Terror in a Can

Novaya Gazeta ^ | June 6th, 2005 | Vyacheslav IZMAYLOV

[struwwelpeter]

       From a letter to the editor:
       "Not long ago in 'Novaya Gazeta'. I read Dina Rubinaya's comments on how they feed soldiers in the Israeli army. For example, one can't get yoghurt for lunch, since it's reserved for breakfast.
       I'm sending you labels from rations which were distributed for army consumption in May of this year at one of the units in Pskov. Our 'daddy' is annoyed by all of this, and decided to share it with his family. All are from expired foodstuffs.
       I ask that if you decide to use this material, not to use my last name, in order not to get my husband in trouble."
       
       We certainly do not want to get our readers in trouble, not the officer and his family who the rear-eschelon units feed with expired foodstuffs, and so we will not give out the author's last name.
       But, so that the newly-named commander of the Leningrad military district, Colonel-General Igor Puzanov, with whom this author has been long acquainted and respects as a fellow veteran of Afghanistan, so that he may make changes and take action in order to protect the health and lives of servicemembers and members of their families, we are reporting that the military members who receive expired rations serve in the Pskov district, p/o Cherekh, in officers quarters.
       
       And so, what are the rear-eschelons feeding the military in Pskov.
       Cans of barley with beef, date of production: 6 November 2002, to be used in 2 years.
       Already one and a half years expired at the time of distribution to the servicemembers.
       This is the most fresh foodstuff.
       Boiled peas. Written on the label is the means of consumption: chew and drink with water. Date of production - October 2001. To be used within 2 years.
       Expired by 1 year and 7 months.
       Applesauce. By the way, kids really love this. Date of production - 20 November 2001. Shelf-life of 24 months. At the moment of distribution to the officers, expired by one and a half years.
       Tomato sause. Date of production: 10 October 2001. Shelf-life of 24 months. Expired by 1 year and 7 months.
       In the letter from the officer's wife it was stressed that all of the food distributed to the officers was expired. No one worries about poisoning our boys. It's not from Shamil Basaev and not from Bin Laden, but from our very own Russian rear eschelon.
       On several packages the contracting agency is printed: 'Oboronprodkomplekt', while on a few the producer or middleman is shown: ZAO 'Gruppa S.V.A.', and the address: Moscow, Krzhizhanovskiy street no. 4, apt. 1, and even a telephone and fax number: 125-17-22.
       I called this number in order to find out when ZAO 'Gruppa S.V.A.' had carried out this contract for 'Oboronprodkomplekt'. Alas, this telephone number corresponds to a completely different organization.
       To search further? No, that's not to be. For now I will conduct a journalistic investigation and find out if 'Gruppa S.V.A.' sold expired products to 'Oboronprodkomplekt', or if the expired products simply sat in rear-eschelon warehouses and after a time it was decided to get rid of these foodstuffs by feeding them to officers and their families. Military memebers and their families could be poisoned. One has to prevent this poisoning of the military members and their families, and so we are sending this material to the Russian defense ministry, the commander of the Leningrad military district, the chief military attorney general's office, and we are offering to conduct a joint investigation.
       We will report the results to our readers.
       
       
A non-coincidental phone call
       
       Before sending our material, we talked with the deputy general director of 'Oboronprodkompletk', Sergey Berkutov, colonel (reserves):
       — 'Oboronprodkomplekt' carries out distribution of food packs which are called 'Individual food rations'. They pass through military inspection at acceptance and delivery from our firm, and military inspection makes a quality identification at the end of production. At warehouses of the defense and emergency ministries (with whom we have contracts), products are not to be released if they were stored for more than 22 of their 24 months of shelf-life.
       Our firm's trademark, however, is sometimes used by unscrupulous organizations, whom we are taking to court. Partly these are Georgian food factories. Some of them glue 'Oboronprodkomplekt' labels on products of unknown origin. Therefore, for the last three years we have changed labels - now they are olive colored.
       We do not ship our production direct to the unit, but to our centralized bases at the defense ministry. There is one such base in the Pskov district, and so we are also interested in your investigations and are prepared to take part.
       
       Vyacheslav IZMAYLOV, military correspondent, 'Novaya'

P.S. We ask the reader of 'Novaya Gazeta' to send letters to our address with similar information. We guarrantee that your information will be given attention.

06.06.2005

[struwwelpeter]

'Army food - the spoils of battle'

Brings back memories of the stuff we'd get in the field - all the MREs too old to donate to disasters (hence the term 'Meals Rejected by Ethiopians').

I found the blackmarket rations from Georgia angle to be interesting. Some people counterfeit DVDs, some money, and some army rations.

What a world we live in ;-)

[fat city]

No pity here. In the early 70's we used to get c-rations canned for WWII. Including Lucky Strike greens.

[GSlob]

Well, expired apple filling ["povidlo" is a kind of a pie filling, much thicker than "sok"=juice] is for the officers. And what kind of crap is being fed to the enlisted men?

[BIGLOOK]

MREs too old to eat.....?

May I recommend the Lima beans with Ham in the old C-Rats. mmmm um mmm mmmm!(That's the last sound a troop made after having eaten one on a dare)

[struwwelpeter]

I've had it, except for the color it's great. I translated it as applesauce, since that was the closest equivalent. The enlisted are probably getting lots of perlovki and grechki, the breakfast of champions.

The officers probably don't care too much about what the soldiers are eating, as much as they worry about what they are drinking.

[GSlob]

Well, I remember "pirozhki s povidlom" = small pies with [fruit] filling. They were selling them from small carts, and the pies [and their filling] were stale, stone cold, greasy and abominable, much worse than pre-packaged baked stuff found in even the smallest US gas stations. I still feel queasy in the stomach at the memory of them - 35 years later. That's why I was correcting your translation.

[struwwelpeter]

Romanov (8th ed.) translates it as 'jam' or 'fruit butter', but what I had was brown applesauce, and loved it.

You know, 35 years ago in Russia is like 80 years ago anywhere else, despite Oscar Wilde's comment that 'in Russian anything is possible except reform', there have been lots of changes.

Except, of course, for those pirozhki, chebureki, and belyashi you get on the railway platforms. What do the babushki fry those things in? Motor oil?

[GSlob]

"What do the babushki fry those things in? Motor oil?"
In whatever fat is available. In my student years [ROTC-type program] there used to be 200L (55 gal) drums with "kombizhir" - whitish grease which looked like partially hydrogenated oils mixed with animal fat, but without noticeable smell. It was used in army cooking (and I much preferred peeling potatoes on kitchen detail to crawling in rubber chemical protection suit/gas mask with full kit over some god-forsaken field with cow "pies" strewn all over it. The cow pies served for land mines). So there it was "combined fat", and probably the same unappetizing stuff was used in industrial bakeries for crappy pirozhki.

[RichInOC]

I call B.S. Beer cans either have a pull tab or you use a punch opener. Vodka has a screw top. Since when do the Russians need to pull corks?

[The Red Zone]

If their canning processes are anything like civilian quality, they have little need to worry. It's possible that after many years, a pinhole will corrode through the metal and the food will spoil. Usually the can will be swelled if that happens. I think I remember reading in the Guinness Book of World Records about some meat that had been canned in the 1800s and the cans were opened around 1970 - there was no microbial spoilage but I don't know how it tasted...

[Long Eared Hair]

A fellow student 12 years back told me he had eaten beef deep-frozen in 1937. He served in The Border Guard in Georgia in 1988.

[struwwelpeter]

I inspected MREs for the Army, and know that the condition of storage matters more than the length. I just enjoyed the article because of the little insights into Russian army life, and the ration factory's comments about black market cans.

Novaya Gazeta is a muck-raker that takes the Kremlin to task for every little defect in Russia. Their articles on Beslan and Nord-Ost make Howard Dean look rational, but I do enjoy their writing style, and I'm looking forward to the second installment of this 'mystery'.

[jb6]

Tomato sause. Date of production: 10 October 2001. Shelf-life of 24 months. Expired by 1 year and 7 months

I remember sitting in Macedonia on a mountain top, (1995) eating a pack of M&Ms with a commercial on them for the upcoming 1988 Olympic Games (this is after half the MREs had to be burned because they had exploded, even though the VETENARIAN had signed off on them multiple times.).

[jb6]

That's the French Knife, comes with a toothpick that has a fold out white flag.

[struwwelpeter]

...even though the VETENARIAN had signed off on them multiple times.)

Now that's a novel spelling.

During all the wars in history until present times, deaths from diseases outnumbered combat losses by several orders of magnitude. During Desert Shield/Desert Storm, however, not one single case of foodborne illness came from military-inspected rations.

Actually, I doubt it, but that's what someone smarter than I wrote on my MSM ;-)

After Desert Storm there was a huge draw-down, and with Clinton lots of voluntary and involuntary separations (including me). There were also some contracting irregularities that I heard of in passing, that could explain the over-extensions.

I'll bet by 1995 they had only one Med Det (Vet) team taking care of the whole eastern hemisphere, and all they were allowed to do was kick boxes as they were loaded onto those white UN trucks.

Last year I was at a Troop-Issue in Japan and was glad to see things were getting back to normal, but every now and then they would find 'lost rations' (poor warehousing) that the TISA chief wanted to force-issue to the field.

Of course, it's a lot easier for a reservist to take the heat for ordering a hundred thousand dollars of MREs to be destroyed. I just didn't want those jarheads and squids to come looking for me after they ate that green Chicken ala King ;-)

The most interesting part of the article you missed - the counterfeiting of Russian army rations in Georgia. I'd consider that a huge health risk, if I was in Ivan's shoes.

[jb6]

During Desert Shield/Desert Storm, however, not one single case of foodborne illness came from military-inspected rations.

Don't believe it. One of the officer cadets I went through training with was one of the first combat engineers in Iraq (by the way, he told me that they started practicing for the liberation of Kuwait City 1 year before deployment and told to keep it quiet) got camel burgers since T-rats and MREs weren't available. He said his whole battalion had dysentery.

[jb6]

One of my friends was eating MREs with his platoon when one of his soldiers pulled out a cow's eyelid from his beef stew. Yum, eye lashes and all.

[struwwelpeter]

I find it hard to believe his unit had no MREs and tray packs available, and an officer who 'went local' and subjected his unit to food poisoning from non-approved sources needs to visit the cow farm at Leavenworth.

But it happens. Back in '88 or '89 a cruiser in the Med made a port call in Morocco or someplace like that. An ensign was to procure cabbage and other fresh fruits and vegetables from an approved source, but found he could save the Navy scads of money by just trusting his instincts.

Within three days the cruiser had to declare itself 'non-combat-ready', from all the dysentery. A dozen Exocets aren't half as dangerous as an ensign with a bright idea. I heard the culprit had to live with the nick 'Ensign Cole Slaw' until his inevitable separation.

[struwwelpeter]

Here's a military forum on MREs, some comments are pretty funny:

"Oh these poor boys with their self heating MREs with cappachino even. We need to go back to where we had Ham&Mother****ers(Ham&lima beans) and the best thing in the pack were the 4 cigaretts that were old when Patton was a leutinant. We just feed these boys too well. We need to go back to the days to where they would trade their first born for a can of fruit cocktail."

[BIGLOOK]

Pete! Good to hear from you again!

I didn't have to eat C Rats on a regular basis. I was in the air with VQ 1 but there were times when some of us were with the Marines in I Corps. Chow time was the luck of the draw from an inverted case of Rats. Those that drew a Ham and Lima Beans stood out, shouted out some of the finest vulgar epithets in the world; then chucked the tin as far as they could.

The locals wouldn't touch them....the VC would avoid them. As far as I know, they are there to this day.