IN THE FREEZER

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 43, 21 February 1927, Page 6

IN THE FREEZER

That tale of the asbestos cat ehasiug a snowball thiough Hades comes vividlj to mind as you step out into the street. F«ir the world is a furnace when you leave a freeziii" chamber on a hot summer day iu Auckland. It is as though you had forsaken Greenland's icy mountains or the frozen wastes of Alaska for the fiery- blasts of—say. Hay, which is in Australia. "And Hay "is next to Hell." wailed an Australian poet. Sounds like Lawson in one of his melancholy moods, but poor Henry "lies low, lies low," and far be it from any of his detractors, far less from a humble admirer, to accuse him of anything worse than his worst if it is not justified. In the chambers of tho Auckland Farmers' Freezing Company on the King's wharf the temperature is 24 decrees below .freezing point. Strange how thoughts arise and memories are stirred by what is called "the association ct ideas." Overhead are the snow clad pipes conveying the ammonia fumes which produ e freezing—for all the world like the cordace of a ship off Cape Horn in the winter. Piled in a stack aro sides of pork. You knock one of them with your knuckles; it is like rapping a concrete block. Frozen corpses: Ugh! Back flies memory to your unhappy schooldavs when, stood on a chair, with your "thoughts "awav on some heaving wa*te where the wild winds 'howl through the ice coated cordage of some wallowing ship, you were made to recite (as a rehearsal for the annual break-up concert! "The Wreck of the Hesperus " : But the father answered never a word. A frozen corpse was lie. Thus are iced pipes, the half of a pig. the old school, the litMe girl lashed to the mast in a snowstorm, and the skipper frozen to the tiller confusedly and inexplicably mingled among the products of modern commerce in a vcrv cold chamber on a very hot dav! In one of tho freezing chambers there are quarters of beef, sides and legs of pork and crates of rabbits for local consumption. You might, it is said, keep these edibles for an eternity but that the cost of storage runs high. One wonders what one of the rabbits would tasto like in a thousand years' time. Judgiii" by the frozen meat once" partaken of in tho fo'c'slc of a British owned steamer runnin-' between Australia and England, it wouldn't ha*e any taste at all. The meat referred to tasted like tallow—if anything. The crew said it hid been seventeen times round the world, but th s was a slight exaggeration. Keally it was omv its second voyage. But frozen meat is not comparable to fresh meat in any case even after a few weeks' freezing—"it cannot compete well even with chilled meat, and that is where the Argentine has it all over New Zealand in the competition for the British market." remarked the custodian of tho chamber. "That's the country for a young man," he added, rather wistfully. For in the Argentine they arc only days * from Europe, where we are weeks. * They send their meat across the Atlantic in a chilled, not a frozen state. That is to say, it is carried at a temperature a couple of points over freezing point, and it reaches the big markets in a state as near N> "fresh" as is the meat you buy from your local butcher's cool chamber at the "end of "the week. The best brains of refrigerating science are now at work to try and discover a method bv which meat can be safely conveyed from New Zealand to England in a "chilled" instead of a frozen state. As this is being explained to you. there comes the realisation that your feet arc decidedly cold. \ou think of the warm sun outside, and. contemplating with lessened interest the pork corpses in the chamber, inquire whether those who work in these surroundings ever get pneumonia. It brings relief to learn that they do not—or not oftener than other men. Tho inspection is not completed, however. There are other chambers. Two of them have the huge capacity of .".0,000 boxes of butter each. and there you see tho golden product stack>-d high to the ceiling, representative of one of ths chief sources of our boasted wealth. It seems impossible, in the midst of all this, that thousa s of New Zealand children very seldom have butter with their bread, and only a* "scrape" when thev do. It puts you in mind of those poorly pa "d cashiers who handle thousands of pounds of ca u each week and are permitted to retain onlv three or four of them for their services. When thov pay tho rent and buy the children's bread th\haven't much left for butter. All the butter you see stacked here is for the English market. It has been graded bv the Government graders, and only first grade "bears tho special brand of the fern "leaf. Each box is so marked that the date of its manufacture, the number of its churning and its factory can be told at a glance. Like meat, it travels frozen. There are other things than these—cheese, for instance, crates and crates of it. It has a very nice smell in cold storage, reminiscent of growim* pineapples. Again the absurdity! How can you grow pineapples in Iceland? In tho chilling chambers, where the temperature is 33 or 34 degrees above zero, or a point or two above freezing point, thev keep fruit for a rise in prices, and eggs—thirty dozen to the crate—against the time when the "hens slacken m their work. Eggs are also kept in pulp, but they are kept frozen, in benzine tins—thirty dozen to the tin, and thirtv dozen eggs in prdn weigh 401b. They are for those bakers who do not use what is termed egg powder, and which is alleged to be no relation whatever to the egg. It is all very interesting, but it is more than very cold, and, as you make your adieus to the pigs carcases and the beef quarters and the ee««s and the butter and the fruit and go out once more into the sun, you think of the man in A aska who was thought to be frozen dead but who thawed gradually in a furnace. They 'tri-vl to dig a grave for him in the ice, but the ice was too hard, so they threw him in the furnace - for, it was remarked, he always did have a fancv ' for cremation. When they opened the door of the furnace an hour later thev found him sittii... up smok.ng his ipe. "Shut that door' 7 ' ho yelled, "you're letting the draught in"