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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 4 (July 1, 1936)

The Wooden Walls—and Iron Stomachs—of Old England

The Wooden Walls—and Iron Stomachs—of Old England.

The dieticians are right when they point out that, in these parlous days of dictators, a bout of indigestion in some high foreign quarters might quite easily embroil the world in a holocaust of bombs and bully-beef. We can believe that cheese and lobster taken late at night may raise hell-andTommy early next morning.

But even such grave danger as this, hardly justifies a diet of foods as difficult to digest as the brim of a minced straw hat, or breakfast cereals which apparently are manufactured from the thatches of the ancient cottages of rural England.

Such experiences cause us to hanker for a return to the days of Pepys, when men were men and meals were meals, and a light snack might comprise a barrel of oysters, a couple of capons, a brace of plaice, a boar's
“Live on minced straw hats.”

“Live on minced straw hats.”

head, an ox's tail, a calve's tongue, a pig's cheek and other spare parts sufficient to reconstruct a complete museum exhibit for the Un-natural History Section. Pepys and his boyfriends didn't care a hoot for the chemical constituents of pig's trotters. Sufficient unto the dinner was the trot thereof and had anyone suggested that their meals should be prescribed by bug-experts the fleet would have been piped to quarters and they would have taken it out of the French. For in those days the Empire's security depended on the wooden walls, and iron stomachs, of old England. But let's be thankful that the day has not yet arrived when we will be inoculated with meals, or vaccinated with vitamins.