SCHOOL GIRLS AS PURE FOOD EXPERTS.
Three girls in a Massachusetts Normal School in 1904 accidentally launched a new kind of pure food movement which is of historic importance, as it puts to shame the dilatory methods of Federal and State Governments.
They missed their lessons one day, after feasting at a surreptitious midnight spread on "strawberry" jam. Their chemistry professor, Lewis B. Allyn, advised them to analyze a can of the same preserves to find out what there was in it that could have made them ill. They did so, and found that the jam contained no strawberries at all but was made of apple sauce, ether, grass seeds, red ink, and salicylic acid.
It looked all right; but what is food for the eye is often poison for the stomach. That was the important lesson this incident was destined to teach the inhabitants of Westfield, Massachusetts.
Peter Clarke Macfarlane, who tells the whole story graphically in "Collier's Weekly" for January 11, 1913, writes:
From that day forward the girls in the chemistry class began to qualify as pure-food experts. They examined the canned goods, the preserves, the medicines, and foods of every kind that came from the stores of Westfield into the homes in which they lived. The housekeepers were appalled to find the sort of thing they had been putting upon their tables. And the grocers were somewhat appalled, but much more annoyed. It is very disturbing, no doubt, to have the canned goods you make the most profit on, the ones that bear the very handsomest lithographs, returned almost in wheelbarrow loads because of some fussy girls stewing chemicals in a laboratory. I leave it to any one if it would not be annoying when a grocer is working energetically to build up trade in a new line of chocolate which he can sell in larger packages for less money than chocolate was ever sold before to have a miss still wearing her hair in braids say right out loud in the store for every one to hear:
"Pooh! I analyzed that in class. It is thirty per cent. cornstarch. That is why you can sell it cheaper than real chocolate. And it has potash in it, too, which turns to suds when you add water, and that's what makes it look so deliciously creamy and frothy when you pour it into the cups. No suds in my chocolate, thank you!"
Professor Allyn, under whose guidance this epoch-making crusade was undertaken—a crusade which should and could be carried on in every town throughout the country—was elected a member of the Board of Health. Opportunity was given housekeepers and all others who suspected foods of being adulterated, to have them examined by the two hundred schoolgirls and their professor. The results were placed on exhibition in the Board of Health Museum. In this way Professor Allyn taught tradesmen that it does not pay to handle impure goods when once the public is enlightened as to the difference between what looks good and what is good.
The Westfield Board of Health now publishes a list of foods which it considers pure. With that list in hand it is safe to go a-marketing. Offending manufacturers and dealers have been converted to the old doctrine that honesty is the best policy, and the plan, altogether, has worked so well that hundreds of letters have come to the secretary of the Board of Health, asking "How can we give our town a pure-food standard like Westfield?"
One of the methods Professor Allyn adopted to teach the inhabitants of Westfield the folly of "eating with the eyes" was to buy a can of peas, open it in presence of an audience, and pour in some hydrochloric acid, a test for copper. Then he inserted a gleaming butcher knife and when he drew it out a few moments later it was coated with copper.
Not all dye stuffs used for coloring canned or other foods are as objectionable as copper, but most of them are undesirable because, as Dr. Wiley has pointed out, they make it possible to conceal inferiority of material or lack of freshness. In "Good Housekeeping" for February, 1913, Dr. Wiley had an article headed "Danger in Vivid Green Vegetables" in which he pointed out that after a delay of six years the Remsen Food Board ratified his conclusions that the sulphate of copper used to give the unnatural bright color to canned peas, beans, and spinach is injurious to health and should not be allowed in foodstuffs. "It must have been a bitter pill to swallow," he adds, "for were they not appointed in the hope that Wiley would be reversed on all points?"
Another pure-food expert has given an amusing recipe for making a bottle of maraschino cherries:
"Take a cherry and remove the stone. Get the color out by holding it over the bleaching fumes of sulphur. Remove a portion of the fleshy part of the fruit to leave mostly fiber. Then inject some artificial sweet substance to give it a 'body' and a sugarlike quality. Dye it with a brilliant red coal tar dye. Put it in a bottle, and sell it to a greenhorn."
A greenhorn is defined in the dictionary as "a person who is easily imposed upon." You prove yourself a greenhorn if you go into a grocery store and buy glasses of preserved fruits and vegetables dyed in brilliant rainbow hues such as no honest fruit ever exhibits. You show yourself a greenhorn if you buy canned peaches for their shape. Peaches picked and halved before they are ripe retain their shape beautifully. If you want to eat with your eyes buy this kind by all means. Peaches picked and halved when the sun has ripened them on the tree have Flavor; this kind is for those who eat with their mouth.
Many of us are not greenhorns. We would buy more California peaches in winter if the cans had a label with these words on it: "These peaches were picked ripe; they may look a little mushy, but they are much pleasanter to eat than those which are picked unripe to make them keep their shape. Try them and note the difference."
Fortunes are in store for canners wise enough thus to recognize the commercial value of Flavor and to educate the public in this simple way, as well as by advertising in the newspapers and magazines. A consumer who has eaten some of the flavorsome ripe peaches will come back for another can—or a dozen cans—much sooner than one who has eaten the hard insipid halves of unripe peaches.