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250
1907]
Butchers' Shops and Shops where Food is Sold.—These places
include butchers' shops, fish shops, fruit shops, sausage factories and other
premises where food stuffs are prepared for sale or sold, such as street barrows
and stalls, and they were carefully inspected during the year, as many as
9,938 visits being paid to them.
The Inspector reports that his observations of them have been
satisfactory. He also states that the meat of the animals killed within the
Borough and afterwards sold therein does not represent more than 20 per cent.
of the total quantity of meat that is vended, which he notes is also of good
quality.
Among the food discovered at places where food was sold or in course of
preparation for sale, were 5 pig's heads and 6 pieces of beef which were
tuberculous; also quantities of fish, oysters, rabbits, various fruits, tripe,
mackerel and a turkey, all of which were destroyed in the Council's destructor
or so treated by the Inspector as to pevent their use for human food.
In one instance where the Inspector seized 216 tins of tinned fruit and
vegetables and 24 tins of meat paste, he allowed the proprietors to destroy it
themselves, but such a course of procedure did not, and could not, meet with
the approval of the Public Health Committee, who have rightly given stringent
orders that in every instance he must either witness the destruction of the food
or so treat it that it will be impossible for it to be made use of.
Cowhouses.—The cowhouses are gradually becoming less numerous in
the Borough, a fact which has been more than once deplored in these reports,
for it is felt that their sanitary condition in comparison with the great multitude
of similar places on country farms is almost as a palace to a room in a
London slum as regards cleanliness and sanitary state.
During the year their number has been reduced by two, so that there are
only 7 at present existing.
The Medical Officer of Health visited each of them himself and can
vouch for the fact that their condition was good so far as cleanliness was
concerned, and also that the cows themselves were clean and showed a marked
contrast to the manner in which they were kept a few years ago.
The Inspector, however, states in his report that he had to complain of
the dirty state of some cows in one of the cowhouses, but, as he points out,
they had been newly purchased, and the condition of their buttocks and
flanks was of old standing and due to their previous insanitary surroundings in
some rural district.