Treats and morale: why the chocolate is not optional

Most planning for a store cupboard, or a long trip, is about calories, protein and shelf life. That is the right place to start and the wrong place to stop, because there is a problem the numbers do not show. People who are fed dull food stop eating enough of it, even when there is plenty, even when they are hungry and working hard.

That is not a guess about human nature. It is one of the best-documented findings in military nutrition, and NASA and the polar expeditions found the same thing.

The army that would not eat its rations

In 1995 the US Institute of Medicine reviewed decades of studies on soldiers living on packaged field rations, the kind that are complete, shelf-stable and carefully balanced. The headline finding was blunt. Across six studies that measured intake and energy use precisely, soldiers on those rations showed “energy consumption ranging from 52 to 85 percent of energy expenditure”, with deficits of 1,000 to 1,500 kcal a day. The food was there. They were not eating it.

When the same studies looked at soldiers given ordinary cooked meals, or a mix of cooked meals and rations, intake came close to what they were using.

The committee’s explanation of why is the most useful paragraph in this page, because it reads like a list of things a cupboard can fix:

Taste, variety and temperature. The report names “palatability, variety, and temperature of the foods” as major contributors to whether rations are eaten, and recommends “greater variety and enhancements to reduce monotony”.
Choice. Field rations “are by design all inclusive and do not allow substitution or choice”. A complete, balanced box with nothing in it you chose is easier to leave half-eaten.
Hot food. It recommends “supplying hot meals whenever possible, including in the field”.
Company and time. “Ideally soldiers should be able to eat in groups”, and “making specific time available for eating is important and perhaps critical.”

None of that is about nutrition in the narrow sense. All of it decides whether the nutrition gets eaten.

Saving the good box for last

NASA learned the same lesson from crews living for months on the Mir space station. Alongside the standard menu, each astronaut had bonus containers of their own favourite foods. NASA’s food scientists reported that “bonus food containers of astronaut’s favorite foods were provided to increase variety”, that “all crew members emphasized that variety was critical”, and the detail worth remembering: “in most cases, the bonus food containers were not opened until near the end of the mission.”

They were not eaten first. They were saved for the stretch when the routine had worn thinnest.

Midwinter in Antarctica

Polar expeditions planned for the same thing a century earlier. On 22 June 1911, in the dark of the Antarctic winter, Captain Scott’s party marked the halfway point with a feast. Scott wrote that the table, usually laid with “mugs and enamel lime juice jugs”, now carried glass and champagne, and that they sat down “to an extravagant bill of fare as compared with our usual simple diet”.

Seal soup, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, a flaming plum pudding and mince pies, and then a savoury of anchovy and cod’s roe, with “the table strewn with dishes of burnt almonds, crystallised fruits, chocolates and such toothsome kickshaws”.

It was not an indulgence that got out of hand. It was on the calendar, and it was a halfway mark. “By the end of dinner a very cheerful spirit prevailed,” Scott wrote.

Britain’s sweet ration

At home, the Second World War made the point in reverse. When sweets were rationed in 1942, Gwilym Lloyd George, answering for the Ministry of Food, told the House of Commons that the country had been eating about six and a quarter ounces of chocolate and sweets per person a week before the war: “Six and a quarter ounces may be very small, but it is three times the tea ration”.

Sweets stayed on the ration for more than ten years. On 4 February 1953 Lloyd George, by then Minister of Food himself, announced: “The rationing and price control of chocolate and sugar confectionery end today.”

That a government spent a decade administering the nation’s sweets, and that the end of it was announced in Parliament, says something about how much they mattered.

What a cupboard can take from this

Plan for variety, not just calories. A cupboard that could feed you for a month on one excellent dal will, in practice, feed you less than that, because by the second week you will be eating less of it. Different grains, different pulses, different cuisines. The spice kit does more for this than anything else.

Pack treats on purpose. Chocolate, cocoa, condensed milk, golden syrup, dried fruit, biscuits. They are not a luxury squeezed in if there is room; on the evidence above they are part of what makes the rest of the food get eaten.

Save some. Do what the astronauts did. Put one box aside that you do not open until the middle of the trip, or the second month, or the bad week. It costs nothing extra and gives you something to count towards.

Mark the days. A birthday, the halfway point, a Sunday. Scott’s party ate from the same stores every day and still made one night different.

Make something hot. A hot drink at the end of a cold day is the cheapest morale there is: see real hot chocolate or spiced milky tea.

Sit down and eat together. The army’s own advice. Food eaten standing up, on the move, in a hurry, is food you eat less of.

Not everything has to be sweet. Notice what Scott’s cook served after the pudding: anchovy and cod’s roe. Something sharp, salty or savoury breaks a monotony that sweetness alone cannot.

None of this is a case for living on chocolate. The point is narrower and more practical: the food you will actually want to eat is worth more than the food that looks best on paper. For what a long-life diet needs to get right nutritionally, see vitamins and a long-life diet.