Still can't find any more corroboration this morning besides blog entries. I did find this nice description of the rations and how they were transported to the US. Actually, it seems that 400,000 rations were sent by the UK on Sept 5th, and the quote by the British MoD seems to suggest that they were meant to feed US military personnel on relief operations, not Katrina "evacuees". The US DoD press reported back on Sept 5th that Rumsfeld was in Berlin with his British counterpart and publicly thanked the British gov't for their generosity. ( here)

There seems to be one independent, non-blog article by an American paper (Arkansas PHRASECENSOREDPOSTERSHOULDKNOWBETTER.-Gazette) here, that seems promising, but I don't want to pay for a subscription to read it. The rations were first flown to Arkansas, to be distributed to the diaster area, so the fact that it's being reported on by an Arkansas paper lends a bit more credence to the story (although I wish I knew what they were saying!

Just curious, but have any ETSers recently eaten British combat rations while in the service? I think British BSE erupted in 1997, so any rations containing beef since then could have been "tainted". I'm just wondering because if the DoD let our troops eat these rations since '97, why would the US gov't burn them now? Just because the rations are on American soil versus being eaten by American GI's overseas? Now THAT would be bureacratic nit-picking!