The Development of Special Rations for the Army

The Development of Special Rations for the Army PDF Author: Harold Wesley Thatcher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : World War, 1939-1945
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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The Development of Special Rations for the Army

The Development of Special Rations for the Army PDF Author: Harold Wesley Thatcher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : World War, 1939-1945
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description


Not Eating Enough

Not Eating Enough PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309176107
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Eating enough food to meet nutritional needs and maintain good health and good performance in all aspects of lifeâ€"both at home and on the jobâ€"is important for all of us throughout our lives. For military personnel, however, this presents a special challenge. Although soldiers typically have a number of options for eating when stationed on a base, in the field during missions their meals come in the form of operational rations. Unfortunately, military personnel in training and field operations often do not eat their rations in the amounts needed to ensure that they meet their energy and nutrient requirements and consequently lose weight and potentially risk loss of effectiveness both in physical and cognitive performance. This book contains 20 chapters by military and nonmilitary scientists from such fields as food science, food marketing and engineering, nutrition, physiology, psychology, and various medical specialties. Although described within a context of military tasks, the committee's conclusions and recommendations have wide-reaching implications for people who find that job-related stress changes their eating habits.

Special Rations for the Armed Forces

Special Rations for the Armed Forces PDF Author: Franz A. Koehler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Operational rations (Military supplies)
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Battlefield Rations

Battlefield Rations PDF Author: Anthony Clayton
Publisher: Helion and Company
ISBN: 1909384186
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
An Army marches on its stomach, observed Napoleon, a hundred and fifty years later General Rommel remarked that the British should always be attacked before soldiers had had an early morning cup of tea. This book, written to raise money for the Army Benevolent Fund and with a Foreword by General Lord Dannatt, sets out the human story of the food and "brew-ups" of the front-line soldier from the Boer War to Helmand. Throughout, the importance of the provision of food, or even a simple mug of tea, for morale and unit fellowship as well as for the need of the calories required for battle is highlighted with many examples over the century. For many, until 1942, the basis of food was "bully beef" and hard biscuit, supplemented by whatever could be found locally, all adequate but monotonous. Sometimes supply failed, on occasions water also. The extremes of hardship being when regiments were besieged, as in Ladysmith in the Boer War and Kut el-Amara in Iraq in the 1914-18 war. At Kut soldiers had, at best, hedgehogs or birds fried in axle-grease with local vegetation. On the Western Front the Retreat from Mons in August 1914 was almost as severe. The transport of food is as interesting a story as the food itself, ranging from oxen, horses, mules, camels, even reindeer and elephants to motor transport and aircraft in different theatres at different times. The first airdrop of food, not very successful, was in fact at Kut el-Amara in 1916. The inter-war years experiences of mountaineers and polar explorers, supplemented by academic diet studies of the unemployed in London and North England led to the introduction of the varied composite, or 'compo' rations, marking an enormous improvement in soldiers' food, an improvement commented upon by the bully beef and biscuits-fed 8th Army advancing into Tunisia from Libya on meeting the 1st Army which had landed in Algeria with tins of compo. The Italian campaigns of 1943-45, especially the Salerno and Anzio landings and the battle for Monte Cassino, presented particular difficulties. At Cassino food reached forward units on mules with Basuto muleteers and Indian porters for the last stage to men in ground holes or scrapes. Soldiers landing in Normandy and fighting on into Germany were generally well fed even during a hard 1944-45 winter. The worst suffering, though, fell on soldiers in the Burma campaign, especially in the Chindit columns. In one unit, the only food available at one time was the chaplain's store of Communion wafers. Many men died unnecessarily from the results of poor feeding. In the end of empire colonial campaigns soldiers were generally well fed even if the food was monotonous. Units in the Korean War experienced difficulties at the onset; in the Borneo jungle campaigns of the 1960s the problem was not so much the provision of food for patrols as how to eat it without the smell of the food and refuse from the packs giving positions away. For the Falklands War special cold weather compo had to be provided and was eaten on the long 'yomps' or 'tabs' marches. The soldier on the streets of Northern Ireland often lived on egg "banjo" sandwiches but real hardship was suffered by one Welsh battalion besieged by the Serbs in Gorazde during the Bosnia operations when Vitamin C deficiency led to scurvy. The book ends with food supply, often based on whole or part swapping with American military food (usually below British standards) in the Iraq operations and in Afghanistan. An appendix sets out the contents of a typical box of rations issued to a soldier in Helmand in 2011, very generous in quantity and easily prepared. One side of the box carries a stern message to the effect that a soldier must consume the entire contents in order to maintain full fighting efficiency. Such injunctions were not marked on the boxes of food sent forward to the troops in the Boer War; there the boxes were stamped with the initials of the Senior Catering Office Field Force. "Scoffs here at last." The work has been compiled from documents in the Royal Logistic Corps Museum at Deepcut, from memoirs, letters and interviews, and from the superb collection of regimental histories in the library of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. All royalties due to the author for this book will be sent to the Army Benevolent Fund, The Soldiers' Charity.

Military Food Engineering and Ration Technology

Military Food Engineering and Ration Technology PDF Author: Ann H. Barrett
Publisher: DEStech Publications, Inc
ISBN: 1605950491
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
Written by a team from the U.S. Army's Combat Feeding Directorate at the Natick Research, Development and Engineering Center, this technical volume represents a comprehensive guide to how the military designs, processes, customizes, packages and distributes highly palatable, long shelf-life food products for field personnel. The book offers new data on numerous technologies used to solve problems such as nutrient densification, lightweighting, novel thermal processing, and long-term quality preservation in delivering appetizing foods and more. Testing techniques are explained for evaluating sensory qualities of foods and their effects on physical and cognitive performance.

Combat-Ready Kitchen

Combat-Ready Kitchen PDF Author: Anastacia Marx de Salcedo
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1591845971
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Americans eat more processed foods than anyone else in the world. We also spend more on military research. These two seemingly unrelated facts are inextricably linked. If you ever wondered how ready-to-eat foods infiltrated your kitchen, you’ll love this entertaining romp through the secret military history of practically everything you buy at the supermarket. In a nondescript Boston suburb, in a handful of low buildings buffered by trees and a lake, a group of men and women spend their days researching, testing, tasting, and producing the foods that form the bedrock of the American diet. If you stumbled into the facility, you might think the technicians dressed in lab coats and the shiny kitchen equipment belonged to one of the giant food conglomerates responsible for your favorite brand of frozen pizza or microwavable breakfast burritos. So you’d be surprised to learn that you’ve just entered the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, ground zero for the processed food industry. Ever since Napoleon, armies have sought better ways to preserve, store, and transport food for battle. As part of this quest, although most people don’t realize it, the U.S. military spearheaded the invention of energy bars, restructured meat, extended-life bread, instant coffee, and much more. But there’s been an insidious mission creep: because the military enlisted industry—huge corporations such as ADM, ConAgra, General Mills, Hershey, Hormel, Mars, Nabisco, Reynolds, Smithfield, Swift, Tyson, and Unilever—to help develop and manufacture food for soldiers on the front line, over the years combat rations, or the key technologies used in engineering them, have ended up dominating grocery store shelves and refrigerator cases. TV dinners, the cheese powder in snack foods, cling wrap . . . The list is almost endless. Now food writer Anastacia Marx de Salcedo scrutinizes the world of processed food and its long relationship with the military—unveiling the twists, turns, successes, failures, and products that have found their way from the armed forces’ and contractors’ laboratories into our kitchens. In developing these rations, the army was looking for some of the very same qualities as we do in our hectic, fast-paced twenty-first-century lives: portability, ease of preparation, extended shelf life at room temperature, affordability, and appeal to even the least adventurous eaters. In other words, the military has us chowing down like special ops. What is the effect of such a diet, eaten—as it is by soldiers and most consumers—day in and day out, year after year? We don’t really know. We’re the guinea pigs in a giant public health experiment, one in which science and technology, at the beck and call of the military, have taken over our kitchens.

An Environmental History of the Civil War

An Environmental History of the Civil War PDF Author: Judkin Browning
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146965539X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world. To be sure, environmental factors such as topography and weather powerfully shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and the war could not have been fought without the horses, cattle, and other animals that were essential to both armies. But here Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver weave a far richer story, combining military and environmental history to forge a comprehensive new narrative of the war's significance and impact. As they reveal, the conflict created a new disease environment by fostering the spread of microbes among vulnerable soldiers, civilians, and animals; led to large-scale modifications of the landscape across several states; sparked new thinking about the human relationship to the natural world; and demanded a reckoning with disability and death on an ecological scale. And as the guns fell silent, the change continued; Browning and Silver show how the war influenced the future of weather forecasting, veterinary medicine, the birth of the conservation movement, and the establishment of the first national parks. In considering human efforts to find military and political advantage by reshaping the natural world, Browning and Silver show not only that the environment influenced the Civil War's outcome but also that the war was a watershed event in the history of the environment itself.

The Stuff of Soldiers

The Stuff of Soldiers PDF Author: Brandon M. Schechter
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501739816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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Book Description
The Stuff of Soldiers uses everyday objects to tell the story of the Great Patriotic War as never before. Brandon M. Schechter attends to a diverse array of things—from spoons to tanks—to show how a wide array of citizens became soldiers, and how the provisioning of material goods separated soldiers from civilians. Through a fascinating examination of leaflets, proclamations, newspapers, manuals, letters to and from the front, diaries, and interviews, The Stuff of Soldiers reveals how the use of everyday items made it possible to wage war. The dazzling range of documents showcases ethnic diversity, women's particular problems at the front, and vivid descriptions of violence and looting. Each chapter features a series of related objects: weapons, uniforms, rations, and even the knick-knacks in a soldier's rucksack. These objects narrate the experience of people at war, illuminating the changes taking place in Soviet society over the course of the most destructive conflict in recorded history. Schechter argues that spoons, shovels, belts, and watches held as much meaning to the waging of war as guns and tanks. In The Stuff of Soldiers, he describes the transformative potential of material things to create a modern culture, citizen, and soldier during World War II.

Nutrient Composition of Rations for Short-Term, High-Intensity Combat Operations

Nutrient Composition of Rations for Short-Term, High-Intensity Combat Operations PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309096413
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
Recognizing the importance of good nutrition for physical and mental status, the Department of Defense asked the Institute of Medicine to guide the design of the nutritional composition of a ration for soldiers on short-term, high-stress missions. Nutrient Composition of Rations for Short-Term, High-Intensity Combat Operations considers military performance, health concerns, food intake, energy expenditure, physical exercise, and food technology issues. The success of military operations depends to a large extent on the physical and mental status of the individuals involved. Appropriate nutrition during assault missions is a continuous challenge mainly due to diminished appetites of individuals under stress. Many less controllable and unpredictable factors, such as individual preferences and climate, come into play to reduce appetite. In fact, soldiers usually consume about half of the calories needed, leaving them in a state called "negative energy balance." The consequences of being in negative energy balance while under these circumstances range from weight loss to fatigue to mental impairments. An individual's physiological and nutritional status can markedly affect one's ability to maximize performance during missions and may compromise effectiveness. With the number of these missions increasing, the optimization of rations has become a high priority.

The Role of Protein and Amino Acids in Sustaining and Enhancing Performance

The Role of Protein and Amino Acids in Sustaining and Enhancing Performance PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309172810
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
It is a commonly held belief that athletes, particularly body builders, have greater requirements for dietary protein than sedentary individuals. However, the evidence in support of this contention is controversial. This book is the latest in a series of publications designed to inform both civilian and military scientists and personnel about issues related to nutrition and military service. Among the many other stressors they experience, soldiers face unique nutritional demands during combat. Of particular concern is the role that dietary protein might play in controlling muscle mass and strength, response to injury and infection, and cognitive performance. The first part of the book contains the committee's summary of the workshop, responses to the Army's questions, conclusions, and recommendations. The remainder of the book contains papers contributed by speakers at the workshop on such topics as, the effects of aging and hormones on regulation of muscle mass and function, alterations in protein metabolism due to the stress of injury or infection, the role of individual amino acids, the components of proteins, as neurotransmitters, hormones, and modulators of various physiological processes, and the efficacy and safety considerations associated with dietary supplements aimed at enhancing performance.