Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat - Hardcover

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ANASTACIA MARX DE SALCEDO is a food writer whose work has appeared in Salon, Slate, the Boston Globe, and Gourmet magazine and on PBS and NPR blogs. She’s worked as a public health consultant, news magazine publisher, and public policy researcher. She lives in Boston, MA. Visit AnastaciaMarxdeSalcedo.com.

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For about three days when we were in Kuwait in 2003 and U.S. forces were advancing into Iraq, the sirens would go off, and we’d have to put on our gas masks and our MOPP* gear and get into our bunker. Saddam was sending what we thought were Scuds with chemical weapons at us, but actually turned out to be smaller missiles. We’d have to wait for the all clear, which would sometimes take a long time.

We really shouldn’t have been eating in the bunker, but sometimes we’d get hungry, so we’d eat an MRE.* Usually only one person had one, so we were sharing between everyone. There were probably ten of us in there. It’s a concrete bunker where you can’t stand up, you can’t really sit down, you’re sitting on a sandbag, and you’re leaning forward because your head’s hitting the ceiling. Everyone’s wearing flak jackets, environmental suits, and a gas mask and helmet. So we’d pass around an MRE, take off the gas mask for ten seconds, and grab a bite of, like, Salisbury steak. And then we’d put our gas masks back on and pass it over to the next guy.

I remember when the guy pulled out the MRE. Everyone sitting in there is so hungry, we haven’t eaten in hours, and so when he offered to share, we were all really happy. It was kind of like a bonding moment. We knew that we didn’t have any control over what was going to happen, and we were all breaking the rules by taking our gas masks off and eating when we shouldn’t be. It brought us all to the same place. We were all stuck there. It didn’t matter whether you were a private or a master sergeant, you were stuck there in that bunker.

—DJ, Corporal, United States Marine Corps, Al Jabar, Kuwait, and Al Asad, Iraq, 2003–6

Chapter 1

UNPACKING YOUR CHILD’S LUNCH BOX

D irty, hungry, uncomfortable, and scared. Most of us can’t imagine what it’s like to eat under the circumstances that DJ and his squad did. The experiences of war, if an American constant during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, seem remote to the average person. And we certainly don’t imagine that the entrée the soldiers shared—a several-years-old beef patty with brown sauce in a laminated plastic-and-foil pouch—has anything to do with the food that fills our refrigerators, cupboards, and shelves. But it does.

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A PASSIONATE HOME COOK, one who read recipe books in bed like novels, preferred browsing at an ethnic grocer’s or a farmers’ market to shoe shopping, and reliably created magical dinners where people lingered long into the night, talking, drinking, and nibbling until there were no leftovers. Although my own mother was indifferent to the matter, as a child I silently apprenticed myself to the three best cooks I knew—my Yankee grandmother, my Sephardic New Yorker grandfather, and my Mexican friend’s mother—sidling into their kitchens and absorbing by osmosis their doings. At the age of seven, I proudly presented my parents with my first creation: “spiced eggs” scrambled with every single flavoring from the rack. By the time I was in my midtwenties, I had read everything in M. F. K. Fisher’s oeuvre, and, inspired by—but not following—the thousands of recipes I’d mentally collected, cosseted my college boyfriend nightly with delectable little suppers prepared just for him.

When the new millennium rolled around, I’d acquired a husband—from Cuba, in Ecuador—and become a mother, which only strengthened my resolve to concoct everything from scratch, even pancakes, whipped cream, and mac ’n’ cheese. I spent an inordinate amount of time provisioning, trucking out to farms weekly for two separate community-supported agriculture locations, one for meat and the other for vegetables; ladling bulk items into flimsy plastic bags at my local co-op; and scouring Asian, Latin, and Middle Eastern groceries for exotic produce, spices, specialty meats, and condiments. Regardless of how much my children pleaded, I refused to stop at McDonald’s on car trips. I even became a leader of Boston’s Slow Food convivium, finding time to organize a cocktail party featuring local Brazilian culture, teach Boston schoolkids how to make their own vegetable burritos, and celebrate the humble bean with a hundred-plus-person potluck and a reading by a renowned food historian. It was exhausting. It was fun. And it made me feel good—proudly conscientious. As many do, I fervently believed that it was important to cook, that it brought together my family in a vital ritual, that the dishes I produced were healthier and more satisfying, and that it was part of a human heritage that embedded us in the world, both past and present.

Which is why, when it came to school, I made the extra effort to pack my daughters a nutritious, homemade meal. I could have signed them up for the school meals program, where blue-capped cafeteria ladies grimly plop onto trays a hot entrée, such as the dreaded sloppy joe, insipid pizza, or turkey with gravy; a vegetable (canned peas/green beans/corn); a slightly rancid carton of milk; and Jell-O, fruit cocktail, or a mealy apple. (The menu has improved slightly in recent years—wheat instead of white buns, no dessert, and some scraggly schoolyard-grown broccoli.) But an involved parent, a mother who cares about what her children eat, makes their lunches herself. To do so, I relaxed my stance against processed foods, which, I have to confess, had long ago snuck into my home, first with my husband and eventually, under the duress of relentless lobbying, with me. Armed with child-pleasing supplies culled from the shelves of the supermarket, I set about my task. Into the nylon carrier with its cunningly zipped insulated vinyl compartments and controlled-atmosphere Tupperware, I put Goldfish, an energy bar, a juice pouch, and a sandwich. This last I’d assembled with my own two hands: soft twelve-grain bread, turkey ham, and a slice of American cheese swathed in Saran wrap. A couple of baby carrots and some grapes to round things out. I put the two lunch boxes in the refrigerator, poured myself a fishbowl of Shiraz, and went to bed, confident that I’d done my best by them.

Or had I?

As my children had gotten older, I’d started a side career as a food writer. After a few pieces about Latin American cooking—fiestas de Pascua (Easter), Ecuadorian soups, street food—I found myself increasingly drawn to writing not about home cooking, my own or that of others, but about the industrial foodstuffs that I, with annoyance, accepted as staples in my pantry. First off the block was that insidious impostor Annie’s mac ’n’ cheese, pretending to be more wholesome than it was: I read the label very carefully, and it turned out to have practically the same components as the neon-orange standby, Kraft’s. The Internet exploded, mostly with vitriolic responses by parents defending their reliance on “the Bunny” and his wares as a decision that was somehow healthier than buying an almost identical nutrition-free product from a major conglomerate.

I had found my topic.

My next piece, on breakfast cereal, led me deeper into the real world of food processing. I dug into the history of our archetypical carbohydrate and read up on its modern-day production, schooling myself in the functioning of that mainstay of manufacturing, the extruder, which uses a screw or a ram to push metal, plastic, ceramics, and food through a long chamber, where it is heated by friction and pressure (and, in some cases, electrical heat) and then forced through a die. In addition to cereal, extruders are used to create many other...