Thursday, February 11, 2016

Quickies: Comfort Food With Balls

     Have a bite...if you think your teeth are up to it:

     Meals-ready-to-eat, otherwise known as MREs, aren’t know to be the most appetizing of foods for deployed military members.

     But now the Army has come up with a pizza that not only has a three year shelf life, but according to taste testers, it actually is pretty good.

     "It's a fully assembled and baked piece of pizza in one package," Lauren Oleksyk, a food technologist at the US Army's Natick Soldier Research, Development, and Engineering Center, told Tech Insider.

     “Where’s the achievement here?” you might ask. Well, apparently the pizza’s attackers took some work to thwart:

     One hurdle to overcome was figuring out how to prevent mold from growing. For the dough, they used something called Hurdle technology that creates layers of protection from preventing bacteria forming. The tomato sauce has a higher pH and is more acidic to keep the critters away.

     All right, that is something to preen about...but can this fabled pizza survive a point-blank round from a Vulcan cannon? How about a Kalashnikov? The public wants to know!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A higher pH is by definition less acidic.

Reg T said...

The best part about this pizza is that, in its un-reconstituted state, it can be used in place of the ceramic plate in body armor. In testing at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, it was able to withstand an armor-piercing .50 BMG at 50 yards. The technicians further determined that, if a .50 BMG incendiary round was used, the pizza would be ready to eat within five minutes.