REVIEW: Cheese Omelet with Vegetables Power Performance MRE (Meals Ready to Eat)

Don’t get me wrong. I may be a passive pacifist, but I’m not one of those beatniks who believe that everything can be solved without violence. Somebody has to be the bully or the badass with the poo on the stick once in awhile, but Jack Bauer’s chewing Doublemint gum right now, so he’s a bit too busy to kick ass, and Chuck Norris is retired from Delta Force…which is why we have military forces to take their place, armed with state-of-the-art weapons and MREs (Meals Ready to Eat).

Cheese Omelet with Vegetables Power Performance MRE is fairly low in calories and quite nutritious for something its size, but that comes with a caveat. It’s got the longest list of ingredients for an omelet I’ve ever seen. Here’s a quick rundown of what it contains (which is only a wee fraction of the entire list): liquid eggs, cottage cheese, green chilies, mozzarella, water, cream, modified starch, and about seven or eight preservatives. It’s just like dear old grandma’s secret recipe for a prize-winning omelet (incidentally, I’m still waiting for her to pass on her coveted buck cake recipe)! It’s supposedly designed to last for at least 14 years, which explains the caveat, I guess. It’s also packed so full of cholesterol that the plaque-y goodness must aid the preservation process.

I tore open this bag to find myself utterly devoid of patriotism. I knew that MREs had a bad reputation, but this was completely uncalled for. It belongs on a stick…a very long stick. It tastes like crap and quite frankly it reminds me of really terrible and rancid coffee, which dominates the palate, both on and off the tongue. The texture is basically what you’d expect; extra congealed and crumbly, with the dryness of extra hard boiled egg yolks despite an eerie moistness, which is the only thing remotely egg-y about this thing. The veggies were a lost cause as well, since their flavors were completely dominated and their texture was soggier than wet toilet paper. It smelled like really bad tin can food.

I tried to play with it and build little mounds of crap for my green soldiers to march over, but my wee plastic commandos mutinied and started an underground bordello for G.I. Joes and Mr. Potato Heads. This thing is completely irredeemable and worthless like Switzerland’s military might. It’s a giant fuck you to our soldiers, who deserve better like laser ray guns that go pew pew or robot butlers/maids.

At least it comes with a sah-weet brown spoon. Let me tell you, this spoon is truly badass compared to all the other wimpy plastic spoons out there. It’s frickin’ Schwarzenegger from Commando or Terminator 2. This spoon is bigger, stronger, thicker, and heavier than your average plastic spoon. It’s brown so you can eat this crap without breaking your camouflage cover, if the smell didn’t give you away first. It’s also strong enough that it can be used as a weapon of minor destruction if one finds themselves without anything else after killing too many sissy minions. Now that’s American justice: death by plastic spoon. Too bad it’s not a spork.

(Nutrition Facts – 1 mysterious package – 300 calories, 16 grams of fat, 4.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 530 milligrams of cholesterol, 680 milligrams of sodium, 14 grams of carbohydrates, 1 grams of dietary fiber, 6 grams of sugar, and 23 grams of protein.)

Item: MRE – Cheese Omelet with Vegetables

Price: $4.45
Size: 8 ounces
Purchased at: eBay
Rating: 0 out of 10 (8/10 for the badass spoon)
Pros: Nutritious. Shelf-stable. Badass brown spoon. Grandma’s buck cake recipe. Bordellos. A badass with poo on a stick. Death by spoon.
Cons: Rancid coffee-taste. Terrible tin can food smell. Crumbly texture. Long list of ingredients. A number of preservatives. Jack Bauer chewing gum. Plaque-y goodness of cholesterol. No badass spork.

29 thoughts to “REVIEW: Cheese Omelet with Vegetables Power Performance MRE (Meals Ready to Eat)”

  1. Years ago as a lad, I was in the Boy Scouts (mind you, before they went nuts chasing after atheists and the gays and whatnot. Back when being in the Boy Scouts was something to be ashamed of for not having a dad, and the other scouts with dads would show theirs off. Or something)

    Sometimes, when we’d go camping, we’d go raid the army surplus store for a case of MREs. Sure, the acronym was re-imagined as Meals Rejected by Ethopians, Meals Ready to Exit, Meals Refusing to Exit, etc., and this was in the years before the fancy ones with the chemical heaters and whatnot.

    We’d tear into the box, and trust me, no matter what else happened, you had to make sure you got anything that didn’t say “Omelet” The omelet was not to be trusted. The omlette was the fear. The omelet was the thing even a starving husky kid would give up and use as bait in hopes of poisoning some passing wildlife that he could try roasting over his coleman stove later. NO ON OMELET.

    Thankfully, I learned absolutely nothing about food nutrition from MREs, as simple as it was. You had “crackers, salted” (perfectly portioned in two 2×2 squares and vacuum sealed), you had “butter, peanut” or “spread, cheese, processed, product” (both of which were better suited for ending any case of the runs acquired in foreign locales (one application or another, they were sure to form a pretty impenetrable barrier)) you had your main entree (seriously, stick with the “stew, beef” or “lasagna, approximation”) You’d invariably have the package of “powdered beverage, chocolate” which no matter how many times you’d failed, even following the directions religiously just could. not. be. made. cold. (nothing takes the fun out of summer quite like a non-dairy chocolate beverage that actually turns out to be discolored water with some big insoluble lumps floating around) Inevitably, there was the condiment packet, which would include something like a plastic utensil, a folded paper napkin, salt and pepper packets, a wet nap. a tiny bottle of tobasco, a couple chiclets, some “coffee, instant” and “creamer, artificial” (can’t honestly remember if there was a sugar packet or not) and the thing that made it happen for all us little pyromaniacs, a book of matches.

    At the end of it all, it seems pretty obvious now. Those foil-lined pouches were basically just cans. So anything that you wouldn’t eat out of a can naturally (such as, an omelet), probably wouldn’t be tasting too good here either.

    I feel compelled to mention that there was also a general lack of vegetables. Considering that this was the “cheese omelet with vegetables”, I’m not so sure I would’ve wanted to see what they’d do when vegetables weren’t just an afterthought.

  2. Thank you RP for justifying my total overfeeding of my son when he returns for a visit from his military life. I cannot imagine actually eating the thing on that plate.

  3. This reminds me of that Calvin & Hobbes strip where, in one panel, Calvin asks his mother if he can have another plate. She asks him why he wants one in the next and he (in the final panel) replies with, “someone threw up on mine.”

    It looks like someone tossed their cookies on yours. That is one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen. Eating it has to be the food equivalent of jumping on a grenade.

  4. After Katrina most people in the New Orleans area got at least a box of MREs. Even though they are shelf stable, age does matter with them, they are suppose to be eaten within two years. Most of the ones we got back then were fresh(ish). The pasta dishes were good in a top of the line Chef Boyardee(sp?) way. The best thing in them were the vegetarian ones which would almost always have a lemon poppyseed poundcake inside for dessert.

  5. One of these MRE meals saved me in Iraq. The Chicken stew took a bullet for me God bless the United States of America and God bless that chicken

  6. Okay, I can add this one to the list of “scariest looking things I have ever seen”. This one is even scarier than the herbal toothpaste…

  7. I’ve had an MRE once in my life. It actually wasn’t too bad, although I don’t remember which one it was, so maybe it was so bad that I don’t want to remember it.

  8. This is giving me flashbacks of my time in the military. Well, I didn’t have MRE’s much since I was in the Air Force, but during typhoons in Okinawa when the building was locked down, that’s what they fed us. The desserts were ok, as was the beef stew. Never would have TRIED an omelet though, those just sounded nasty, and I guess my instincts were correct.

  9. I fucking LOST it when you talked about the ‘wee plastic commandos’ Oh god.

    That looked disgusting!

  10. When my dad was in Iraq . . . the first time. He sent home an Arab fairy tale book . . . and an MRE. Being 10, I thought it was the coolest thing ever and went to eat it. It was spaghetti.

    I’ve never had a worse case of food poisoning.

  11. I’m just going to stick to two sentences because no matter what I say, I won’t be able to out-comment transiit’s novel. That stuff looks disgusting!

  12. You know, I joined at eighteen and MRE’s did not bother me much as bad as they were. They were still better than my mother’s cooking.

    They have become a bit more “fancy” than when I first had them. They were still on omelets, spaghetti, and beef stew mostly when I had joined, and by the time I left they were trying gumbo (which is honestly insulting being Cajun), and some “Asian Inspired” dishes.

    I never had the guts to read the ingredients list, I would assume it is better to not know.

  13. Hahaha I love your review Reprobate!!

    And thank god when I was in girl guides, we made grill cheese sandwiches over our large soup can ‘stove’!!

  14. When I was at a training camp a few summers back, they always gave us more boxes of MREs than we actually needed for the people – after everyone had picked through everything, there was usually a box filled with just the omelette ones because no one was willing to eat them.

  15. Hey, the vegetarian/pasta MREs are AWESOME. I’ve been out of the Army since Jan 06 and still have a few on standby… just in case…

  16. Hey, it’s better than most things the local Afghani’s sell in their shops.
    No, not really. I’d actually take dysentary over a Cheese and Veggie Omelet anyday.

  17. I have to admit, I actually don’t mind the “veggie omelet” (as it’s usually called in non-expletive terms). But, despite that, I’ll have to say that it’s probably the most hated of all the meals in the recent years of MRE “menus” (though the Cajun Rice & Beans seems to run a close second). When we’re allowed to choose out of the MRE box (which includes a variety of 10 different meals), you inevitably end up with a leftover box full of veggie omelets. When you get no choice, most people rather just not eat it at all. So you can see how despite the extremely high caloric content of MREs (meant to sustain us in combat or field training), most of us come back skinnier anyway. Because even two MREs a day (let alone three) is just disgusting at a point.

  18. Oh, maaaan! My mom was in Mississippi when Katrina hit, and decided on the totally fab idea of staying with my step dad in their tin can of a trailer.
    Needless to say, when she came to visit, there were some stories to tell about MREs! She came like magical Santa, bearing an entire box! I was probably about 12 or so, and instead of having them “rot” in the basement, as they probably should have done, I brought the entire box to a friend’s house where we had a figurative feast.
    Some of it was the craziest stuff ever, I don’t remember much of anything tasting remotely palatable, despite how many salt and pepper packets you dumped in.
    The insta heater things were really cool, and the apple cider or whatever was pretty darn good.
    I think that the rest of the box is what I stare at every time I do laundry. Maybe I’ll try them again…

  19. Ahh, MRE’s. Yes, I remember eating them after Katrina. Actually we were rather lucky because we also managed to get a box of British MREs and those are the best! The best one was the lamb and potatoes. Man, that was tasty.

  20. My family stocks up on a couple weeks worth of MRE’s in case the worst happens. We do occasionally have to eat them as they reach the end of their shelf life.

    Beef Stew is really good. Anything chicken or with a white sauce is questionable. We (luckily) stayed away from anything with eggs.

  21. Wow…i grew up on that crap. There is a reason they give it to soldiers, airmen, sailors, etc who are in the field! or they had way too many left at the base that they were trying to get rid of and your parents are supercheap!!!!

  22. Uh oh. I predict an unspoken contest between you and Ace to see who can eat the most rancid products imaginable.

    No matter who wins, both lose. How you suffer for us.

  23. I F**KING LOVE MRE’S!!!

    I used to eat them all the time as a kid- my dad would bring them home from Camp Pendleton. I was so sad when they discontinued their dehydrated fruit salad. IT WAS DELICIOUS. In place they just put regular hydrated peaches which was no fun what so ever.

    YUM.

    But this is coming from someone who looks forward to hospital and airline food.

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