It cannot be denied that there is something to be said in favor of "eating with the eyes." Women naturally want the apples and oranges, the berries and vegetables, and the viands on their tables, to look pretty and inviting. Nor is there any reason why they should not have their way. The eye and the palate can be reconciled by breeding fruits and vegetables that combine good looks with agreeable flavor.
Luther Burbank has done the world a tremendous service by originating the luscious fruits and vegetables briefly referred to in the preceding chapter, but perhaps his greatest achievement is the demonstration that there is virtually no limit to obtaining fruits of any size, form, or flavor desired, and that the good looks and flavor can be amalgamated at pleasure with shipping and keeping qualities. He himself is preparing many pleasant surprises of this kind beside those I have referred to, and hundreds of others are profiting by his example and following his methods.
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.