PROFESSOR SHELDON ON BUTTERINE.
Professor Sheldon, who delivered an exhaustive paper on the ‘Butterine Question’ at a meeting of the Farmers’ Alliance, said that the quantity of butterine produced in Great Britain was not known, but was understood to be considerable; nor was the volume of imported butterine known before the beginning of 1885, because, up to the end of 1884, it was entered in the Board of Trade Returns under the heading of ‘butter.’ The weight of butterine imported in the four months ending April 1885 was 308,548 cwt., and in the corresponding months of the current year the volume of it had risen to 324,275 cwt. The quantity of butterine imported, at the rate of the past four months, amounts to one hundred and thirty tons a day, day in and day out, Sunday and Monday alike, or getting on towards fifty thousand tons a year; and this over and above what is produced in the United Kingdom. The effect of the enormous trade on the dairy-farming of this country may be easily imagined, and foreign dairy-farmers are also feeling the competition quite as keenly. The Professor admitted that butterine, when made in a proper way and from good materials, is a wholesome and useful article of food. He considered it beyond dispute that butter would have been outside the reach of a vast number of poor people, had not butterine come in as a substitute and lowered the price. He admitted that well-made butterine is a very tolerable substitute, though it is not butter in another form, as some would have us believe. The utilisation of surplus fat in the form of butterine was about the best possible way in which it could be used at all as an article of food and in a systematic manner. The clause relating to the penalties to be imposed upon retailers who sold butterine as butter, in the Butter Substitutes Bill before parliament, he considered the most important clause in the bill, as it concerned the men who had hitherto been the chief offenders.