This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

A few years ago, Anastasia Mark Stelshedo was making lunch for her kids.

And so like most moms, I do a lot of lunches and when I do that I usually try and

find a balance between healthy and not so healthy. On the not quite so healthy side she might pack some cheesy crackers and on the

healthy side she'd make her kids a sandwich or at least she thought the sandwiches that she was making were healthy until she looked closely at the ingredients.

I realized that I'd pulled the package deli meat out of my fridge, that the bread came from my bread box, and I've been sitting there for a while box and I've been sitting there for a while and I've been sitting in the supermarket and then it had been manufactured way back when.

And Anastasia got to thinking, it is kind of unnatural for food to last this long.

Is this really a healthy lunch?

That's Tina Antelini, host of the podcast, Gravy, helping us tell this story.

Anastasia looked at the package deli meat, the store-bought sliced bread, the processed

cheese.

As it happens, she's a journalist.

She writes a lot about food, and so she started looking into it.

I went through all of those ingredients

that you just listed up, including the mustard and the mayonnaise.

And at least two of the items,

the package deli meat and the supermarket bread,

took her research ultimately to this obscure US Army base,

the Natick Soldier Systems Center.

This is very strange.

What is the Army doing in food?

What the Army is doing in food is, of course, feeding the troops.

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