Let Them Eat Cake
-- Ordinary Cake, That Is
No wonder the Pentagon's
recipe for fruitcake wasn't classified; no baker in his or her right
mind would have wanted to steal it. After all, it filled more than 14
pages of small print with petty, Kafka-esque, and often impossible requirements.
(Talk about taking the fun out of dessert!) The recipe even included
a test for chemically analyzing the "soluble solids" in the
finished product. (Despite its thoroughness, however, the recipe failed
to tell where one could obtain the necessary
testing tool: a "refractometer".)
Aside from some jesting newspaper articles, the Pentagon's baking specifications remained unchallenged until a Pentagon employee complained about them during an August 1993 town hall meeting lead by Vice President Al Gore. The complaint inspired Jeff Jones, a Pentagon official, to suggest an alternative approach that, though novel to the Defense Department, has long remained popular in homes across America: TASTE the cake! If you like it, great. If not, get another cake mix.
Jones' approach apparently struck a chord with the Pentagon, which scrapped the military specifications for mess hall food.
3/16/00
