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.
PENNYWISE DEALERS AND PINEAPPLES.
Herbert J. Webber relates in the "Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture" for 1905 that when the department's pineapple-breeding experiments were started, the question of what varieties to cultivate gave considerable trouble. Many growers insisted that the red Spanish was by far the best variety, because of its adaptability to open field culture, freedom from disease, and good shipping qualities. Others contended that "as varieties existed that were of far better quality and flavor, the market should be educated to demand these better so-called fancy fruits."