Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 268, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 November 1911 — TALES OF COTHAM AND OTHER CITIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

TALES OF COTHAM AND OTHER CITIES

Painted Meat and Aged Eggs in Gotham

MEW YORK. —Since the first of this Is year the state bureau of food Inspection has pounds of food as rotten or adulterated. Most of the food condemned was in New York eity. . y The other day the first of the group of offenders were arraigned and must appear for trial. Most of them were dealers from the Jpwer part of the dty, and the charge against them alleged the possession of decayed chickens, soured condensed milk, corned beef, dyed chopped meaK spoiled meat of all kinds, rotten eggs, bad butter and decayed fruits. According th reports there are even worse articles in restaurants and stores, such as painted fish, spoiled* meat dipped. In formaldehyde and reddened so as to look fresh, ice cream containing wood alcohol, candles containing poisonous dyes and soda sirups made of coal tar. “We have found bad butter —a mess,*' says Dr. McMillan, chief of the

inspectors, “that was a mixture of good and bad butter or oleo and bad butter and good butter all mixed and treated so that it looked palatable. In one of the cellars of a restaurant man I found hams that he had bought at a navy sale of rejected foods, and he had, in addition, many pounds of rotten tomatoes. On the stands of venders we have found a goodly amount of decayed vegetables-and fruit, which, strangely enough, people buy. “As soon as rotten food is discovered by. inspectors it is denatured by methylene blue or some like acid, unless it is needed for chemical analysis. * “Meats can be treated effectively with formaldehyde. A piece of ‘ tainted meat, black and malodorous, is often washed in the acid, we find, and is then sold for good meat, fed and fresh looking as its treatment makes it. “The rotten egg industry Is not yet deed- Recently I found 171 cans of •spot’ eggs in one man’s cellar and 42 In another. Bach can contained 30 dozen eggs. If fresh eggs are put into cold storage in summer, they will keep nicely for six months. If they are put in in cold weather, they will keep for a year.' Longer periods than those result in eggs that are not fit for human consumption.” \