Food

Transcript

Anchor: With little time to get over the shock of discovering an unknown country, most of our men are sent directly to the front lines. Once there, the first trouble many of them face is not what one might expect...

Ronald Guertin: For the first five or six months, we ate a lot of British food. That was no good. But when we got some American rations. That was great!
(Soldiers walking through mountains)
(Preparing a meal)

Sheridan "Pat" Patterson: You got a little package and that was a day's ration in the thing, there's things like wieners and beans, lima beans, stew.
(Soldiers eating their rations)

Paul-Émile Pomerleau: There was chicken and a pack of cigarettes in the rations. At night, we had a beer.
(Soldier having a beer)

Ronald Guertin: There was ice cream and steak. It came out of a tin, but it didn't matter. It was good.

Sheridan "Pat" Patterson: Got to be boring after the first week.
(Soldiers eating their rations)

Stuart Reitsma: If you had to eat out of a tin in the winter time, you put a dent in the tin with your riffle butt or whatever you had, threw it on the fire, and when the dent came out you knew it was safe enough to eat.
(Soldiers sharing a meal at camp)

Arthur Lortie: Always eating rations caused problems, because we often had stomach pains, diarrhea...

Yvan Paquin: I ate British rations from the beginning of World War 2. And now, in 51 or '52, it was all coming back to us in rations. It wasn't too fresh, y'know. Meat that's been in a tin for 15 years doesn't taste very good.
(Preparing a meal)

Sheridan "Pat" Patterson: The infantry brought their kitchen up with them, they ate fresh rations.
(Infantry kitchen set up)

Albert Hugh MacBride: In the armored corps we got one hot meal a day and we had to go down and pick it up from the infantry. And he didn't like us, because every time they missed us they'd hit his kitchen (chuckles).
(Preparing a hot meal)

Jean-Émile Paillé: One time, we were in a place where we didn't have rations. For some reason or another, they just hadn't got to us, so we ate chestnuts.

Ronald Guertin: A tangerine orange... over there, they grew like apples grow here… everywhere. That's how it was. We ate a lot of them!