FOOD QUEUES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 345, 1 February 1946, Page 13

FOOD QUEUES

(Written for "The Listener" by DR.

MURIEL

BELL

Nutritionist to the Health Department)

AVING just stood in a Friday bread queue with dis‘appointment efter my wait, but with some yeast and a recipe recently published in the New Zealand Listener as a second line of defence, I am reminded that there have been two amusing cattoons lately about food queues in Europe which bring back ‘home to us the difference between our pleasant land and those where food and labour shoftages are more acute. eee One is by David Low, depicting an enormous queue, becoming in their anxiety rather unruly at the head end, as they wait their turn at the ice-cream cart. As its legend, the cartoon quotes the now well-known Churchill phrkseology: "We will fight in the hills, in the fields, and on the beaches." Another is published by Punch, showing a crowded foreign open-air arena, and a housewife with her basket telling her neighbour: "I didn’t mean to come to the circus at all this afternoon. I thought I was in a queue for bread." The journal Food has a verse introduced by the information that the allocation of coffee for home consumption has been increased by 20 per cent, The verse runs: In shops ‘to-day the things one buys Ate scarce, from clothes to lollipops, But coffee stocks are on the rise In shops.

They queue for soap, they queue for mops, For condiments and cakes and dyes, For fish on slabs that dankly flops In shops. The Sunday joint is scant of size, There is a scarcity of hops, But coffee stocks are on the rise In shops. In the same journal there was news of an order by the Ministry of Foodin October, just at the time, mark you, when the housewife would be making her Christmas puddings. The®order ran: "Owing to the shortage of oils and fats, shredded and/or flaked suet (excluding raw suet whether or not shredded, sold by butchers) has been prescribed as a rationed food. It is included in the cooking fats ration as an alternative to lard and compound cooking fat, and may not be obtained or sold for household consumption or manufacturing purposes except against a fats coupon-or permit." During the Christmas season, when no doubt many of us felt a little irked at thé lack of freédom to buy all the meat and butter to which we have been accustomed, we had at least the freedom to buy as much fat and as much soap as we. wanted. How many New Zealanders could manage on an ounce of cooking fat per week, even when they get twice as much meat-roast fat as the people of England get? A good thing, the saving sense of humour that cartoons or versifies in the face of hardships.