You ever know those people- the ones who like what they like, food-wise, and can’t be steered very far in some new direction?
Like taking your grandpa out for Indian food. Might not work.
My grandfather? Meat and Potatoes guy. Fought in WWII. He wasn’t gonna eat Sushi, y’know? Pizza looked a little squiffy to him. Thai? Tie what?
My dad? Tex/Mex is good. Chinese, okay… Ethiopian? Vietnamese? Maaaaaybe not.
My grandkids will probably joke that I wouldn’t ever eat reconstituted protein from the Reclaiming Unit, or lab-grown beef slab. Those li’l squits won’t have the kind of immune system my grand-dad had, though. Nosirree. He probably had antibodies that’d crawl right out of his body and attack stuff he was just THINKING of picking out of the garden and putting in his mouth.
Nothing wrong with sticking to the evils you know versus the heartburn, indigestion, food allergy, that you have yet to meet. If properly sealed and properly decontaminated, the MRE’s should still be safe….
mr cranky pants wants HIS food and NO ONE ELSE’S hehe
I grew up in the capital city of Minnesota, and even so, during the 60’s when I was a kid, the most exotic foods we had the option to be exposed to were Italian (there was a pasta restaurant called the Venetian Inn) 20 miles outside of town, and fake Chinese take-out (chow mein). It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that we even had Vietnamese places in Minneapolis, and I didn’t learn about sushi until I was in my thirties. Ethiopian? Love berebere. Tex-Mex? I lived in Austin, TX, for 10 years. Reconstituted protein from the Reclaiming Unit, or lab-grown beef slab? If I can’t read webcomics in the dark by the day-glo food coloring then it’s not REAL reconstituted protein, or lab-grown beef slab.
It’s probably going to be grasshopper or cricket flour made into nutritious flat biscuit crackers and GMO legume soup (which might make you sprout an extra tentacle or something) …. sigh.
I lived there in the late 80’s. Leann Chin steamtable pick/buy/to-go outlets. I still miss those. Building next to my apartment/over/businesses had a Vietnamese restaurant that never cleaned anything and would start the vent grease traps on fire about once a month. Stand on the sidewalk on ice at -20 barefoot because I had to convince a firefighter that I lived next door and I wanted to know if I had to pack my cats and evacuate.
I’ll echo TSOJ, I grew up in a northern Chicago suburb. “Foreign food”; chow mien, spaghetti sauce and even tamales came from a can. But my Dad would sometimes pick up exotic stuff before his commute home. We tried caviar, chocolate covered bugs, rattlesnake and even whale (but still in cans). Now I’ll try anything…sometimes.
Mmmmmm, Soylent Green.
I learned about real foreign foods while stationed in the far east. My first taste of sushi was lubricated by liberal amounts of sake. My wife is from Korea, so we eat a lot of Seoul food.
While my personal diet falls firmly between horrifying and atrocious I will state I have never had a serious taste for MREs. In spite of that some were actually pretty decent as long as you were not stuck eating them for three to four weeks waiting for a convoy to refill the DFAC. My personal preferences were the jambalaya, enchilada and chili-mac. With the exception of a few dissenters the absolute worst was the chicken breast. No effort could make that thing edible.
In the early 1970’s I bought some WWII surplus C-Rations. My father who had been in Korea (they ate leftovers) said WHY?!?!?!? Because I wanted to try it. I bought 4 and got cigarettes in one, chocolate in one (he said those were the coveted ones, how did I rate?) and one was scrambled eggs and the other some sort of potted meat. I have eaten a LOT better. He declined burning the smokes. Mom lit one and put it out as fast as she could, it hadn’t aged well apparently. The chocolate was well bloomed but. An interesting history lesson. I used to buy surplus MRE’s for camping and I’ll agree the chicken breasts are pretty dismal. Only complaint I really had was they sold the heat packs separately and they were almost as much as the meals. Though it made for convenient scarf away from campsite.
Any MRE with jalapeno cheese is automatically the best one, anyway.