Meals Ready-to-Eat

I found these postings below on another list serve. Sounds like Uncle Sam or his dictator, the UN, is getting ready for something big. As a side note, MRE's cost about $50 US for each case.

Offered by Clipper.

Dear friends,
As some of you know, I live in a poor and working class neighborhood in Kansas city, and am involved with various activities that help poor people become less poor. As part of this, I often take in people who are homeless, or would be if not for a safe harbor. One of my housemates just got a four month temporary job unloading trucks at an underground storage center located near my neighborhood (KC has a lot of underground limestone caves that are used for storage). Anyway, this particular contract is a government contract, and the product being unloaded and stored is MRE's. that is, "meal ready to eat", which I believe is the current incarnation of the old army C rations. How many MRE's are on a truck? All day, 8 hours a day, for four months. That is a lot of meals ready to eat.

Note that I didn't hear this from somebody who heard from somebody, I heard this from somebody in my own household who is unloading the MREs, beginning at 7:30 in the AM. Three things: First, I am comforted to know that this large amount of food is being stored here locally. Second, if you have any fiends or acquaintances who do temporary labor or casual jobs, you might ask around and see if any such operations are going on in your city. Three, somebody is taking this really seriously. MRE's aren't cheap.

Today they unloaded nine trucks, and then were let go early because some additional expected trucks didn't show. It takes two guys about 1-1/2 hours to unload a truck, and each gets $35. Don't know if this space has been used to store MRE's before, but that's on the list of questions to scope out. It does seem to be a government contract, the supervisors seem sure of that. It has been confirmed that this is new, that is, it isn't the regular cold storage location for Ft. Leonard Wood, etc. One of the other laborers said that each truck had 3500 cases, so today there were nine trucks times 3500 cases equals 31,500 cases. Anybody know how many MRE's are in a case? This would seem to be literally an enormous amount of food, as if there were six MRE’s in each case, that would mean 189,000 meals were unloaded today alone, and today was a short day. He was called back to work at 3:30 in the afternoon, but the expected trucks still didn't arrive.

Note that the laborers apparently have to +spc - a certain amount of time sitting around and waiting. Since the contract is for four months, 22 work days a month, and if today's unloading was an average work day, and there are at least six MRE's per case, then we're talking a minimum of 16,632,000 MREs. Any way you look at that, it is a large amount of prepared food, being tucked securely away in a limestone cavern in KCMO. It's three meals a day for 500,000 people for 11 days, and that's the low estimate, since today was deemed a slack day by those doing the labor.

I researched MRE's just this evening to learn more about them. The full meal type MRE comes 12 per case, and the case weighs 17 pounds. So, for doing some math, double the figures you were dealing with. Using Robert's math that would come to 33,264,000 meals - using 22 work days per month, for 4 months, and the light work load experienced by Robert's friend that particular day. Assuming 12 per case, that's 2,772,000 cases at 17 pounds per case equals 47,124,000 pounds of food, or 23,562 tons. That would mean you could feed 500,000 people 3 meals per day for 22.17 days or roughly 100,000 people for just over 3 months (about 111 days actually). These are large numbers indeed and we can all look forward to learning more about this.