An Interview with Captain Elliott Emerich on Instant Coffee in Military

Transcript :

I’m currently a captain in the US Army. I graduated from West Point in 2008 so I’ve been in for about 10 years now. I am a field artillery officer, and I have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan multiple times.

I can probably trace it back to the World Wars were at that time they were called C and the T Rations, and basically they were nonperishable goods that were packaged in cans and that would distributed to soldiers. Over long periods of time you could keep a high inventory and basically you could keep it in storage for a long period of time, forward near the front lines.

So we moved from the C and the T Rations to what we call now is a meal ready to eat, the acronym MRE for short, and they are just pre-packaged basic food. If you’ve ever been like hiking or gone on a long expedition, it’s very similar to dry food in that nature so it’s high content, high calorie, but can be preserved for a long time. And the idea behind it is you can package them up into boxes and there’s about 12 MRE’s per case, and that you can take those cases and deploy them forward and keep high in big inventories over a period of time and be distributed out to the troops.

So of it and some of it isn’t, there’s a little heater that comes with some of them and so you can heat the meal a little bit. There’s not any necessarily that you add water to other than the dry, for all intensive purposes, let’s call it a milkshake. So they have milkshake ones, and some different powders like beverage powders that you can mix water into for instant beverages or some kind of pudding or milkshake.

So that’s the advantage of having a MRE or a meal ready to eat, I can store it for a long period of time, it doesn’t take time, money and energy away to basically create more cooks, more jobs within the Army in order to serve soldiers hot and fresh meals. Especially having been on a lot of operations in areas where there isn’t a whole lot of civilization and life support stuff, you have to be out basically in the woods, in the desert or on a mountainside, and you basically survive out of everything you can carry on your back. And so when you’re conducting these large scale operations over a long period of time without the life support. You know, at base you can go back to go to a cafeteria to get food that’s prepared for you, it’s there, it’s ready and you can put in your back and it doesn’t go bad. That’s the best advantage to having it. They are expensive in cost, and now I think they’re somewhere around $11.00 for a meal ready to eat. So they’re quite expensive and I’ve never done an analysis of the cost benefit of having a meal ready to eat vice the resources it would take to create a dining hall or a cafeteria to pay cooks. So typically we try to do a little bit of both, especially now that I’m moving up in the ranks and I’m doing a little bit more of the planning and oversight, we try to do a good balance of serving hot meals versus meals ready to eat. Especially when on operations and when operating in the woods.

So what I’ve realized is you appreciate those affordable luxuries a little bit more so when you do and see things a typical human is not supposed to see and do, music sounds nicer, smells are a lot more heightened, your senses are a lot more heightened, and coffee is just that little bit of joy that you get everyday that tastes that much better. Especially in or around combat zones where some of those luxuries aren’t always afforded, especially when you’re eating meals ready to eat, and so that coffee is a little bit nicer, it’s that kickstart to your day, it’s that little bit of joy, and order outside of normal chaos.

I think to try to summarize some of which we’ve talked about, now deployed forward, where you don’t have access to those luxuries and you’re eating MRE’s, instant coffee is definitely a way to go. I think to answer a part of your question, what kind of coffee do I prefer or do most soldiers prefer, I think it depends on where they’re at and what they can get while they’re there. I’m not a particular on light roast and medium and dark, I think it’s just really whatever you can get. Last time I checked, there’s not a Dunkin Donuts in Afghanistan or Iraq or at least I didn’t see one. So you can’t really be particular, you just got to pick and choose, and I think instant coffee again might not necessarily be the most joyful type of coffee that you could have but amidst everything else, it’s quite nice.