AIRMEN'S FOOD

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 221, 18 September 1942, Page 2

AIRMEN'S FOOD

HANDLING OF MEAT THOUSANDS OF SAUSAGES (0.C.) WELLINGTON, this day. There is probably <n<> civilian shop, even among the most famous of the world's departmental stores, which is in a position to provide a customer with an aero engine or a pound of sausages over the counter, but this is routine stuff to air force equipment officers and their staffs. Nor are meat and its small goods a side line with them. They buy meat by the dozen carcases and turn out sausages in thousand pound lots on some R.N.Z.A.F. stations. This is skilled work, and.is done by tradesmen who, in more peaceful clays, presided over the chopping blocks in city meat stores. The butcher shop is one of the many departments for Mich the station equipment officer is responsible, and is associated with the ration store, from which the various messes draw their foodstuffs. All meat is subject to rigorous inspection. When orders, of a size which the suburban butcher dreams about but could never hope to receive, come in from the messes, they <** - e made up by the sergeant butcher and his staff with a competence and speed that is assisted by freedom from the interruption of telephone calls from impatient householders. The orders must be ready for delivery to the cooks at 9 a.m. under the watchful eye of the orderly officer, who checks the quantities with the orders. Such Is the insistence of the service on the rights of serving men to good food that that famous and capacious tome, "The King's Regulations" solemnly lays upon the orderly officer the particular dutv of being present when the day's rations are issued, and of calling in the station medical officer to inspect any item whose fitness for consumption" seems doubtful.

Like his comrades in the navy and army the. airman regards as inalienable his right to grouse occasionally especially about his food. But, as in the two older services, the' air force, while respecting this age-old privilege of the ranks, dues its best to see that it is only a symbolic exercise of this customary right rather than of any actual 'need to grumble about the quality of the