Battling Scurvy in the Fifth Grade

I helped Alexis make hardtack the other day.  She said it was for a project at school.  Basically, hardtack is edible stone.  You take a bunch of flour, add a bunch of salt, stir in some water, and then bake the living shit out of it for over an hour.  It comes out hard as a rock and only slightly edible.

Our hardtack looked almost exactly like the one on the left.  We tried a piece, and it wasn't too awful.  It tasted like the oldest, hardest cracker I've ever eaten.  OK, it was kinda awful, but it did help coax out that loose tooth she had.  Our hardtack seemed authentic, though.  We were quite excited and she took it to school very proud of herself.

I realized I should be more engaged in my children's education only later, when it occured to me to be curious about why we were making hardtack.  By that time, Alexis was already at school (several days had passed).  To Wikipedia!!

Hardtack was made by British soldiers for long sea voyages.  It had the nickname "sea biscuit."  Learned something there, didn't you?

I was trying for the life of me to figure out why Alexis' fifth grade class was learning about British naval history.  Perhaps they were learning about the Battle of the Solent from 1545.  Or the the bungled Drake-Norris Expedition of 1589.  Or maybe they were learning about the 1651 "Navigation Act" which cut out Dutch shippers from English trade.  Seems a little outside the standard fifth grade curriculum, but it's been a few years since elementary school for me. 

Then I went to the next wiki-paragraph.  Which was:

"During the American Civil War, 3-inch by 3-inch hardtack was shipped from Union and Confederate storehouses. Some of this hardtack had been stored from the 1846–8 Mexican-American War. With insect infestation common in improperly stored provisions, soldiers would break up the hardtack and drop it into their morning coffee. This would not only soften the hardtack but the insects, mostly weevil larvae, would float to the top and the soldiers could skim off the insects and resume consumption."

Ah, the Civil War.  Much more appropriate to a good American fifth grade education.  Thank you Wikipedia!  And thanks for making our hardtack sound all the more better.  Mmmm, weavils.