Yes, they are still available -
http://www.tesco.com/groceries/Product/Details/?id=254922614
From various sites it seems that they are very useful for preventing morning sickness and digestive problems although they are reputed to cure both constipation AND diarrhoea!
Arrowroot is sometimes given to people recovering from illnesses as they are supposed to be easy to digest.
Also Milk arrowroot biscuits -
The Milk Arrowroot biscuit has a long history. It was first introduced in 1888, and in those days arrowroot was seen as an easy to digest food suitable for invalids and babies. As such, these were one of Arnott’s flagship lines, and the health-giving properties of these biscuits was marketed strongly.......
......We now know, of course, that arrowroot is not very good for you at all, consisting as it does of almost pure refined carbohydrate.
http://chillikebab.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/milk-arrowroot/
I am sorry to say that the website in your link, Mrs Too, is very suspect.
If you plough through the site, you'll find it is almost
exclusively about biscuits in the range made by Arnott's...an Australian company that is Oz's biggest biscuit and snacks manufacturer.
Hype!
This makes me highly suspicious of the blog. The site doesn't come out and overtly declare it is bought-and-paid-for but hides under the cloak of being an unbiased independent biscuit-mad consumer penning his own crumby thoughts from the suburbs of Sydney.
As such, I am a serious sceptic of the site's statement that you quoted...
"arrowroot is not very good for you at all, consisting as it does of almost pure refined carbohydrate" ...because, while that might well be true of Arnott's own appallingly unappetising arrowroot biscuits, it certainly
isn't true of Arrowroot itself.
As my earlier post's footnotes pointed out...Arrowroot contains protein than that of other tropical food sources like yams, potatoes, cassavas, plantains, etc.
Plus very good levels of niacin, thiamin, riboflavin etc. It helps prevent congenital malformations in new-born babies while containing some important minerals such as copper, iron, manganese, phosphorous, magnesium, and zinc and potassium to help regulate your heart rate and blood pressure.
If the dear old Aussies, and particularly the bakers at the unscrupulous Atwood's factories, prefer to make their arrowroot biscuit
without any arrowroot in it then it just goes to show why Cell Block H was so full.
Interestingly, the Atwood blog went on tellingly after the quote about
'that arrowroot is not very good for you at all, consisting as it does of almost pure refined carbohydrate'.
In full it said of their very own fake arrowroot biscuits
"We now know, of course, that arrowroot is not very good for you at all, consisting as it does of almost pure refined carbohydrate. In any case, arrowroot flour is not the major ingredient in these biscuits; neither do they contain much milk. For the most part this is just a conventional plain biscuit made with wheat flour and vegetable oil." So, rotten bakers they may be...arrowroot still stands as a healthy substance in anyone else's opinion.
Apart for it tasting like chalk, I am still trying to work out why (and when) it suddenly fell out of favour with the drinking classes.
Would somewhere in the mid-60s seems to be the beginning of Arrowroot's demise?