IN OUR CEASELESS efforts to ward off death and corruption, human beings have devised a thousand ways to postpone the inevitable. In order to keep ourselves alive through lean times and in barren lands, we have kept our comestibles edible by salting, drying and otherwise protecting them from the ravages of time. And, weirdly, in our efforts to stave off the inevitable, we have often applied the same methods of preservation to our own kindred.

According to Sue Shephard in her book, "Pickled, Potted, and Canned," all the preserving methods found effective in keeping food safe have, at one time or another, been applied to the preservation of human remains. The art of mummification evolved directly from the art of food preservation.

These days we tend to think of food preservation as a quaint occupation practiced by a few overly domestic folks in their country kitchens. But in fact, the science of this craft has always been driven by commerce and war. In turn, the success of our grandest endeavors has always depended on well-preserved supplies of food.

The single most significant way that food preservation has changed the world is by making food available to large armies far from hearth and home, be they bedouin soldiers carrying the dried milk they called jamid or the modern American in uniform with an MRE (Meal Ready to Eat).

Indeed, almost every advance in salting, drying and canning has been pioneered by efforts to feed the troops. Old TV commercials for Roman Meal bread showed Roman soldiers carrying little bags of grain to sustain them between bouts of pillaging. (They really did.) And the science of modern canning was developed by Nicolas Appert, a French confectioner who used his knowledge of sweet preserves to develop ways of boiling beef soup in champagne bottles for use by the French navy in 1803.

In the memoirs of the great French chef Auguste Escoffier, I read with particular interest the chapters devoted to his war years. While the historical significance of the Siege of Metz is lost on me, details of the great chef's efforts to keep the officers fed are fascinating. Fearing an attack was imminent, he hid jars of Metz's "excellent and famous plum jams, about 20 kilos of salt, and Liebig tins of preserved food." Liebig was a German chemist who in 1850 developed the first "meat extract," a kind of canned, concentrated bouillon.

When some of my own family was under siege in the wake of brutal hurricanes that ripped up the state of Florida last year, the Red Cross handed out cases of bottled water and MREs to the stunned victims.

"It was deeply weird," explained my oldest brother who lives on the Gulf Coast. But, he enthused, "the packaging was really cool."

I was reminded of his forays into the war-torn make-believe of our childhood when he led us on expeditions across the hostile terrain of my grandmother's back yard to eat bologna sandwiches he had wrapped in wax paper and packed in an old waterproof artillery case. Now, as the manager of a beachfront hotel left in ruins after the hurricane, he carried MREs to work as a night watchman while the hotel underwent repairs.

"Some of the entrees are not bad," he said. "And I tell you what, if you heat the pumpkin bread up in the microwave and put a scoop of ice cream on top, it's good."

Naturally, I had to see for myself. I persuaded a nephew to send me one of the meals and, with great excitement, I opened the thick, beige plastic in which it was wrapped. I examined the individual packets of jelly, the "snack bread" and the peculiar "beverage base powder." I heated the tightly sealed packet of "Turkey Tetrazzini" with the baffling "Chemical Heater," and opened it to discover a mishmash of what tasted like something recovered from the ruins of my elementary-school cafeteria.

I was hooked. Sheer fascination led me to prowl the Internet in search of more MREs, and there I uncovered a thriving underworld of hunters, campers and survivalists who use MREs for disaster preparedness and outdoor food.

One Web site, theepicenter.com, listed its home office in Eugene, Ore. Bryan Nelson, a former Seattleite, started Epicenter in May 1995 as an information site on disaster preparedness, and it evolved into a retail site for shelf-stable products like MREs.

It's impossible to eat an MRE without thinking about the soldiers for whom these meals were designed. The packages are emblazoned with advice for staying battle ready: "Even if you don't feel like eating, eat the snacks so you will have energy." To prevent water from spilling out of the heating packet, users are advised to lean the bag against "a rock or something." And what struck me as sad about these meals was not so much the lack of flavor but the ironic lack of anything living in these life-preserving portions. Like anything preserved, the meals are removed — for as long as their packaging holds tight — from the natural world where matter decomposes and becomes the raw material for the next round of living things.

And this is what makes these meals so intriguing. MREs may be disgusting and of dubious nutritional value; nevertheless, in their very conception, they express the same uniquely human impulse that compelled someone long ago to preserve a mummy. Somehow, they tell the age-old and sometimes bizarre story of humankind's ongoing struggle with mortality.

By halting death in its tracks, we preserve a semblance of life that may ultimately preserve life itself. And the same death-defying trick that made Appert's soup in a champagne bottle a bizarre but welcome addition to the galley of a French naval vessel long ago makes MREs a thing of wonder today.

Greg Atkinson is a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.