New Ukrainian field rations will comply with the NATO standards

The volunteers have designed two types of rations: emergency ones, which were created quickly by diversifying the pre-existing diet, and advanced rations which will be much richer in their composition. The emergency rations will include dried fruits, canned vegetables, spices and energy bars, while the advanced rations will look much like common daily diet. For example, breakfast offers will include pancakes, while lunch range will encompass soup and porridge with meat or soup and noodles with chicken; various pates and chocolate will be on the menu as well. The rations will be divided into five types according to their composition.

The volunteers have decided to pack Ukrainian rations according to the NATO standards, using multi-layer retort packaging, which can sterilize or pasteurize food. It creates an aseptic environment where harmful microorganisms are killed completely, so products do not go bad even at high temperatures. As for reheating, the emergency packages will still be reheated with dry ethanol, but it will be moved from the list of recommended items to the mandatory list. The retort-packed rations will use chemical reheating. By the way, there already are companies that are ready to produce low-priced chemical reheaters in Ukraine.

According to volunteer Nelli Stelmakh, the field ration now in use is unbalanced. It satisfies calorie requirements and has normal ratios of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, but there is almost no minerals and vitamins in it. In particular, it suffers from a considerable lack of calcium. People should not eat field rations for more than three days in row, but soldiers in cut-off pockets are often forced to subsist on them for up to 30 days. Such nutrition causes bad teeth, nervous disorders, and gastrointestinal tract diseases. Therefore, it was decided to supplement new rations with multivitamins and calcium preparations. Also, all new rations will include spoons, which soldiers often lacked, gum, ketchup, mustard, and increased quantities of salt and sugar.

The designers were assisted by researchers from the Institute of Food Technologies. The rations’ composition will be submitted for approval to the Ministry of Defense in the coming days, and the volunteers expect the ministry to approve it.

Nelli STELMAKH, coordinator, National Assistance Fund “Wings of Phoenix”:

“Our current rations are actually copies of the ancient Soviet designs. My colleagues and I went to plants which make these field rations specifically to check on them, and what we saw was, frankly, totally unsanitary conditions. I cannot imagine how anyone can work at such production units.

“The field rations we would like to see implemented are based on American prototypes, disassembled into components and adapted to Ukrainian tastes. Of course, we could order them designed from the scratch in Ukraine, but we would then have to wait for at least six months. As we were really short of time, we decided to just adapt proven technologies.

“We will do our best to get these field rations approved. It would be nice to see the decision-maker himself spending three days on these old rations, and he would have no doubt left then whether to approve them. Let him try to subsist on these rations for a few days without a spoon and without dry ethanol for reheating, drinking both coffee and tea twice daily, and we will have some results then. This country has hideously complicated approval procedures for everything. My impression is that our officials are fixated on the process, not the result of their work. However, as we have adopted this field as our own, we will insist on them working effectively.”