Working my way through an old case of 1982 MREs, I decided to try a 1982 Beef Slices in Barbecue Sauce MRE packed by Sopakco (I swear, I'll never get bored of trying these and I appreciate the comments in the other threads.) Let's take a look!
Here's a look at the items placed on the tray.
This ration includes peanut butter, Beef Slices with Barbecue Sauce, crackers, freeze dried peaches, chocolate covered oatmeal cookie, and the accessory packet. If you look closely at the accessory packet, they underlined "Toilet Paper". I wonder why this is. You may also be able to tell that the cardboard sleeve containing the beef slices retort pouch is expanded more than the previous menus. I don't know if this is normal or a sign of age.
Here's the Beef Slices w/ BBQ Sauce in its retort pouch. It may be hard to tell but the retort pouch is still expanded.
When boiling it in water, it continued to expand more, almost like a balloon being filled with air. I don't think that's normal but I couldn't call it quite yet.
Here's a look at the items in the accessory packet. It contained a chocolate fudge bar along with the other standard items.
And the ration, fully prepared.
When I poured the beef slices with BBQ sauce on the try, it actually smelled pretty good. I can only guess why the retort pouch was expanding so much when I was boiling it. The BBQ sauce tasted like a standard, store bought BBQ sauce like Bullseye or other similar brands although I can't do a good comparison because I rarely use BBQ sauce. The beef slices smelled a lot like beef jerky and even looked a bit dried like beef jerky. In the second photo, it looks pretty unappetizing. My guess is the white parts are fat on top of the slices. I took a small bite of it and the BBQ sauce was still tasty and the beef slices tasted a lot like beef jerky but as expected, it tasted sour/bitter and my tongue felt numb. Sadly, I had to dispose of this one.
The freeze dried peaches also did not make it since they'd been exposed to oxygen and moisture at some point. They were very pliable smelled like decomposing fruit. The chocolate fudge bar also went bad. The first few small bites were okay but as I took a bigger bite it tasted bitter and made my tongue numb, almost worse than the beef slices did. I think it's interesting how our sense of taste will tell us not to consume something that's bad, despite how good it may look and smell or how edible it once was.
As noted in the previous reviews, the peanut butter with crackers were still good. I've never seen bad MRE peanut butter and I've seen bad MRE crackers once or twice in the hundreds that I've consumed over the last few years. The same applies with the chocolate covered oatmeal cookie. Since the creamer was clumped up, I decided against preparing the coffee.
