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51
CANNED SPINACH.
The following report to your Worshipful Committee was forwarded by their
direction to the Ministry of Health, Medical Officers of Health for Port Sanitary
Districts and Medical Officers of Health for Metropolitan Boroughs abutting on
the River Thames :—
CANNED SPINACH.
" I have to bring to the notice of your Worshipful Committee another request for export
of seized food material.
The vegetable spinach in its natural state is found amongst foodstuffs because of two
principles, first its Vitamin content (anti-scorbutic) and secondly as affording a cellulose
residue which preserves the regular functions of the lower large bowel as an excretory organ—
a residue which is largely wanting in the highly-concentrated foods of to-day. It possesses
the minimum of nutriment.
The presence of natural green (chlorophyll) is largely a measure of the Vitamin content.
The vitamin is an essential to health.
The consignment of spinach in question contains an excess of copper sulphate. This
material is used to supplant the green colour of the vegetable which has disappeared together
with the Vitamin usually associated with vegetable green-stuffs, in the process of canning.
From the scientific point of view there is thus an addition of poison to the material,
further to that deficiency in Vitamin which is the nature of all canned vegetables which have
been subjected to heat in processing.
Somewhat in contra-distinction to tinned or bottled peas, spinach is with difficulty
coloured with copper sulphate in regulable proportions, and is so useless if not harmful a
foodstuff when so coloured that one would welcome the absolute disappearance of this
commodity from the list of available so-called foods.
Its greening by means of a poison together with its deficiency in Vitamin should rule
green tinned spinach out of the list of foodstuffs entirely.
The eye of man naturally and hereditarily associates green vegetable material with that
essential well being which accompanies the eating, amongst other foods, of leaves containing
chlorophyll green and is due to Vitamin.
The eye is vilely tricked by the substitution of a poison green for chlorophyll green—•
or indeed the addition of any green colouration—in the absence of Vitamin.
That the undiscerning public demands green colour and naturally finds it appetising,
is a cogent reason for affording the completest protection to them in their exercise of this
primitive and basal instinct towards health.
The poison in green coloured preserved vegetables in the more subtle in that, unlike that
of the green copper-containing oysters of some of ourwestern rivers (formerly mistaken for the
succulent blue point of vegetable colouring) which immediately on ingestion produce disease,
it as a rule only produces occult effects, because of the smaller quantity present.
The importer in this case and the agent have called and written to put certain trade
aspects of the case before your Medical Officer, and have stated —
' The packer has requested us to cancel all existing orders for coloured spinach,
and states we are to inform our various buyers he will not ship any further quantities
of coloured spinach against their orders in hand.
' We will, if necessary, give the Medical Officer an undertaking as agents that,
if released, we will not try to re-import this spinach here through any other port.
' We will also ask our principals to give the Medical Officer their undertaking
not to seek to re-import this coloured spinach to London or any other port of the
United Kingdom.
' In view of the above facts we hope the Medical Officer will grant the release of
these goods, so that they may be returned to Antwerp, Belgium, to the packers.'
Considering the views expressed above, I am reluctant to suggest to your Worshipful
Committee the permission to re-export these and such goods whatever the trade aspect of
this particular case.
I recommend that no food in which there is copper in excess of two grains per lb. be
allowed for re-export on seizure.
I further recommend that this report on the matter be forwarded to the Ministry of
Health with a view to expressing the opinion of the Port of London Sanitary Authority
that copper in whatever quantity as an adjunct or colouring matter to food should be entirely
excluded as being unnatural to food and poisonous, a doubly pernicious tricking of man's
hereditary instinct towards health and well-being."
G