Food cubes in TOS

You're right. And since I happen to have a screen shot of that cup, and I'm sure it will never, ever be useful for anything again, here it is!



It's too bad that there were so few places on the bridge where you could actually set down a cup. The only place you could put one there is on the arm of Kirk's ever-spinning chair!

 

I think we had nutra-cubes in high-school, or was that the French fries all pushed together...

 

I just saw the TOS episode 'The man trap'.
At some point, around 30 minutes, you can see that Kirk is eating food cubes, on the bridge.

I am wondering what he was eating for real, because to me those food cubes do not look tasteful. It reminds me of green oasis (floral foam).

 

screencap

 

That's just Shatner chewing the scenery.
(rimshot)

 

There was a (fortunately) short-lived TV show called "Young Blades", a retelling of the Three Musketeers in 17th-century France. One episode featured coffee being introduced in Paris. I guess the timeline is about right. But the odd thing is that the eating establishment where it was introduced was already referred to as a café. I guess the writers didn't know what the word means.

I was in the Army in the late 1980s. MREs at that time were okay, but didn't quite have the quality or diversity you're describing.

The main dish varied between "beef slice in BBQ sauce", "pork slice in BBQ sauce", "meatballs in BBQ sauce" and things like that, or a freeze-dried beef or pork patty that required boiling water ... and didn't tend to reconstitute well no matter what you did. They didn't have the self-heating packaging, but it probably wouldn't have helped. (The meatballs were pretty good, though.)

The crackers, peanut butter, jelly, and cheese spreads were pretty standard. There were other side dishes like normal applesauce, a freeze-dried potato patty, and freeze-dried fruit. Those weren't bad... actually it was pretty handy just to munch on the latter two while still dried.

There was usually a "miscellaneous" packet with coffee, creamer, cocoa, a wad of toilet paper, and some other things. I don't remember any powdered drink mixes. Very few contained name-brand products, except one variety that had Chiclets.

Most of them had a dessert referred to as a "nut cake" of one kind or another. Chocolate nut cake, maple nut cake, pineapple nut cake ... I don't remember how many there were and it didn't matter, because they were all awful. ("Uniformly" awful. ) I'm still not sure what they were a cake of.

Regarding the freeze-dried beef patties: there was one time when we'd come back from the field and our commanding officer announced a cookout where we could hang out and relax. Attendance was mandatory because we were going to have some FUN, and doggone it that was an order, private!

The C.O. set up a grill in the field outside our barracks and started grilling. Guess what the "hamburgers" were?

At least he tried to reconstitute them first.

I guess it was a creative way to claim morale-boosting, stay under budget, and burn off some unused MREs.
As if they were going to spoil.

 

I'm sure they were still better that the infamous canned C and K rations of World War II and Korean War vintage.

 

They started to improve the MRE following the Gulf War in 1991. We had some in 1992 and they were not all that good, but I assume what we got was the left over ones from pre-1991. By the 2000s they were really ramping up MRE meal designs. There are lots of variations now, and supposedly only a few that are nasty.

 

Ah, so you're saying he just grabbed some buttons from one of the consoles.

 

My daily chuckle, courtesy of Silvercrest! Thanks!

And thanks for the MRE input in general!

 

My first though is that that reminds me of those dry blue marchmallows in Lucky Charms cereal.

 

^Ugh. If those little freeze-dried patties were so unusable and had a limited shelf life to boot, I wanna know who approved them in the first place.

I prefer to think that the stuff from those days just had a longer shelf life. The nastier the food, the longer the life.

I'm certain. I don't have much exposure to either, but I understood the K rations had an even worse rep than the C rations. I wonder what the difference was.

 

Planets, moons, stars, or clovers?

 

Logically, you must mean "Marshmelons".