FILTHY FOOD.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 134, 9 June 1938, Page 9

FILTHY FOOD.

SYDNEY REVELATIONS

INSPECTORS' EVIDENCE. MANY GRUESOME FINDS. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, June 5. The Public Service Association is seeking a new award for our food inspectors this week, and several of these officials, called as witnesses, havej been submitting some startling and unsavoury evidence to the Full Bench of the Industrial Commission.

Some of the testimony offered during tw6 days was so revolting as to be: almost unprintable. For instance, apure food inspector, A. C. Patten, emphasising the need for constant vigilance by the inspectors, gave the commission a brief account of his visits to some of our food factories.

On one occasion he visited a confec-l tionery factory which produced varietiesj of chocolate, and he found men passing steaming fig 3 through a sausage machine to be minced up as "filling." "The fig 3," he said, "were alive with weevils and grubs, and were covered with filth." At the wholesale warehouse where this manufacturer got his' supplies he found several hundred cases of rotten figs. Complaint Received. On another occasion he found weevilly| walnuts being passed through a sausage] machine for inclusion in cake mixture. Another pure food inspector, W. Allison, with experience dating from 1912, told an interesting story about a complaint received from a woman who had bought various edibles from a store' at C'oogee. When she got home she found a piece of rubber in the butter and maggots in the bacon and the cheese.i

Mr. Allison made a point of visiting the shop in question, and found that the bacon and cheese were exposed in the windows without any covering, that the premises were swarming with mice, and that the whole place was in a neglected and filthy condition.

The same inspector stated that he had visited various jam factories, and had found apples being converted into jam without any preliminary washing, and fermented pulp mixed with good pulp to help the stock last out.

In one instance he found that a certain | brand of fig jam was warm when it came to the shops for sale. He made a special trip to the factory -concerned, and found that figs used in the manufacture of this plan were fermented and maggotty, | and he discovered also that water was Iran constantly from a hose into the pans '•'to wash the maggots away."

It is some consolation to learn that this particular manufacturer Was prosecuted and fined £20, and that the figs jwere seized and destroyed. Seized and Condemned. Incidentally, one may mention, our food inspectors often have to act as "destructive agents" in the course of their duties. Thus Mr. Madgwick told the commission that he had taken as much as 1£ tons of tinned foods to the furnace at once to make sure that it would not be used; and in one year ihe supervised the destruction of over 190001b of confectionery which had been seized and condemned.

To return to Mr. Allison, he had many strange tales to tell the commission of "raspberry" jam which proved to be onethird apple and plum pulp; of rabbits so far decomposed as to be absolutely unfit for consumption; of tomatoes infected with black spot, "dirty, diseased and inaggotty," and yet converted into pickles and Bauce.

Of course when manufacturers deliberately trick the public in this way they •jo to a great deal of trouble to avoid detection. Thus Mr. Patten informed the commission that Departmental inspectors had discovered that prunes which were "alive with weevils" had [been unpacked, soaked in syrup, repacked and sent back to the retail I stores.

For the time the pnines would look quite fresh and juicj'; but, said Mr. Patten, "in six weeks they would be alive with weevils" again.

One of the inspectors gave quite a picturesque account of his visit to some market gardens in which vegetables were habitually washed for the market in the "stagnant waterholes" in which' the gardeners performed their own ablutions. Unfortunately, this inspector admitted that he had not visited such places in recent years, but he supposed that conditions to-day are' much the same as in 1929, when 98 per cent of the suburban market gardens were " like that" —noisome,. filthy and unhygienic. One of the most disquieting facts brought under the notice of the commission is that the visits of inspectors are "few and far between," and that they tend to grow less rather than to increase.

These are matters to which, as the "Sun" has pointed out, the City Council and the Public Health Board should give immediate attention. There can be no doubt that these shocking disclosures have produced a feeling of genuine alarm here, and that the confidence of our people in the efficiency and the wisdom of our public health administration has ljeen rudelv shattered.