Treatise on the Falsifications of Food, and the Chemical Means Employed to Detect Them (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1848. Excerpt: ... ON THE USE OF THE FLESH OF DISEASED ANIMALS AS AN ARTICLE OF FOOD. From the public papers, and from other sources, I have been enabled to ascertain that cattle in a frightfully diseased state are continually sold for the purpose of forming an article of food. Cheap sausages are thus manufactured, and the best-looking part of the meat sold in the usual manner. It is also an extraordinary thing, that horses' tongues are never found with that portion of the flesh in use for canine and feline consumption; they are commonly salted and sold as neats' tongues; now such a procedure as this must be prejudicial in the greatest degree to the public health, for horses are seldom killed until they are in such a state of disease as to be totally unfit for further employment in the usual manner. Having thus cursorily reviewed the subject of flesh, I will now pass on to fish. A great quantity of the fish sold to the humbler classes of society, is in a totally unfit state for use, more especially the salted or dried portion. Herrings, haddock, Sec, having partially undergone decomposition before the salting process has been commenced, are unfit for use as articles of food, and the greater portion of very cheap dried fish is in this predicament. In fact, I have no doubt that many distressing ailments have arisen from this source, in the same manner as from the celebrated "sausage poison" mentioned by Leibig. Dr. Weiss, of Bacnang, in Wurtemberg, has observed twenty-nine cases of poisoning of this class, out of which number there were six deaths. Smoked meats, as before observed, are not the only animal matters that undergo an alteration which will transform them into an essentially poisonous substance. Pork is especially prone to undergo this peculiar change. The nature, h...