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Field Ration D

The United States Army once paid Hershey's to make the worst chocolate bar in history. It was 1937 and Captain Paul Logan of US Army Quartermaster General's office sat down with Hershey's chief chemist Sam Hinkle and gave him one of the strangest product briefs in the meeting. He needed a chocolate bar that weighed four ounces, could withstand extreme heat without melting, delivered enough calories to keep a soldier alive in an emergency, and tasted, in Logan's exact words, only a little better than a boiled potato.

He did not want it to taste good. If it tasted good soldiers would eat it whenever they felt like it and have nothing left when they actually needed it. The solution was to engineer the palatability out of it deliberately. Make it just edible enough that a starving man would eat it. Make it just unpleasant enough that no one would eat it for fun.

Hinkle got to work. He cut the sugar dramatically. He increased the bitter chocolate liquor. He added oat flour, which created a dry, chalky, unpleasant texture. The resulting mixture was so thick and stiff that it could not be poured into molds at all. Every single bar had to be pressed in by hand. Before the war ended Hershey's had made more than three billion of them.

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