Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 26, Vol. I, June 28, 1884

No. 26.—Vol. I.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, JUNE 28, 1884.
BY DR ANDREW WILSON, F.R.S.E.
In connection with the subject of food and health, an important topic naturally intervenes in the course of such discussion, in the shape of the relation which impure foods bear to the production of illness and disease. Pure air and pure water are required by natural and common consent as necessities of existence; but the purity of the food we consume is no less a paramount condition of physical well-being. Food-impurities may be ranked under diverse heads. Adulteration of foods is thus a common cause of illness. The food, rendered of poor quality, does not contain the necessary amount of nutritious material; or it may impart disease from its being impregnated with matters foreign to its composition, and which have been added thereto for purposes of unfair trade-profit. For example, when one hears of alum and sulphate of copper being added to bread, it is evident that a serious form of adulteration is thus practised; while equally reprehensible modes of procedure are known to be in vogue when flour is treated so as to yield more than its legitimate quantity of bread; when rice, potatoes, and other starchy matters are added to the bread in the course of manufacture; or when flour of damaged or inferior quality is used. Similarly, when milk is adulterated with water, treacle, turmeric, and so forth, a cause of ill-health is clearly discovered. If tea be ‘faced’ with black-lead, or with Prussian-blue, turmeric, and China clay, there can be no question of the fraudulent and dangerous nature of such a practice; and when we read of preserved green peas being largely adulterated with sulphate of copper, and that a one-pound tin of green peas has been found to contain two and a half grains of this poisonous compound, it becomes evident that legislation directed against this worst of frauds—food-adulteration—is both necessary and highly requisite as an active feature of social law.