Thanks for posting this. I had a 12 year old can of beef stew yesterday that was very tasty.
I remember back in the 70s when I was stationed in Germany. My job required 50% TDY for 4 or 6 weeks at a time to some pretty remote mountaintops and locations all the way from Iceland, through England, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Greece and Turkey.
Pretty poor back then. We’d buy surplus rations and eat them for lunch so we could collect the per diem cash and actually make some extra dough. I remember buying a few boxes of K rations (WWII and Korea), and then some C rations. Didn’t die. I liked the potted meat and crackers. Oh, each pack came with matches and a pack of 4-cigarettes....