Portable Food: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2022 - Softcover

An Army Marches on Its Stomach: Portable Foods in War and Peace

Johanna Mendelson Forman

The early twenty-first century has not been peaceful. From the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the ongoing conflicts in Syria and Yemen, to the frozen conflicts in Africa, the common challenge in all of these crises has been access to food. For militaries engaged in fighting and for civilians who are in harm’s way, how to get people fed is both a logistical and a humanitarian problem.

As I write this paper, we are witnessing the brutal fighting in Ukraine after the unprovoked invasion by Russia in February 2022. This conflict involves thousands of foreign troops and local forces that need adequate calories to fight. Civilians fleeing this conflict must have enough food and water to survive.

One thing that has not changed over time is the concept of portable food. Since organized warfare began, in addition to weapons, food has played a leading role in whether a military force will be able to prevail. Without the requisite calories, success in battle is jeopardized. Napoleon Bonaparte’s oft repeated refrain that ‘an army marches on its stomach’ reflected this challenge. He demanded new technologies for preserving foods to make them portable.

The story of food portability in modern times is really a history of technologies that ensured that armies were well-fed when on the battlefield rather than left to forage for their dinner. Starting in the early nineteenth century, the continued efforts to transform our daily bread into a feast with a three-year shelf life has driven research and enhanced the notion of a portable meal.

Ironically, the invention of portable meals for the military has also become a part of more popular culture related to war – the predilection for portable foods by survivalists. Starting with the Cold War, when citizens filled their nuclear fall-out shelters with military meals, to more recent times, when people are preparing for increased natural disasters due to climate change, a growing industry of portable meals has become a feature of online advertising and YouTube videos.

This paper will explore the origins of portable meals for the military, examine the technological advances that have made it possible for longer field engagement in conflicts, and review the expansion of portable meals to the civilian population. Meals Ready-to-Eat (MREs) have become the gold standard of portable meals used by armies around the world, in part because of the investment that the US government made in

An Army Marches on Its Stomach

the twentieth century to create foods that were both nutritious and easy to carry. Today, food portability has expanded to the needs of civilians in conflict regions, with the creation of humanitarian rations to help offset starvation and malnutrition. It is an important component of the portable meal industry, but also a reflection of the ongoing global impact that migration from war and climate has on daily access to food. The war in Ukraine has brought renewed attention to the challenges that modern

armies, even a great superpower like Russia, have in provisioning their troops.
I will touch upon this subject, albeit briefly, because of the anecdotal evidence that the failure to adequately supply the Russian army has contributed to its inability to achieve military objectives, despite its numbers and weaponry. Reverting to plunder and foraging, the Russian troops demonstrate how difficult logistics can stymie an army. Finally, I will examine another dimension of portable meals – their attraction in popular food culture, where consuming meals over social media feeds has become a way to demonstrate what I would call ‘battlefield terroir’, with different nations’ portable meals

gaining a following in yet another dimension of our contemporary food-crazed culture.

The Origins of Portable Military Meals

Chinese warrior and philosopher Sun Tzu (500 BCE) advocated foraging for food or
stealing it from an enemy as the way to feed his armies. Ancient Egyptians also encouraged foraging, even as they introduced a strategy of food storage depots along the campaign
route. But foraging and plunder alone was not a sustainable means of providing warriors
with adequate calories, even if they had enough weaponry.1 It took the Romans to create 241 a better organized supply and logistical system for their army. The Romans’ success in imperial conquests is a result of a much more sophisticated way to provision their soldiers.

The Romans also discovered the importance of portability: ‘The load carried by Roman legionaries when marching to battle has been estimated at about 20 kg. with soldiers expected to maintain a marching pace of about 4.5 kph for distances of about 30 km.’ In addition to their military equipment, ‘each Roman legionary would typically carry several days of food, as well as cooking equipment and a bladder of water’, and also some salt, dried bread, wine, and salted meats. What is clear is that Roman armies ate a varied diet of proteins, legumes, and cheese. Grain was believed to make up the bulk of a Roman soldier’s diet.2 The typical Roman ration contained about 3400 kcl and weighed about 1.3 kg.3

Rome’s technological contribution to portable meals was the addition of salting to preserve foods. This made it possible to have more variety. Garum, a fish paste that was used as a salting ingredient, was one source of preservation, but it is not clear whether this substance was carried with legionaries into battle.4

The Technologies of Portable Food

From the end of the Roman empire through the Middle Ages, 1500 years, there was no major advance in food technology that would allow for greater food portability.5 It was not

Portable Food

until the nineteenth century and the ascendance of Napoleon as emperor that the quest for greater technology to enhance portability emerged as an essential part of military strategy. During the nineteenth century, militaries usually travelled with their supplies

and cattle. In the American Civil War, for example, herds of beef cattle followed the army. Milk also made it to the battlefield, thanks to the invention of the condensed variety by Gail Borden in 1856. And desiccated potatoes and vegetables, a precursor to dehydration, made these items portable.6 Coffee, an indispensable drink and stimulant, was given to Union soldiers just before a battle, as a way to get them ready to fight. The Confederacy was deprived of this drink because the Union blockade of the South made it difficult to procure supplies for soldiers.7

The twentieth century saw vast advances in food technology that allowed for different forms of portable foods. But it was not until World War II that the rations we know today were developed in laboratories dedicated to military use. The goal was to have foods that would meet emergency needs in the trenches...