HDR Humanitarian Daily Ration

[ToughOmbres]

Mods-feel free to remove if this has been covered before.

IRL the HDR Humanitarian Daily ration was deployed in Afghanistan and other theaters. 2200 or so calories, little to no dairy and no meat to accommodate religious preferences.

Unsure of their development history-if they were used in 2001 they have to have been developed earlier. Earliest ones featured a yellow tinted bag similar to an MRE, that was then changed to a salmon/orange color bag.

For T2K would you include the HDR, not include the HDR, lump it in generically with other MRE's or ignore it entirely? Would it even exist in your T2k world?

FTR FEMA and the DLA regularly dispose of enormous lots on the secondary market for relatively little if anyone is interested....

[Tegyrius]

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.

[Vespers War]

The first airdrop of HDRs was part of Provide Promise, providing food to Maglaj, Brandina, Gorazde, and Desaj on November 23, 1993. It was a rapid development program after it was realized during the Somalia campaign that MREs weren't suitable for recovery of civilians who had been in starvation conditions; they made malnourished consumers ill. They're also much cheaper than MREs, at around 1/3 the manufacturing cost (less than $4.50 in 2003).

They would see further use in Rwanda in 1994, Cambodia and Chechnya in 1995, Somalia in 1997, Fiji in 1998, Kosovo and Sierra Leone and East Timor in 1999 and Eritrea in 2000 before their use in Afghanistan.

The wrapper color was changed from yellow to salmon in November 2001 when it was realized the same shade of yellow was used on cluster bomb submunitions, so people avoided anything yellow if they couldn't identify it from a distance.

Current package contents are available here. A 25-pound case typically has 10 HDRs, 2 from each of the 5 menus.

In addition to minimizing animal products and animal-derived products to just a little dairy, the HDR also eliminates alcohol from the package, including the moist towlette that's included, which is non-alcohol based.

Also worth noting is that a single HDR is slightly less than 2 MREs for caloric content - a single MRE is ~1250 calories while an HDR is ~2200-2300. The HDR is supposed to provide an entire day's food for a single civilian, while a combatant is supposed to eat 3 MREs in a day.

[ToughOmbres]

Good points from both posts.

If in the V 1 T2K timeline the Somali and other humanitarian interventions did indeed take place there seems to be a compelling case for HDR's in a game (if desired). Certainly adds a little flavor (pun intended).

The only bottleneck for production from my viewpoint would be that SoPak, Wornick and other who manufacture components for HDR's are also producing MRE's on contract for DOD.

Up until the TDM perhaps 5% production runs of HDR's and 95% MRE's sound reasonable?

[Bestbrian]

I know Unimix was available and being distributed in Somalia, so that could be another mass feeding option.

[bash]

I don't see any reason the HDR wouldn't end up being developed even in a T2K timeline where Somalis didn't happen. Once hostilities between Russia and China start up the US and NATO's assistance to China would definitely include food. A shelf stable and easily transported and delivered food parcel would be quickly developed. It would later come in handy in Europe once fighting starts there.

Even when the timelines require governments to act stupid and short sighted, some private companies are going to jump on production of an HDR-like product. They'd sell like gangbusters to anyone worried about war coming to the US or NGOs wanting to send aid to Europe or China.