It was time for me to have a little fun and try something that's ordinarily out of any average person's comfort zone. And that would be eating a near 20 year old ration! For your reading pleasure, I present to you a 1998 Food Packet: Long Range Patrol, Beef Stew. I cannot begin to tell you how excited I was to crack this open and find what in it considering I've never had a LRP this old before.
One interesting thing I'd like to note is how the LRP is supposed to be opened. They used the old fashioned pre-1996 style instead of the peelable seal.
We've got:
- Beef Stew Cooked, Dehydrated
- Cocoa Beverage Power
- Some mysterious candy
- Granola Bar
- Oh, and is that a Chocolate Covered Oatmeal Cookie I see? It most certainly is!
- Accessory packet containing:
- 2x Toilet Paper
- Gum
- Matches
- Iodized salt
- Taster's Choice Coffee
- Creamer
- Domino sugar
And because my curiosity is getting the better of me, let's break open that candy and accessory packet. I took a pic of the back of the caramels but the camera was shaky and all of the text of the ingredients, nutrition facts, etc. were blurry. My apologies!
Awesome! Let's open the stew.
Looks identical to current production beef stew. Although the packaging is different in the current LRPs/MCWs it's still produced by Oregon Freeze Dry to this day, and I doubt the recipe has changed much if at all.
And here's the entire meal, ready to be eaten!
Oh, yes! What a treat this is going to be. At first sight the beef stew looked and smelled great, identical to a brand new package. I took a bite of it and made extra sure that nothing was off and it tasted fine! Nothing about it convinced me it's almost 20 years old. The granola bar was a tad bit on the stale side, but it was still okay. I decided to dip it into the mocha I prepared and that didn't do it much justice I'm afraid. Oh well, I still finished it off. The chocolate oatmeal bar is always a sight to behold in a ration, and as anyone would expect, it tasted great. The caramels had a bit of an aged taste and were hard to open from their individual packs, but they still tasted okay. They were not as sour as the ones you'd find in an 80's MRE. I suspect that if this LRP were to sit around for another 10 years, the caramels would begin to taste pretty sour. I decided to mix the coffee, creamer and sugar with the cocoa to make a mocha, as suggested earlier. The taster's choice coffee had gone bad so I replaced it with some Diario coffee from a 2012 LRP accessory packet I had laying around. I finished everything off with the gum and stored the matches, toilet paper and salt away for later use. What a great lunch!
