Combat feeding officials falsely claim trans fat is a necessity for shelf life... but their trans fat products fail their own internal shelf-life tests.

The combat feeding bureacracy requires three year shelf-life for its energy bars in MREs. 

They evaluate shelf life by evaluating aged bars on a 9-point “hedonic scale”.

They make a lot of specious claims about how trans fat helps with shelf-life for ration food items.  But in truth, records reveal that their own trans fat bars (which the combat feeding bureaucracy designed, and which are made by their preferred contractors) scored terribly -- in the 4’s, on a 9-point scale.

And yet Natick officials like Stephen Moody have long upheld the (false) party line that trans fat was needed for shelf-life.

A masterpiece of clarity and conclusiveness.

Using FOIA, we discovered the below email, which is very telling.  It’s an internal Natick Combat Feeding Directorate discussion of trans fat Hooah/First Strike energy bars and their embarrassing shelf-life and taste scores.   Apparently scrambling to suppress the findings and/or spin them, Gerry Darsch, the Director of Natick Combat Feeding at the time, mentions that we, the D’Andrea Brothers (what he calls the “D’Bouyze”), would have a “field day” with the embarassing information he was trying to hide -- info about how poorly the Army’s trans fat energy bars scored in shelf life and acceptability tests.  And he was right.  We did have a field day with it.  Because it belies Natick’s repeated claims that trans fat is needed in food because it improves shelf-life. 

These emails were also provided to us by the Army...