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.