The Doomsday Diet - WWIII all-purpose survival cracker

The Rocketry Forum

Help Support The Rocketry Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Winston

Lorenzo von Matterhorn
Joined
Jan 31, 2009
Messages
9,561
Reaction score
1,755
The Doomsday Diet
Meet the all-purpose survival cracker, the US government's Cold War-era nutrition solution for life after a nuclear blast
12 Dec 2017

https://www.eater.com/2017/12/12/16757660/doomsday-biscuit-all-purpose-survival-cracker

Excerpts:

...during the peak of the fallout shelter craze, from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, the government tallied that some “7,000 volunteers had participated in over 22,000 man-days of shelter living in occupancy tests ranging from family size to over 1,000 people.”

These experiments ultimately produced enduring national standards for underground shelters, such as a minimum of 10 square feet of space per person — which, while only half the space allotted inmates in crowded jail cells, was more than three times the amount of space given to prisoners at the Nazis’ Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and six times as much space per person as inside the notorious Black Hole of Calcutta, the government explained helpfully in one report on shelter life. The tests also zeroed in on answers to fundamental questions that had plagued doomsday planners for more than a decade: What’s the minimum level of sustenance one needs to survive the apocalypse, and how do you get that to some 50 million hungry survivors?

...as the 1950s unfolded, it became clear that buying a few extra cans of food at the grocery store wasn’t going to feed the entire country sufficiently. In urban areas, high-rises, and many southern states where homes lacked basements, there would need to be larger government-run shelters. People couldn’t be expected to bring their own supplies and food; everything they would need had to be ready and waiting inside a shelter when nuclear war arrived. The Eisenhower administration embarked on the quest to develop the perfect “Doomsday food.” The requirements were stark: America’s Armageddon ration needed to be nutritious, cheap, easy to eat, shelf-stable, and reproducible at mass scale. Taste, visual appeal, quality, packaging, and all the other attributes that normally come with designing a successful, mass-produced consumer good would be discarded in favor of the simplest food the government could design.

That coldly logical approach, combined with an extensive 1958 study by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, led the government toward a single commodity as the foundation for its plan to feed a nation: The “parched wheat form known as Bulgur,” one of the simplest ingredients known to man. The main ingredient in dishes like tabbouleh, kibbeh, and pilafs, bulgur is nutty, nutritious, high-fiber, and supremely safe. “Bulgur was selected for this investigation because it is processed from a basic agricultural commodity, whole-grain wheat, which is plentiful in the U.S., low in cost, highly palatable, and reportedly very stable,” one government report explained.

That last thing stood out in particular, because it would need to hold up for years inside fallout shelters, awaiting the apocalypse. “Indeed a long shelf life may well be the single most important criterion for choosing bulgur in a stockpiling program,” the government reported. As part of its research, the USDA eventually landed on crackers as the best medium for bulgur-wheat rations in a bunker scenario; after 52 months of storage it reported merely a “discernible but inconsequential decrease” in flavor.

New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, perhaps the nation’s leading civil-defense enthusiast, bragged that a day’s worth of crackers cost just 37 cents per person — an economic solution to feeding an entire nation following nuclear war. A new problem emerged, though: There wasn’t enough capacity to turn the necessary three million bushels of bulgur wheat into the 150 million pounds of crackers that the government originally believed it needed; at the time, nearly all of the government’s surplus bulgur went through a single plant at the Fisher Flour Mill in Seattle, and it couldn’t possibly handle the volume the nation now required to secure itself against nuclear war. On December 21, 1961, the Pentagon convened the nation’s cereal companies to discuss the best way to quickly ramp up manufacturing of the chosen biscuit recipe.

Plans called for shelters to stock 10,000 calories of food per person, which would have worked out to a little over 700 calories per person, per day over the expected two-week stay underground. Each government-run shelter was also to be stocked with 21-inch-tall fiberboard drums, lined with plastic, that would start out as water storage — containing just 3.5 gallons of drinking water per person for the entire duration of the internment — and then, once empty, be converted into toilets. Since there was little else to do in a shelter, the government literature encouraged serving six small single-cracker “meals” each day of precisely 125 calories. The cracker diet would also include stockpiled tins of mouth-soluble “carbohydrate supplements,” i.e., suckable yellow and red hard candy. As one official explained, “Although this may seem somewhat austere, nutrition experts consider it adequate and in accord with minimal survival concept.” That’s a bureaucratic way of saying that the crackers would provide the equivalent of a Doomsday starvation ration — you’d still be hungry, you’d still lose weight, but you wouldn’t starve to death. Herman Kahn, a Cold War strategist, glibly assessed, “Well, you’re sipping a drink, munching on something tasteless, and it’s dark and crowded — a Greenwich Village nightclub.”

The government warmly embraced the idea of converting Cold War rations to disaster relief, believing that it had discovered a great way to recycle and rotate the stores of crackers. In 1974, officials estimated there were still nearly 150,000 tons of the crackers stocked in fallout shelters out of the nearly 165,000 tons that had been originally baked. “Last week, we opened up a can and ate some,” explained the D.C. civil defense director, brushing aside concerns about their freshness. One Pentagon official, appearing to not understand the original purpose of the biscuits, reported that the rations dispatched for disaster victims weren’t meant to be a complete diet on their own. “You wouldn’t want to eat them for a couple of weeks with nothing else,” he said. “They’re good with little bit of cheese on them with a martini on the side.”

Later that year, the U.S. exhumed 20 tons of crackers — hidden in an old streetcar tunnel under Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. that had been used since the Cuban Missile Crisis to store civil defense supplies — and shipped them to Bangladesh to feed survivors of a monsoon there. Other cracker caches were dispatched to Guatemala to aid victims of a devastating 1976 earthquake. The recipients of the disaster food reported developing what one newspaper described as “severe gastric disturbances” after ingesting the biscuits. As those reports trickled back to the U.S., officials across the country wondered just what they’d stocked away for a nuclear apocalypse. In mid-1976, E. Erie Jones, the Illinois state emergency coordinator, convened a group in his shag-carpeted office in Springfield for a taste test; it didn’t even start well. The mere smell from the newly opened tin caused coughing fits. He took a single bite, grimaced, then canceled the rest of the experiment. In reporting the taste test gone wrong, the Chicago Tribune declared that the “Survival biscuits [would be] better as weapons” than food if a war did unfold.


On eBay, search for "civil defense survival crackers biscuits". They're there.

Biscuit_3.jpg


fallout2.jpg


Biscuit_2_a.jpg
 
When things go bad at 4:20......and at 6:19.
[video=youtube;Bty_SiaVtaA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bty_SiaVtaA[/video]
 
Last edited:
In the early 80's I worked at Grand Canyon Caverns, it was a designated fallout shelter and had water and these crackers. Periodically a quality inspection was done, a can was opened and there was a form with various checks and form was sent to DoD and some long forgotten official. I ate one, the quote from Crocodile Dundee comes to mind, "You can live on it, but it tastes like ......"
 
In the early 80's I worked at Grand Canyon Caverns, it was a designated fallout shelter and had water and these crackers. Periodically a quality inspection was done, a can was opened and there was a form with various checks and form was sent to DoD and some long forgotten official. I ate one, the quote from Crocodile Dundee comes to mind, "You can live on it, but it tastes like ......"
There are still stories of Civil Defense caches popping up now and then. This is an interesting YouTube of a guy who opens and tries (if appearing and smelling even remotely edible) various antique and modern military rations:

[video=youtube;1eK9xqKcHco]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eK9xqKcHco[/video]
 
Back
Top