Canned Food

Owing to the fact that it saves labor, the use of canned food has become universal. From the kitchen where each housewife could per­sonally superintend the canning and preserving of the family supply of a few fruits, this process has been made into one of America's greatest industries and has reached out and taken in nearly every article of food that goes upon the family table.

Even when vegetables are in season, hotels, restaur­ants and boarding houses serve almost exclusively canned foods, this is so because it is less expensive, saves labor of cleaning and preparing and saves time in the process of cooking.

The preservatives, chemicals, dye stuffs, embalming fluids and various other poisons so recklessly used by canning companies, in total disregard of human life and health, being brought to the attention of our na­tional government, was the real cause of the passage of the Federal pure food law. It is to be seriously re­gretted that the Federal authorities did not give the public more information along these lines, but dollars were at stake and, as a rule, dollars win.

Every housewife knows, or should know, that the process of preparation and canning of bright red fruits to some extent destroys the color, leaving them rather dull in appearance, hence she should know that the bright red or natural color of any canned fruit is arti­ficial, made so perhaps by dye stuffs as poisonous as strychnine. This same risk is to be run in nearly all canned fruits, vegetables and especially canned meats.

Meat at best is unfit for human food, but when chemically preserved, colored and embalmed to be eaten constitutes the limit of human ignorance.

If the American people had devoted the same amount of thought to the question of good food that they have to cheap food, great evaporating or dehydrating plants would stand as a monument to the health and intelli­gence of the people instead of the money-making, food-poisoning canning factories.

If the average woman who directs the family table would devote half as much time to the study of pure food as she does to the fashion plates, she could supply the table luxuriously every day in the year, wholly with­out the use of one article of canned food.

Fruits out of season could be secured in dried or evaporated form. These could be prepared without cooking, merely soaking them in pure water so as to restore their normal amount of moisture. Under this process the inferior part is revealed and could be dis­carded.

There is no community so remote that such vege­tables as potatoes, cabbage, turnips, beets, carrots, parsnips, pumpkin, dried fruits, legumes (peas, beans, etc.) and all kinds of whole grain cannot be secured at any season of the year. To this can be added the semi-tropical fruits such as grape fruit, oranges, apples, bananas and all kinds of nuts and dairy products which are available to those who are willing to trouble them­selves enough to secure and prepare them.

Every requirement of the human body can be found in the above catalogue of food. If there is a yearning for other things it is a false desire and should be treated with the same courteous deference that a sen­sible person would pay to the longing for moonshine whiskey or black Havana cigars.

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