Fur a'plenty in the dining hall

Corporal Snark, a demoted mess sergeant in the 245th US Army Air Force, has always been one of my heroes, even if the mess chief, Milo Minderbinder, had his reservations about him.

''Corporal Snark tends to be a bit creative, I feel,'' Milo tells John Yossarian, soon after Milo takes over the catering. ''He thinks being a mess sergeant is some sort of art form and is always complaining about having to prostitute his talents … Incidentally, do you know why he was busted to private and is only a corporal now?''

''Yes,'' said Yossarian. ''He poisoned the squadron.''

Milo went pale again. ''He did what?''

''He mashed hundreds of cakes of GI soap into the sweet potatoes just to show that people have the taste of Philistines and don't know the difference between good and bad. Every man in the squadron was sick. Missions were cancelled.''

''Well!'' Milo exclaimed, with thin-lipped disapproval. ''He certainly found out how wrong he was, didn't he?''

''On the contrary,'' Yossarian corrected. ''He found out how right he was. We packed it away by the plateful and clamoured for more.''

Anyone who has spent time in boarding schools, the armed services or jail understands the issue and, sometimes, the sheer unrecognisability of some of the food served up.

The scene is from Catch 22, by Joseph Heller - evergreen after 51 years. The movie, too, a mere 43 years old, is still worth watching, even if it omits Corporal Snark.

Residents of institutions - even hospitals, perhaps the last to reform - do reasonably well these days, compared with times past. They still complain, but they have no idea how good things are, comparatively.

Most boarders 50 years ago were obsessed with food. We worried equally about the quality and the quantity of it, and, even beyond issues of quality - in the sense of whether it tasted good - we wondered about the ingredients.

We wondered, often, just what they were, since some seemed to come from animals or cuts of meat unrecognisable to us, many from life on the land and accomplished butchers and slaughtermen.

We wondered about the freshness of the ingredients and eyed cautiously many a gristly thing floating in dark gravies for signs of green, or blue and sometimes yellow, for whether any remaining fat was rancid, or for recognisable fur or feather, paw or nose attachments. They would rotate at the ends of forks (yes, contrary to some speculation, we were issued with forks) and examination would be microscopic - indeed sometimes literally, back in the science laboratories.

Experienced eating in boarding school, army or jail refectories required the active engagement of each of the sense organs: the eyes, the nose, the tongue and the finger. Even - indeed, perhaps especially - the ear, and not only in the hope of clues about the species of animal involved. The reactions of others seeing, feeling, smelling and tasting food were infectious. If someone expressed some pleasure, the chances were good that most would. The first loud ''yuck'' - or worse - was fatal to further enjoyment, even among the inured, who could and would eat anything, and whose complaints were mostly directed at the quantity.

It was generally accepted in any institution, then as now, that the contents of sausages consisted of the scrapings from the floor (cigarette butts, sawdust and all), bits of offcut, gristle, liver, intestines, hearts and other oddments of offal - apart from kidneys - ground up with vegetable scrapings and peelings, flies, cockroaches, bread that had turned blue with mould, weevilly flour, and any rodents, alive or dead, silly enough to be scarpering around. Plus large quantities of salt, and other disguising spices, including curry powders, to suit.

The English statesman Disraeli once commented that the making of laws and the making of sausages should not occur in public. Oddly, however, sausages were fondly regarded by a good half of the institutionalised kids, even if they were rejected, automatically, as being unfit for human consumption by the other.

The distinction was according to background. Lads like me, from country properties, were used to meat, in ample quantity, and, often, because of the lack of refrigeration 50 years ago, in various stages of gaminess. The hardier lot - which did not include me - were even used to eating the odd example of native fauna - kangaroos, emus, and sometimes koala, wombat or even echidna - as well as wild pig, goat and camel. Just the same kids - the poorer ones - lived in households that killed the oldest ewes, or the culled rams - rather than some tasty hogget, and so they were used to stringiness and springless meat. It was all killed outside, quartered on a gallows and hung overnight, brought into a meat-house with flyscreen to hang from hooks, and then butchered, daily, according to need.

Some meat, particularly beef, went into brine - salty water - stored in 44- gallon drums, allowing the salt meat to keep for longer periods. We did have kerosene refrigerators, but they rarely stored uncooked meat.

These country kids tended to crave what was not for them available: what we called ''butcher's meat''. The sausage encapsulated it, since hardly any farmer or grazier then made sausages, cut up meat in thin slices, or prepared anything in the way of delicacies, apart from the occasional ham or brawn (if that can be counted a delicacy) - perhaps a sheep's head among the southern bucolics.

The meat pie was also favoured by country boarders, even with ample evidence that the customs of the sausage factory were exemplary compared with the pie factory. We called the pies at our school ''fur-a-plenty'' pies after the well-known ''Four and Twenty'' factory, and sometimes they were all gristle, while there were times one searched in vain for anything that could be called meat at all. But we loved them, drowned in tomato sauce, of course.

At Goodooga in 1963, pies cooked elsewhere arrived on an unrefrigerated truck on Sunday nights, and were sold by those going to the open-air (segregated) walk-in picture theatre for 15 pennies - a shilling and threepence - each. Unsold pies lay on a tray in the shop, where the temperature had been known to reach 48 degrees.

On Monday, pies were 12 pence. On Tuesday, nine pence. On Wednesday, six pence. On Thursday, when some were almost flyblown, three pence. A bloke could get hungry sometimes.

But there were other things so horrible that one did not readily imagine them. It first occurred to me reading Stiff Upper Lip, by Lawrence Durrell, when our hero, Antrobus, tells the sad tale of Mungo Piers-Foley, a military attache, who one day made a dreadful mistake, and was forced to resign his commission and his clubs and put himself into exile in deepest central Africa.

'''It happened while I was in Paris,' [Piers-Foley confessed to Antrobus]. 'Quite inadvertent, the whole dashed thing.

'''It could have happened to anyone. I popped into the Octagon for a bite. It wasn't until the addition arrived that I realised. Old man, I had eaten a piece of horse.'

''I [Antrobus] sprang up, startled. 'You what?' I cried incredulously, realising I was in the presence of tragedy.

'''Horse,' he repeated wearily, passing his hand over his forehead. 'As I live, Antrobus, a slice carved from a gee-gaw. It all seems like a horrible dream.

'''Yet I must say that it cut quite sweetly and the sauce was so dashed good that I didn't realise it. Dear God! - a horse. And I a Colonel of the Blues … To think of it, I, who have lived for, and practically on, horses. The irony of it all. To find myself sitting there, involuntarily wrapped around a succulent slice of fetlock, feeling the world's biggest bounder. And with a touch of mustard too …

'''I have eaten many strange things in unguarded moments. I once ate some smoked grandmother in the Outer Celebes, but that was to save the regimental goat. And once, at Government House in Gibraltar I think I ate a portion of infant monkey. But it was never proved. The ADC refused to confess. But all of this is a far cry from horses, old chap. A different world. No I confess I sobbed aloud as I paid that bill.'''

There are further sad events for Piers-Foley I'm afraid. In his exile, he slowly sheds all inhibitions and standards (though not, I am relieved to say, the habit of dressing for dinner and setting himself a bread and butter knife even when dining alone in the jungle) but that is for another day.

But it is clear that he was right to sob. It isn't done. Or shouldn't be. Certainly not outside continental Europe, and then only either with knackery rejects or so as to defraud Americans or others silly enough to eat what they think to be prime minced beef.

We boarders - we prisoners, we soldiers - may have been brutes. But one did Not Eat Horse.

>> Jackson Waterford is Canberra Times editor at large.