Nearly two million people have watched Steve Thomas dump this jiggling, unrecognizable yellow blob onto a tray. It was, in a former lifetime, spaghetti with “ground meat.” But now, beneath the black goo that has seeped out onto the lid, it looks like dog food that only a heartless monster would actually serve to a dog. The pasta itself has come to resemble maggots, which are somehow all the more disturbing in their stillness—like this gelatinous poison got the best of even them. Thomas emits an involuntary series of eeughhs in response to the sauce’s sour, acidic odor, but they quickly become oohs of admiration when he notices how well preserved the can is.

The spaghetti isn’t the only oddity this 1969 Vietnam War MCI—or Meal, Combat, Individual ration—has in store. “I can almost guarantee the nuts are going to be rancid in that bad boy,” Thomas correctly predicts of a desiccated pecan cake roll. But even after close to half a century, the coffee still tastes great.

Steve Thomas’s YouTube channel, Steve1989 MREinfo, is devoted to unboxing old and obscure military field rations—and, when possible (that is, when they aren’t totally putrid), taste-testing them. He eats history for an audience of a quarter-million subscribers, meaning an audience roughly the size of the city of Buffalo is so committed to ration-devouring videos that they’ve signed up to make sure they never miss a new one.

Viewers tune in to watch Thomas sample edible artifacts from the last eight decades and from almost 20 countries, from Germany to Thailand to South Africa. “You open it up and the thing hisses, air rushing in. It's amazing. You never know what you're going to come across,” he told me.

Thomas’s command of military history is as impressive as his enthusiasm is infectious. Exclamations like “nice,” “wow,” and “geez” would each warrant their own squares on a Steve1989 bingo card. His videos are playful, oddly soothing, and genuinely illuminating; multiple fans have compared their improbably addictive appeal to that of painter and PBS personality Bob Ross. “I just watched a grown man eat a Russian mountain ration for 28 minutes… And I don’t regret it,” commented one viewer. Wrote another, “These videos have added an unexpected joy to my life.” And another: “Watching these videos is somehow therapeutic to me.﻿” And one more: “Been watching his shit for 3 hours straight wtf is wrong with me﻿.”

“It was the grossest thing I've ever tasted, because it literally felt like fire.”

"There are so many different kinds of people that get into MREs for so many different reasons,” Thomas explained. Among the ration enthusiasts he knows are people interested in the military (veterans and non-veterans alike), people interested in history, people interested in camping, people interested in food, and even people interested in their packaging.