Take the Gadling challenge – army meal or airline meal?

OR

Here is a fun challenge for you – I’m sure that anyone who has been served an airline meal has come across a dish that looked like it came right out of a blender.

The kind of meal that takes 5 minutes just to determine what exactly it is.

In this quiz, you get to pick whether the “delicious dish” is an army meal or an airline meal.

Army meals are often referred to as “MRE’s”, which stands for “Meal Ready to Eat”. The meals are usually freeze dried or preserved in a can, and can be heated using a portable stove, or more recently with a self-heating mechanism.

Airline meals are prepared in massive kitchens by people who probably bring their own food when they fly, because no matter how delicious it sounds on paper, the final product never really tastes (or looks) right at 35,000 feet.

I’ve had a couple of happy exceptions, mainly on Asian airlines who really know how to prepare a dish to taste like it was intended, no matter where you are.

So, do you think you can tell what was prepared for the army or what was prepared for airline passengers?

Done (or too lazy to finish the quiz)?

Click here to see photos of the answers!

Supersize your next camping trip: Cheeseburger in a can

Want more variety than the standard rice and beans when you’re out mucking around in the field? Believe it or not, a German outdoor outfitter has managed to fit a cheeseburger (with onions, lettuce, and pickles to boot) into a can.

One cheeseburger is an affordable € 3,95, and for that, you get 260 calories. And since you can apparently find anything on the World Wide Intertubes, I just came across one guy who ordered one of these burgers-in-a-can. He has posted plenty of pictures (see the gallery below) from his little adventure.

For one, it’s a bit disconcerting to see someone cooking a tin can in a pot of boiling water. But from what he says, the burger’s actually decent, and he recommends getting a few if you’re on a camping trip.

It reminds me of the recent upsurge in interest over Meals, Ready-to-Eat (MREs), the military meals-on-the-go, which you can now find all over eBay. Has anyone bought some and enjoyed them on a camping trip? What’d you think?

%Gallery-15201%