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rabbits, with good results, on bran, milk and "milky dysels." We are becoming conscious, scientifically,
of the great qualities of unfactored food, the limits urbanisation and distribution impose on its
procurement, and some of the rational procedures corrective to these limitations. The necessary
exact knowledge is one result of the defects following on crowding and urbanisation ; dwindling instinc ts
must be revived or replaced by conscious knowledge supplied by research workers whose labour
deserves unstinted recognition from the community they so well serve.
Superfluity of Added Material.
Alteration in factored foods on the deficiency side is in chain with superfluity of added material.
In this, of highest consideration are the recent regulations as to preservatives. The principle which
had too long held sway, and was leading us down a blind evolutional path, from which return to a line
of lasting progress is difficult but not impossible, was a requirement of proof that any given preservative
was harmful to the human organism. Clear indications are given in modern medicine that the
early stages of disease are insidious and almost unobservable. The guiding principles therefore should
have been based on the question whether the added materials were natural to the human body and
its physiological processes or not. Is its elimination easy ? Is it a possible cause of delayed digestion ?
And is its quantity or, indeed, its presence superfluous to the object in view ?
It once seemed that the boric compounds had acquired squatters' rights and were unassailable
in them, so that the members of an urbanised community were for ever doomed to expend gastric
energy in diluting boracic salts to beyond that point at which either bacillus or cell of the enteron
could make tardy use of the doped foodstuff. And the factor using methods of unscrupulous want
of cleanliness could cloak them with this antiseptic which is quite foreign, even inimical to the vegetable
and animal economy—that is, to life in. general.
A misguided use of one of the two preservatives at present permitted has been the addition of
sulphurous acid in tinned fruit. This unscientific experiment could but announce itself to the recipient
of the material by the flavour of sulphurated hvdrogen, inevitable to chemical reaction between acid
and tin. These wasteful experiments can easily be avoided by the employment of a scientific staff
in connection with food manufacture. It is noticeable that the large firms of caterers have such a staff.
Their use is a large guarantee of at least the harmlessness of the manufactured foods such firms supply,
as well as of the attractive state in which they are delivered to the public, and should be looked on
as an economical essential. The method of trial and error in manufacture is wasteful in ways to be
easily foreseen by a capable chemist, physicist or biologist, and waste is in conflict with our premises
as to abundance.
Food Lost by Keeping.
In connection with waste and abundance should be mentioned the masses of material, such as
dried fruit, which steadily deteriorate, even to eventual destruction, while awaiting their market ;
their eventual monetary value often does not cover the customs duty on import, so that not even
the doubtful consideration that what is no good for the human being is good for other animals can
be brought into economic play, and the deteriorated food turned into flesh. The food is lost by keeping.
On looking back over the outstanding and peculiar food poisonings, arsenical neuritis due to
beer and lead poisoning to cider manufacture, were due to want of knowledge, not deliberate sophistication.
Regulations now fully cover such possibilities in metallic poisonings. Cider has retaken
its place as a beneficent drink; beer was easily freed from a stigma which had extended therefrom to
alcoholic liquors in general.
But a far less subtle sophistication than either deficiency due to facture or added deleterious
material is in vogue ; it is the abstraction of one material and addition of another in substitution,
this often being of such a nature as to be in itself beneficial, and at the same time difficult of detection.
Synthetic cream is a case in point; in this, there is none of the salts of the lower members of the fatty
acid series which distinguish what has hitherto been known as cream from fat in general.
The synthesis by using other fats for milk fat may lead to ready fraud as obtained at the time of
the introduction of butter substitutes ; against this kind of substitution the public has need of protection,
supplied by a constant watch only afforded by the chemical expert in the laboratory acting with
the administrative health officer, and by responsibility in law which shall bind manufacturer and
vendor in declaring the " erzatz " nature of the food tendered under a possibly misleading name.
Imported Commodities.
It is a distinct protection to our food supply from abroad that any material imported should be
by the very fact deemed to be food deposited for sale, and as such, if unsound, seizable and liable to
such procedure as would apply to the home supply. It is often urged that such material could be
made use of abroad, and should be exported where a case for this can be made out. Such a procedure
would mean that the unscrupulous importer would have a double market ; either his bad goods might
slide into consumption in England or stand an equal or better chance in a less particular if less paying
market abroad. The net result of permitting re-export would be the hopeful bandying about of
unsound food. Re-export of seizable material should in no case be permitted ; the precedent once
set up breeds bad importations or, what is more difficult to cope with, doubtful importations.
The refusal of re-export literally carries the war of unsound food into the enemy's country in a way
that calls for international understanding. The foundation for this has been truly laid in the agreements
which quickly followed on the Foreign Meat Regulations ; the principle is that meat so packed
as to be readily inspected, and certified to have been inspected according to an approved scheme
before export from abroad, is naturally raised in standard of excellence and finds a readier acceptance