A tuck shop was a small business run by a servant ( usually ) in an English Public School ( aka expensive private school ) where sweets and delicacies were sold at no discounted price to the children.
Not to be confused with a Truck Shop where employers, having paid their workers script instead of money would only redeem that script for goods they sold to those workers. At the opposite of discounted. Nosh was also used for food in public school vocabulary.
Tuck itself is not a synonym for food, but Tucker is in Australasia. As distinct from the American Tuckered Out, for the state of tired.
Tuck does mean food, in the specific context to which you referred of schools. When I went away to school, I took with me a tuck box (like a small trunk) in which I kept my tuck - sweets, biscuits, sometimes fruit, that sort of thing. The word “tuck” wouldn’t, though, be used as a general synonym for food, or in any other context. The only other food-related use I can think of is if you wanted someone to start eating/eat more rapidly or enthusiastically, in which case you would invite them to “tuck in”.
This isn’t true. Scott’s food was famous for his “hoosh”, the high fat pemmican, mixed with dry biscuits to make a kind of stew. It takes fuel to heat the pemmican too. It was in tin cans and looked rather like brownish-grey dripping. It had to be heated to get out of the can otherwise it was just a block of solid fat.
I saw a can that was removed from a cache at Butter Point that became exposed by receding ice cover in the mid 80’s. A most unappetising looking food if you normally eat American or NZ style meals.
Well, evidently Scott really shouldn’t be blamed for the scurvy: Scott And Scurvy (Idle Words)
Fascinating story about how the cure was found and then lost again.
Makes me wonder if, 50 years hence, some unexplained modern ailment like fibromyalgia or whatever will turn out to be something similarly simple and really-obvious-in-retrospect.
I don’t know, but if it’s not the case that wool is suited to the antarctic then why do people who have actually wintered there mention bringing it? link
Maybe Scott’s crew were not using it for the appropriate layer or whatever, I don’t know much about his expedition. But the blanket statement that wool in general is a bad material for use in Antarctica is false.