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58
Poultry—stored prior to sale in bedroom and sold in private
passage-way into which two bedrooms opened.
Bananas—found hanging to ripen in shop parlour and infested
with bed-bugs.
Fat—being removed from grease trap in waste pipe of sink
in a meat cooking-room, rendered down and used as cooking fat for
pastry making.
Fish—stored in a partitioned-off portion of a fowl-run.
Grapes—being emptied in market street on dirty asphalt
road for sorting.
The additional powers for preventing ill-health through
chemical contamination of food were obtained under the Public
Health (Preservatives in Food) Regulations, 1925, which came into
operation generally on the 1st January, 1927, and, so far as they
related to butter and cream, on the 1st January, 1928. These
Regulations prohibited the use of chemical preservatives except as
regards a list of articles, 17 in all, mentioned in a schedule appended
to the Regulations, to which certain chemicals could be added in
the proportion stated in the schedule. Boric acid and metallic
colouring matters containing arsenic, copper, mercury, lead, etc.,
gamboge and some coal tar colours were also excluded from all
foods.
The Regulations were a great advance, particularly as they
required foods containing permitted preservatives to be labelled
so as to indicate both the preservative and its percentage, but the
need for official standards still remained and many articles of
food, the average composition of which was well known, could not
be sampled with any useful result.
The Council later drew the attention of the Ministry of Health
to the unsatisfactory conditions under which bread was often
prepared, even though premises had been constructed according
to the Regulations governing food premises, and the filthy premises
from which it would be delivered to the consumer. The Council
also made representations regarding the danger of permitting
undesirable articles of food, such as apples sprayed with arsenical
mixtures and cherries infested with larval parasites, to be brought
wholesale into the country and then distributed to retailers; and
also the need for protecting food liable to contamination and
exposed for sale on street stalls or open shop fronts. With regard
to the latter it was pointed out that fish, fruit, sweets and other
articles of food were often exposed for sale in the open street without
any protection from flies and dust in dry weather or from being
bespattered with particles of mud in wet weather.
The risk of transmission of disease through the medium of the
milk supply caused great concern to the Council and in 1925 they