Interesting topic!
I'm finding conflicting origin stories in my cursory Google searches. Sources are saying they were introduced in 1993. Sources also are saying that they were conceptualized as a consequence of NATO involvement in Bosnia and Somalia, where someone realized that MREs weren't great to provide to a Muslim (or, by the same logic, Hindu) population due to the prevalence of pork-based components... but the timeline on those missions doesn't line up for a 1993 product release. Also, in the v1 timeline, Yugoslavia holds together until the war is in full swing, so that particular "lessons learned" may not have occurred at all.
Having said that, I think you'd still see something that looked very close to the HDR in most Twilight universes, particularly those in which the American civil defense establishment never ramped down. In such a setting, the driving force behind the HDR would have been FEMA and the state emergency management agencies, particularly those who were looking at the problem of mass care and sheltering for large populations with religious dietary restrictions. In this case, the design parameters for the ration itself would be very close to the real-world ones, but the packaging would assume domestic use and a certain level of English literacy. Rather than being shipped overseas by the container-load, HDRs would be a fixture of the American evacuee diet over the winter of 1997-98.
- C.
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