Better Food For Our Fighting Men by Matthieu Nicol

An artist book by Mathieu Nicol, editor of the creative consultancy and communications agency "Too Many Images".

The book contains photographs taken primarily in the 1970s and 1980s from the archives of the U.S. Army's Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, located near Boston. The center is still in operation today, employing both military personnel and civilian contractors in its mission to improve the daily lives and diets of U.S. soldiers. For the world's most powerful military, feeding the troops presents logistical, psychological, and food safety challenges. Germs are the enemy, and the supply chain is a critical and complex delivery system. The goal of the institute is to provide nutrition and morale across all terrains and troop configurations, from mess halls for officers and self-service buffets for NCOs to battlefield mess halls and survival rations for commando units behind enemy lines. Solving this logistical puzzle is like trying to stuff a square peg into a round hole. Once we have devised a way to optimize the daily nutritional requirements of the human body in question, we need to come up with the best solution for food storage and transportation. A 24-item glossary explains the abbreviations used in the image captions and the staples of a typical soldier's diet and explains how the food industry manufactures and It traces the new technologies that have enabled the food industry to produce and supply those foods.