MREInfo.com

I received my 4-Pack of vintage MREs yesterday and decided to jump right in with Menu 6. I don't know if these are old enough to be the infamous 4 fingers of death - hopefully I don't find out the hard way.
The menu can be found here: http://www.mreinfo.com/mres/mre-menus/mre-menus-1996/

The contents of the bag were as listed, and the entrée was labeled Beef Frankfurters.
All of the contents were in great condition. The beverage base was grape. The creamer had hardened, which I've read is typical. The Tabasco bottle was intact, with no leaks, although the sauce itself had darkened a bit. The peanut butter still felt soft. The candy was Charms.
OK - on to the show.

The grape beverage was darker than I expected, but tasted fine - nice and grapey. The pineapple had darkened, and didn't smell like much of anything. I tasted a piece, and it didn't taste bad exactly, just not like pineapple. I decided to skip eating the rest.
The potato sticks looked and smelled fine, so I ate all of those. They weren't rancid, but tasted a little "greasy".
The crackers looked fine and tasted just a bit off. The big surprise was the peanut butter. I kneaded the package, opened it and put a dollop on the cracker, and it tasted - good. Really good in fact! For 20 year old peanut butter, it was great.
The iced tea mix was ok - it didn't seem to dissolve as easily at should have.

Then I moved on to the "Four Fingers of Death". The FRH worked better than I had expected, as I didn't really expect it to get warm at all. I could see that the powder had leaked out, as others have posted. It took about 10 minutes to really get warm, and it never got REALLY hot, but it was hot enough to warm the beef franks. My "or something" was a sanding block.
The frankfurters looked and smelled ok, maybe some minor darkening in places. I decided to use caution and only ate one half of one of the "fingers". And followed it with a slug of vodka. It tasted fine, again, better than I expected. It is amazing how well most of this MRE held up over almost 21 years.
The candy was sort of melted together, so I didn't try any.
I tried one of the matches, and it lit instantly. I'll save the TP and gum for later.

One interesting item in the bag was a flyer or note giving that seemed to be included to convince the consumer of the benefits of MREs and how best to use them. Have any of you folks seen these before?


It's now almost 24 hours after eating my very old peanut butter and hot dogs, and no ill effects. A success!

Nice review, thanks for sharing! I'm glad your 4 fingers of death experience went well; I've heard of a cpl that didn't

Great review and pics! Yes, they used to put those cards in a lot of the MREs. I'm not sure when they stopped doing that. I've got a few stuck on the shelf in the collection.

Nice review! I personally like the beef frankfurters, aka four fingers of death

The peanut butter is something that always holds up pretty well in older MRE's.

Ryan