Pizza completed to endure 3 years, 50-foot drops

Next year, military in the meadow could have pizzas in a pocket that previous much longer than that tart you swollen under the sofa most recent weekend.

There are visibly a number of things that military deployed overseas overlook about home, but there's one demand Jeremy Whitsitt of the Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center has heard over and over yet again

"Since the dawn of time... pizza has been one of the most requested and sought-after components in an MRE," Whitsitt told Military Times. "We're lastly cracking the code in receiving the crust and the cheese and the beef to all live gladly in a purse for three years, lacking refrigeration."

MRE stands for Meal Ready to Eat, the meals in a pouch that the military started using to feed soldiers out of reach of a kitchen in the 1980s to replace canned meals. In addition to maintaining the feel and flavor of pizza for more than 1,000 days, Natick's staff also told WBUR that these pizzas will be available for delivery into combat zones -- via parachute or a 50-foot drop from a helicopter.Preserving pizza is a difficult task, it turns out, for manifold reasons. First, you've got to keep the sauce from soaking into the crust, and you also have to prevent the acids in the ingredients from turning the whole thing to mush. The solution seems to lie in using doughs with humectants, additives that bind damp to keep the coating from going damp. Other gums and enzymes are also added to keep the cash from going decayed.

The pizzas in a pocket will be field-tested in the summer and could go into manufacture in 2015. Of course, by then, NASA may have perfected its 3D-printed pizzas. Combine those two technologies, and we could all stock our shelves with sufficient pies to most recent awaiting the ending of time... or at least awaiting 2018.