, helping us tell the story. Anastasia looked at the package deli meat,

the store-bought sliced bread, the processed cheese. As it happens, she's a journalist. She writes a lot about food. And so she started looking into it. I went through all of those ingredients that you just listened to, including the mustard and the mayonnaise. And at least two of the items, the package deli meat and the supermarket bread, took her research ultimately

to this obscure US army base, the NADIC Soldier System Center. This is very strange. What is the army doing in food? What the army is doing in food is, of course, feeding the troops. And by strange extension, you and me. Military organizations have actually been involved in food production ever since the earliest combat rations. The first combat rations were probably eaten by the Sumerians.

They did carry with them into battle, barley cakes, beer, and green onions. Back in the early days of organized warfare, if you were marching into battle and didn't know when you'd get home again, you needed to bring something that would keep. All of these rations were based on traditional methods of preserving food, drying, saltine, smoking, and pickling. But the real innovation was coming up with a preserved protein. Ancient Egyptians went to war carrying dried fish with them. And in the 11th and 12th centuries the Mongols preserved their meat by storing it under their saddles. And the salt from the horse would enter the meat and the

the pressure of the rider's weight would push the meat down and that would actually create this preserved meat. So that that's kind of salted by horse sweat and compressed by your butt on the saddle. Mongolian methods aside for some 2000 years, military food rations pretty much stayed the same. Flower, beans, a hunk of salted meat, and some heart attack, a kind of twice baked biscuit. Or in the case of Napoleon's army, soldiers would just go plunder the countryside and eat whatever they found.

Which became a problem when soldiers went MIA trying to get food when there was a battle to fight. And so in 1795, the French government and the agriculture department decided they needed a new way to preserve food for the troops. They announced a contest, 12,000 francs to anyone who could come up with a new method. A man named Nicholas Appair responded. He was, at the time, the celebrity chef. He cooked for kings and queens.

And a pair found a way to cook and preserve food using glass and metal containers. This is canning, and it revolutionized the world. This was the first time that a military had taken on a big problem in food technology and solved it. And militaries would continue to innovate around food for soldiers and sailors. Fast forward to World War II in the United States. During World War II, the country had to ramp up from feeding 400,000 soldiers to ultimately 11.6 million. American troops had packs of meat and cheese and crackers,

as well as canned goods, of course. But these Russians didn't survive the rigors of war too well. And they really hadn't been sufficient to feed so many soldiers in so many different locations, in so many different climates and conditions. The military had been unprepared to feed their soldiers during World War II. The government said, well you know what?

We don't ever want to have to go through this again. It was just horrible to have to ramp up. So let's maintain ourselves in a state of preparedness. And so preparedness became policy after World War II. To support that, they created a system of 700 federal laboratories, And so preparedness became policy after World War II. To support that, they created a system of 700 federal laboratories all devoted to developing military technologies. And one of them is the NADIC Soldier System Center outside of Boston.

So, this looks pretty much like suburbia with the exception of the intense electric fence. Except for that barbed-wire fence in the guard posted at the gate, the Nadex Soldier System Center looks like a normal office park. But this office park is the epicenter of the modern military diet. It is the home of the combat feeding directorate, which has been here since the 1950s. First of all, can I have you introduce yourself to me? Absolutely, I'm Stephen Moody, the director of combat feeding here at the Nadex soldier research development and engineering center.

Stephen showed me how military food technology has evolved over time. Cans, for instance, have since been replaced by flexible lined pouches, because cans are bulky and heavy. And since the 1980s troops have been eating their meals out of those pouches, in what are called MREs, meals ready to eat. The first MRE contained a lot of freeze-dried components, a freeze-dried meat patty that you would have to add water to, and then heat it, and having eaten a few of those in my time as an active duty soldier. It had to get it just right. It was always either a little bit too soggy or a little bit

crunchy at the end of the day. Ever since World War II, the combat feeding directorate has been tasked with overcoming certain challenges inherent in food. It spoils, it grows mold, it loses flavor. And if you're trying to feed a vast number of people and climates ranging from the desert to the humid jungle over a long periods of time, you have to figure out ways of making food that will avoid its natural tendency to go bad. So the combat feeding directorate has whole teams of microbiologists, engineers, and other scientists working to extend to the lives of foods. Food engineering preservation and stabilization, for instance, would be the ones that would

try to figure out how to make that product shelf stable for two, three, five years without refrigeration exactly. And then there's the little detail of taste, making this stuff actually palatable. The modern MRE has come a long way from that chewy freeze-dried meat patty. Today's high-tech pouches come with another pouch that chemically heats the ration. The US military now offers 24 different entrees, from cheese tortellini to lemon pepper tuna to jambalaya. On the Jambalaya, for instance, trying to make sure that Jambalaya would last for three years at 80 degrees in a pouch is a challenge.

So we tweak the spices, we tweak the ingredients so that we can make sure that the flavor is optimal at the end of the shelf life as well as the beginning. So that soldier on a mountain in Afghanistan can enjoy a flexible pouch of three-year-old jambalaya. I mean, that's the goal. But it's not always the reality when you open an MRE. So it was just like just gelatinous barbecue beef that had this pungent smell to it. Louisiana native Ben Armstrong spent five years

in the Marine Corps. Don't even get him started on the John Belaya MRE for a Louisiana. Well, it's just sacrilege. I would never try it. And so the military isn't just working on MREs. They're also trying to develop foods that look and taste more like,

you know what you eat at 3 a.m. You're like really, really hungry and your judgment is somewhat impaired. We actually took something like a hot pocket that you'd find in the freezer at the grocery store and made one that was shelf stable. And we did that by controlling the water activity and the pH of the different components within the product so that they wouldn't allow bacteria to grow. They packaged it up with something called an oxygen scavenger,

a little packet of iron filings that absorbs oxygen, keeping it away from the bread. So mold wouldn't grow on the bread. And we designed hurdles to each step within the process that might allow spoilage to the point where we now have a sandwich that will last for three years at room temperature. And this leads us to the holy grail of military food science.

An item that soldiers have been requesting since time immemorial... pizza. Pizza that is shelf stable for three years. This is our pilot plan. Stephen took me inside a massive industrial kitchen full of giant kettles, mixers, ovens. I see a worker in a lab coat and hair net standing over an enormous pot stirring vigorously. What, hi. It's cooking. Hi, we're going to some pizza sauce.

In another corner of the pilot plant, a different worker is slicing up a pizza topping that at first I thought I misheard. Did you call this Osmo Roni? You call it Osmo Roni. Osmo Roni. Osmo Roni. Osmo-roni. Osmo-roni.

Osmo-roni, or Osmotic pepperoni, looks like a roll of toilet paper made of meat. A thin sheet of beef rolled up with a layer of plastic to prevent it from sticking to itself. It's preserved using osmotic dehydration. The technology basically involves running thin sheets of meat through a special water bath that removes water from the meat itself, preserving it. I tasted it. I probably if somebody had just served me that I would not have even questioned what it was. No, no you wouldn't. I mean, it tastes like pepperoni. I would probably increase the amount of pepperoni flavor, but those are some of the things that we're working on. The army is aiming to have shelf-stable pizza in combat zones by 2017, and maybe soon after

that, in your local grocery store. This is another part of the combat feeding directorate, ever since its origins after World War II. When the military decided it needed to create a backup plant to feed troops in the event of a sudden war. And so the US government made it a requirement for these labs to share their findings with the commercial sector. What we try to do when we come up with a new technology is make sure that it's not

military specific, so that there are commercial applications for it. And that can only help us with economies of scale. If something is military unique and it's only produced for the US military, the costs are going to be a lot higher than if it's produced for the commercial sector as well. And it's not just costs. If there's ever a large demand for these combat rations, like in a time of war, it's good for the military if there are companies out there that already have the technology to make these kinds of products.

And of course, if the private sector has these technologies, they'll use them. On us. This means there's evidence of the army's influence all over the Gris' Reiles. For example, your children can thank the armed services for their favorite food, mac and cheese. Cheese powder in the mac and cheese, and then you'd have also an army cheesy snack foods that might be around. Anastasia Mark's Dicell Sado took all of her research, starting with her children's lunch, and wrote a book called Combat Ready Kitchen, how the US military shapes the way you eat. So at this point, she can walk into a grocery store and point out all the foods that have

the military's fingerprints on them, which is exactly what she did with me. We've got some TV dinners. Turkey Tetruthsini and Meatloaf and gravy and Turkey Pot Pie. The TV dinner, the frozen entree was developed by an army contractor to feed bomber troops on overseas flights. And this prompted the military to come up

with what became the microwave. Yes, the microwave is a military innovation. The military also developed freeze-drying technology, so instant coffee, teas, soups. The army also hit upon a game changer, but they call intermediate moisture foods. Foods that are moist and also bacteria resistant. You see this in energy bars, pillowy sliced bread and packaged cookies. One thing that cookie makers did is once they understood the scientific they started

and making this often chewy cookies in the olden days, supermarket things would be crisp. As we go through the grocery store, Anastasia stops and squeezes packages. She gets excited about a package of Thai basil and sweet chili stir-fry sauce. Okay, the reason I feel it up is that to feel the packaging. This is a retort pouch, which was developed by the Nadex Hunter. Those flexible pouches are the same packaging from the MREs, but now it's for squeezy applesauce

and yogurts, tuna and sauce packets. It can start to be a little bit haunting as you go grocery shopping, the military everywhere. I started to feel like I was walking around looking at ghosts of conber Russians. I think about it when I'm with my kids because they do seem to prefer those. It's not just Anastasia's kids.

These food products are beloved and ubiquitous. From Cheetos to Chewy granola bars, military innovations have a tendency to get worked into our diets. And most people don't stop to question how a packaged cookie can remain soft for eternity. And I think most consumers say, hey, it comes in the package to the company, says it's okay, I'm not going to worry about it, and we go for that. Anastasia says it's unclear how or if these food preservation techniques are affecting our health.

There are a lot of ways that the military has changed the chemistry of different foods, and not all of them have been studied. But she's definitely hesitating before putting these types of foods in her kids' lunches. The average civilian doesn't need food to stay preserved for years at a time, but it's showing up on our shelves thanks to the military and we're buying it. This is what we're given, the shelf stable and the mold resistant, meticulously designed to simulate the fresh and the familiar. So if in a few years you happen to buy a shelf-stable pizza in your local supermarket, be prepared, that pepperoni might actually be... osmironi.

99% invisible was produced this week by Tina Antillini, with Avery Truffleman, Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, Kurt Colstad, and me Roman Mars. Tina Antillini hosts the podcast Gravy, which is a production of the Southern Foodways Alliance. You can check it out at SouthernFoodways.org-slashgravy. You can find a link to Anastasia Marks Del Salcedos book combat ready kitchen how the US military shapes the way you eat on our website that's 99pi.org. 99% of visible is a project of KALW in San Francisco and produced out of the offices of

Arxine, an architecture in interiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Radio Tapio.