Why Not Mangaia
pp. 15-16 · Read in the full issue
Arrowroot?
From Our Own Correspondent
Mangaia, Nov. 10.
WHEN this writer occupied a bed in a NZ hospital, the less-fortunate brethren in the wards, denied solid foodstuffs, consumed a large amount of gruel. Now, this island of Mangaia has no market for its splendid white “pia”— a powder of high food value, made from locally-grown arrowroot. We could supply, each year, the raw material for hospitals in NZ to provide for their pallid pil grims a far better gruel than the feeble stuff my ward mates used to curse.
Why 'is this Cl source of supply ignored? The island of Mangaia alone produces, every year, a supply of arrow root that would keep at least one hos pital going, and. I think, would be very much cheaper than the Eastern article.
Incidentally, local “pia,” mixed with ripe bananas and baked in an earth oven, makes a delicious pudding, that the medical menu has also overlooked as an invalid food of the very first rank.
Mr. Justice J. B. Thomson, Barrister at Law, Middle Temple, and Fiji’s new Puisne Judge, arrived in the Colony in early December. He is also a Puisne Judge for the Western Pacific High Com mission, and comes to his present post from Northern Rhodesia.