Video: Food is one of the pieces of common ground that people of all cultures share. Food is the one language we’re all forced to speak. And then there’s Steve1989 MREinfo. He just likes to eat really old military rations. It’s kind of his thing.
Steve has eaten the old-as-hell food of armies from countless wars, but this piece of Civil War hardtack (a cracker-y type of food) is by far the oldest thing he’s ever ingested. Hardtack was intended to be, well, hard. It’s lack of moisture is what kept them from rotting, so it’s difficult to say if it’s really even gone stale in any recognisable sense. All we know is that this cracker survived century-and-a-half after the war, only to be eaten by a guy who loves Phil Collins.
At first he describes the taste as similar to a library book or mothball. I wouldn’t put it past him to have firsthand experience eating either. The hardtack gets tossed into some water to soften up, and takes on a eraser-like taste, similar to car tyres. Who could resist flavour descriptions like that? Finally, Steve tosses it into some coffee to get the authentic infantry experience, minus the bullet wounds, gangrene, amputations and so on.
Although two other videos have since been uploaded to Steve’s channel, they appear to have gone up around the same time as the hardtack tasting, meaning they were probably shot and uploaded in batches. Who want to take guesses on his current level of intestinal distress? The words “arse geyser” come to mind.