“June 30, 1906″
The Department of Agriculture, charged with administration of the Pure
Food and Drugs Act, recently completed its 12,000th seizure and
prosecution under that law, since the enactment in 1906. Thereupon it
published a general summary of its works, listing the chief kinds of
malpractice which it had been called upon to deal with. The 12,000th
case had to do with the shipment of 400 cases of eggs, some of them
rotten, from Iowa to Illinois. The chief classes of offenses:
Dairy products: more than 1,000 seizures, having to do chiefly with
butter lacking in butterfat, watered milk, milk contaminated with
bacteria.
Eggs: more than 600 seizures, mostly because part of the eggs were
rotten.
Flour: more than a hundred seizures, because unbranded, or
short-weight, or containing excessive moisture.
Tomatoes, canned, as catsup, etc.: many seizures, largely because part
of the fruit was decomposed or the product was watered.
Canned
salmon: numbers of seizures, because a few of the smaller canners
persist in putting up rotten salmon.
Olive oil: many seizures,
because the product is adulterated with cottonseed oil, a wholesome
but cheaper product.
Labeling of containers: hundreds of seizures
because of wrong quantity labels.
Medicines: large numbers of cases of
all kinds, because adulterated, impure, or because of false claims as
to their virtues; ” “about everything from candy cathartics to
pink-pellets-for-pale-people and falsely-labeled so-called cures for
cancer, tuberculosis and scarlet fever.”
The conclusion to which
the Department came was that the grosser forms of adulteration and
misbranding are disappearing, although new and more subtle machinations
have in part taken their places—but in general a U. S. man can eat
himself into surfeit with less danger from false and filthy food, and
’drug himself out of the surfeit with less risk of repairing straight
to his coffin than he could in the years before the Act was passed.
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