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Comment by stef25 | Hacker News Reader

Not related to the pizza version but to all MRE's - what if you have a broad food allergy, like lactose or gluten intolerance / allergy? Seems almost impossible to not have those present in these types of food.

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There is a wide variety of medical conditions that disqualify people from serving in the US armed forces.

https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/disqualifiers-med...

Then you don't eat the main item, and you go hungry. That's about how it goes. I got vegetarian omelet all the time, it's notoriously gross and runny. You typically don't get to swap if you're less than an E-5. So you just eat the other stuff in the meal or go hungry.

Honestly Basic training with a food allergy, sounds like hell. You're pretty much starving for a month, and you don't get the luxury of choice while eating.

I was a smaller guy when I went through in 2009, and I was required to eat every last thing. I can now eat 3 full meals in less than 2 minutes. But I feel bad for someone who's got an gluten intolerance, because a DS isn't going to take that as an excuse.

I’m going to guess that food allergies is something MEPS would catch. As a former grunt I can’t see how having a major food allergy would work. There’s too much to worry about to also make sure your supply lines also have just the right amount of xyz food intolerant meals. Food prep for patrols was “throw a box of MRE’s in the truck and let’s go”.

I don't think the US military accepts people with food allergies like that.

During a draft they would, but right now in times of "peace" the military can be choosy.

> During a draft they would, but right now in times of "peace" the military can be choosy.

No, even when there's a draft they don't accept people with certain medical problems. Someone who requires special meals to get enough calories to do his job would more than likely tax military logistics more than his labor is worth while deployed.

Edit: I guess people don't like the above idea, but it's true:

http://aaugusti.umwblogs.org/hist-375-military-history/#_ftn...

> Michael was a young man during the era of the Vietnam War. He was given the lottery draft number nine and had to get a physical to proceed with the draft process. Michael attempted to use an allergy to wool as an excuse to get out of the draft. He was told to wear wool socks to see if the allergy was true. Under the socks, Michael used a solvent to create a rash to the wool. He tried several times before an Army doctor issued him as medically ineligible for service.

As an example, during the surge volunteers could get enlistment waivers for almost anything except Celiac disease or peanut allergy. Minor felonies, not so minor felonies, fat, ASVAB test results worse than filling out the score sheet randomly, school dropout, addiction history, well, OK if you really want, but no food allergies.

Do you by any chance have a reference for how much standards were lowered during the surge? I knew they were lowered some, but I thought it was a little bit, not a huge amount.

USAREC works in mysterious ways. The exact legal definition of waiver vs standard vs requirement is complicated and fuzzy. This link from NYT (a fake news source, but sometimes accidentally factual) gives some insight in that the number of waivers roughly doubled.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/us/14military.html

The effect on the army is unclear. Note that even during the surge more than ninety percent of recruits required no waivers. So you can spin the story as the number of recruits with clean records dropped from 98% to 96% which doesn't matter, or its a crisis that the number of troublemakers doubled.

A single example of this was Bo Bergdahl. Generally speaking, washing out of another branch of the service for psychologcial reasons like Bo did (coast guard) is a huge red flag and would have disqualified him at another time.

This is a personal ancidote from my experience only, but it was generally understood that during the Iraq period circa 2003 If you have a pulse, you were qualified to enlist.

I don't recall any other soldiers in basic with me having any food allergies for what it's worth(this was back in 2002). I'm not sure if that was just coincidence, or if that allergy disqualified them from my branch(army).

There was a thread on reddit.com/r/army about getting diagnosed with Celiac while on active duty. Interesting reading.

https://www.reddit.com/r/army/comments/9gl5vt/celiac_disease...

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