80's MRE's and food poisoning??

Sr. Wing Commander · Post by **Sr. Wing Commander** » Thu Feb 16, 2006 11:01 pm

I remember back in the mid 80's a story on 20/20 about how a large number of MRE's made several soldiers sick. Somehow bacteria wasn't killed during the retort process and grew in the packs. If I remember right a few soldiers died. Years later someone told me this was true but that it was mainly confined to Chiken Ala King (which looked like vomit in a pouch).

I was wondering if anyone has any links on news to this or articles or even remembers it, or if it is not true.

Post by **kman** » Fri Feb 17, 2006 10:01 am

I've read a few stories about that - seems like the issue was centered around the "Chicken ala King" MRE. This is why I refer to it as "Chicken ala Death"

. I actually tried one of those from 1992 and it was still good and I didn't get sick. Whew.

When I get some time, I'll have to dig around and see if I can find those articles.

mw509 · Post by **mw509** » Fri Feb 17, 2006 4:06 pm

Would it be possible to find the original 20/20 clip on the internet some where?

Post by **kman** » Fri Feb 17, 2006 5:48 pm

It can be kind of tough finding archived video like that. Text and news stories stand a better chance of getting archived either by the original producers, Google cache, or The Internet Archive/Wayback Machine:

http://www.archive.org/

But it's worth digging around to see what we can find.