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50
Although it is sometimes possible to detect the fact that the meat
was diseased at the time it was canned, even this evidence is lacking
in sausages made in thr wonderful sausage machines at Chicago and
elsewhere. Flesh of almost any animal, including fat, gristle and
diseased as well as sound flesh, may be introduced, and emerges from
the machine in an extremely finely divided condition—almost as a
meal. It then has the consistency of mashed potatoes and it is
practically impossible to say whether the sausages were made of sound
food or not. The danger is also increased in this case from the fact
that much of this class of food is not exposed to the same high temperature
for long periods, as is the case with canned meat generally.
The public would be well advised to avoid all canned food which
is not labelled with the name of the firm which prepares it, and to
always eat the contents within 24 hours of the opening of the tin;
and until satisfied that the health interests of the consumer are amply
safeguarded in the United States or elsewhere, to give their prelerence
to home-canned food.
Another branch of food inspection which demands more of
our attention is that which relates to the sausage-maker. A visit
to a butcher's shop where these articles are made never fails to
impress me with all the possibilities of dishonest and unwholesome
manufacture. Most of the meat made up into sausages, saveloys,
black-puddings, etc., is material which, in the first place, sells at a
better price in the fresh condition as butchers' meat, and I have good
reason to know that sometimes it is only made into sausages, etc., when
the possibilities of selling it as fresh meat are very remote or nonexistent.
I have on several occasions made seizures of meat which
has been set aside for sausage-making, and which has been quite
unfit for human consumption; little wonder, then, that in some
40 per cent. of samples one finds antiseptics (sometimes in large
quantities) in sausages, and that I have occasionally found two
different chemical antiseptics in one and the same sausage. The two
chemical antiseptics employed are solutions of sulphurous acid (sometimes
in the form of sulphite) and boric acid; and when they co-exist