PRESERVATIVES IN FOOD.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 244, 15 October 1925, Page 19

PRESERVATIVES IN FOOD.

WHAT OF BORIC ACID. BACTERIA IX CHEESE. (From Onr Special Correspondent.) LONDON", September 7. The heated discussion as to the "use and abuse of preservatives in food continues unabated, and most of all is division of opinion rife on the subject or boric acid. One analyst scouts the idea of its being bad. citing the oldfashioned remedy of childhood days of borax and honey. In a long highly technical article on the subject, one scientist declares that preservatives, which are suspected because they may in themselves be dangerous or may be used to mask bacterial changes in food, actually serve, at present, to kill or check the spread of all type of bacteria. At present it is significant that food poisoning is most commonly caused by fresh, unpreserved food. Unpreserved cream, butter, and other foods may have dangers greater than the preserved products at present Used. Discussing boric acid, he says the Government experts condemn boric acid, and permit benzoic a-cid. The reason for this discrimination is not very clear. Boric acid, for example, while not the sort of drug which one would on general principles give to young children, is not proved to cause symptoms of any sort. However, the object aimed at is a good one—to pluck apples direct from the tree, and draw milk from the cow, without admixture of any substance, good or evil. The doubt, he goes on to say, -which will remain in the minds of some is whether or not the increased danger of bacterial food poisoning trill do away with the benefit of a world rid of the universal presence of boric acid. Bac- , teria are everywhere. Most of them are harmless, and there are far more which serve man in his industrial processes than there are disease-producing 6pecies. Whenever an animal is killed or a cow milked, bacteria multiply in the food. Up to a point they produce no effect. After a while the products of their vital processes accumulate, and one notices a disagreeable smell or taste. In the vast majority of cases no illeffects follow the eating of food even in an advanced state of decomposition. Custom ordains that certain food should be eaten in a semi-putrified condition. His view of the cheese poisoning incident at Dover (which we reported at the time)) is interesting. It was he consider?, probably due to a variant or "'sport" in the Mendelian sense of an organism formally involved in the ripening of cheese.