COLD STORAGE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 April 1942, Page 4

COLD STORAGE

BRITAIN’S FOOD EMERGENCY

Hundreds of cold storage centres with a temperature of 20 degrees below freezing point are now available up and down Great Britain for the colossal order of 1,000,000 tons of meat recently placed by the Ministry of Food with Australia and South America. Each of these centres can keep thousands of tons of meat, bacon, butter and frozen eggs over a period of two years. In one of them, for example, there are 1,200 tons of butter, 3,400 tons of meat and a large quantity of bacon; another holds, 60,000 ’ carcases of mutton; a third, 3,000 pig carcases. In peace time, Britain’s food storage resources are to be found mainly at the docks. Today, scattered throughout the country are not only these hundreds of cold storage centres but 10,000 other storing places for non-perishable food products, set up according to district and each supplying its own area with at least six or seven main articles of food.

There has been some quick improvisation. Here a textile mill, there a furniture factory, has been turned into service; in one cdse the cells of a prison are to be found crammed with canned meat; a casino now holds 700 tons of tea, margarine and flour.