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Show AMERICA IN ACTION FEEDING U. S. TROOPS IN INDIA By Lieut. Col. Karl Detzer AN AMERICAN BASE IN INDIA. American soldiers are getting plenty of hamburgers, plenty of good steaks, plenty of roast beef here . . . and not a single pound of it is coming com-ing from the United States. The subsistence sub-sistence branch of the quartermas- ' ter corps, army service forces, is buying Indian beef on the hoof, processing proc-essing it in its own packing plants, and supplying all troops in the area. Medical corps inspectors trained in Chicago packing houses check every ev-ery pound of meat as carefully as government inspectors examine it in the United States, and only first-grade first-grade beef finds its way to mess-room mess-room kitchens. In addition, chickens by the thousand, thou-sand, also carefully inspected, are bought on the local market and kept in army cold storage plants. Each morning the chicken dealers appear, crates of live fowls piled high on camel carts. Native employees, under un-der the watchful eyes of American sergeants, haggle over prices, pick out the best quality, and make the purchases. The same packing plant candles and buys 1,000 dozen fresh eggs a day, and fried eggs for breakfast are the rule, rather than the exception, excep-tion, here. The government saves money. The best beef sells for nine cents a pound. The supply is plentiful, it being estimated that there are 180 million beef cattle in India. And not one inch of shipping space, not one ton of cargo, not a single pound of refrigeration is needed. Ships that otherwise would be used for shipment of meat now haul munitions muni-tions and trucks. Released by Western Newspaper Union. |
