British internee Elsa Colquhoun feasted on a special birthday dinner comprised exclusively of rubbish. “Such a wonderful meal,” she wrote in a thank you card, “all gathered from the Japanese garbage dump!” Medical officer Maj. Samuel Bloom roasted his pet guinea pigs, while many others choked down everything from stray dogs and cats to snails. Even rats could fetch as much as eight pesos apiece on the camp’s black market. “One man,” Eva Anna Nixon wrote in her diary, “pioneered in rat cooking and others followed.”
