Just to be honest with you, there’s some MREs I’d rather have than some more of the oven moistened French toast and oven moistened scrambled egg breakfasts that I’ve had.
And, having participated in the “old army” back in the Viet era, I still think there were items in the old C rations that were better than the MREs. A heated tin of the old C rat bread....mmmmmm mmmmmm good.
I only had a few MREs but liked the spaghetti meal myself.
Most of my 6 years in the Marines was with c-rats. I still have a P38 on my dog tag chain. The last year I was in was when we were introduced to MREs. We called them “Meals Rejected by Ethioians” back then. They were new, and not particularly well received in my unit. We wanted our c-rats back. I suppose they’ve tweaked and improved the MREs in the past 30 years or so.