COCOA RATIONS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4534, 9 February 1942, Page 3

COCOA RATIONS

HIDDEN AWAY IN BRITAIN’S SECRET LARDER

Britain’s fighting forces and the men and women on civil defence are consuming a very large proportion of the £4,000,000 of cocoa now being imported each year from the West Coast of Africa.

The Royal Navy, which first took to cocoa a century ago, absorbs 300 tons of it. They have their own traditional method of preparing the beans, which are cleaned, roasted, crushed, and made into big slabs in their own kitchens. The cocoa, or “ki” as they call it on the lower decks, is-. scraped down from these slabs in the cook’s galley for liquid use, and on the night ■watches both officers and men drink it round the guns and torpedo tubes. During the battle of the Plate galley staffs kept up a supply of hot cocoa throughout the whole action, and while Crete was being evacuated under heavy bombardment from land and air the galley staff of one warship sent a constant flow of cocoa to more than 1000 men.

The convoy service also absorbs goodly quantities and cocoa appears thrice a week on the Army diet sheet for supper. It is included in every parcel sent to British prisoners of war, and during the Battle of London and the bombing of British cities people in air-raid shelters adopted it as a standard drink. Each member of the Civil Defence Forces is allowed three-sixteenths of an ounce of cocoa a day. It comes to them in sevenpound tins from the nation’s “Shadow Larder,” which has 1,000,000 rations stored secretly throughout the country.