“As to just going commercial...”
They did go commercial. They teamed up with FPL Foods for the development.
What did they develop? ‘Continuous Osmotic Dehydration’.
http://science.dodlive.mil/2012/09/27/army-designing-tastier-meats/
The link above contains the second quote I have seen from this Yang guy, saying normal jerky is to salty...which makes me suspicious there is a ‘Lets Move’ component to this (and skepical the jerky tastes good at all).
Anyway, that’s the $1.5 million voila moment. Instead of using salt to cure the meat, the meat is “...pulled through an osmotic solution [composed of sucrose/sodium chloride/water] that extracts moisture” (I’ll ignore the fact that ‘continuous osmotic dehydration’ uses sodium chloride in its no salt breakthrough dehydration method).
BTW, the Army already uses jerky in its First Strike Rations...’The use of commercial off-the-shelf products like this is one of the ways development time of the FSR was lowered.’:
http://www.mreinfo.com/us/fsr/first-strike-ration.html
So, unless this new jerky is remarkably cheaper, lighter, tastier...something, its just a classic case of a solution in search of a problem.
bump