THE SALE OF WHOLE MILK.

Otago Witness, Issue 3413, 13 August 1919, Page 13

THE SALE OF WHOLE MILK.

In a world where more or less everything is wrong there is a difficulty in knowing where exactly to begin to set things right. There js hardly any department of human life' where the rumblings of acute discontent are not heard. We are disposed to take a charitable view of the shortcomings of the State because everywhere people ara calling upon it to act in a thousand directions simultaneously as if the State were God. The State, after all, is only a few dozen men of mediocre ability, who are as incompetent to decide upon the multitudinous problems referred to them as the present writer would be to take upon himself the various functions of all the professors and fellows in one of our biff universities. We remember being present at a meeting a few weeks ago where "a roomful of people concentrated upon a patient citizen of the United States, urging upon him the innumerable things which they thought tho President of his country should do in Ireland, Europe, and the world generally. He said at last: " It is not the conception which American citizens have of their President that he should take the place and duties of God. Omnipotent in the world." It was a chastening, sobering thought, and a great deal of world melancholy might be allayed if people would not make so much a fetish of the State, but had , a higher conception of their own possibilities as private citizens and human beings. To carry on the work of a nation properly requires all tho energies and thoughts of all the people in it, and the less people rely upon themselves and the more they rely unon the State the worse do things get, for they ask the State, whose officials are a decimal fraction of the people, \o accomplish what can only be done by the whole people working at their own jobs. As well might an army depute its general staff, alono and unaided, to undertake warfare with an enemy army as for the people to expect the State to do everything and provide for everything. These wholesome if unpalatable reflections have been present with "us for many years, and the vividness with which we realised their truth accounts for our strong, bias in. of personal, co-operative, or direct action in all things as against direct action through the State and the phalanx of political middlemen, who throng its ante-chambers, who secure audience of the State for and who are paid for their services as intermediants m votes and cash. There is, of course, a sphere of action where the State alone can operate effectively. That we have never denied. There are also problems which might be solved by the peonle for themselves, which need solution, and, failing action by the people, the State must inevitably intervene. One of these soecial problems 5s the milk supply. It is certain that if farmers and consumers do not solve, by co-operative or private action, the problem of securing a supply of pure, wholesome milk, the. State will take action. The farmers will certainly squirm under the control, and the consumer, unlucky creature, will pay monstrously, as he does in all_ cases where his new god manifests its omnipotence. We put ourselves, imaginatively, in the place of the consumer for a moment, and we would, on the whole, prefer to pay high prices for State-controlled milk to paying lower prices for uncontrolled milk and allow our children to drink jugfuls of bacteria. Now the quality of tho milk supply in our cities hns been one of tho grievances which hr>s been slowly gathering intensity, and in Great Britain the National Clean Milk Society seems at last to have got the State to move. Ireland, as our contributor remarks, is excluded. We do not know to what this exclusion Is due —whether the St,ate thinks too many Irish children are born and grow up for the peace of the world and that the quality of milk as at

present supplied in Irish towns is an excellent method of limiting the growth of the population. We admit that, judged solely by the facts, there does not seem to be much sentiment on the matter in Ireland. Professor Houston's exposure of the quality- of milk supplied in the city of Dublin left the city cold. Even hifl diabolical and ingenious devices to illustrate what goes on in the stomach of an infant which has drank milk with putrefactive germs in it created no sensation. Though the tubes with samples of_ this kind of milk generated gases sufficiently forceful to blow the corks out and to inflate littlt rubber balloons tied over the tubes, there was no disturbance. No mob surged round the milk vendors, wrecking their premises, Professor Houston was not seized by eithef people or authorities and his throat squeezed until he gave the names of Hut dealers in infanticides. Still, we believe* in spite of appearances, that a large nunv bc-r of people do want pure milk and are prepared to pay for it. In New. York the city authorities graded the milk according to quality in three grades, the lowest kind of which was unannkaple. And the effect of this was to raise, in a couple of years, the standard of milk so that while, when the grading system was first enforced, about 40 per cent, of the milk was graded in Class 0 as unfit for human consumption, in a year or two the percentage of milk in tho lowest grade was negligible. Farmers and milk vendors who had been careless soon found that it paid to be careful, and we notice that in Great Britain Ministry of .Food is permitting better prices for milk of quality, and the grading system is coming into operation. We anticipate that everybody will want to get the best milk, and that this will lead to a rapid improvement in the quality all round and to oare in the handling. These regulations do not extend to Ireland, though the need for pure milk is just as great, but we think that it is inevitable that conditions in Ireland will be equalised. Meanwhile, we believe that the farmers or milk vendor* who will take steps to produce and sell milk in glas# bottles guaranteed to be of Grade A —thai is, milk where the bacterial count shall not exceed 10,000 per cubio centimetre at the time of delivery—would find tho provision •of such milk a profitable business, and thai the public, or a very large body of consumers, would gladly pay the higher price necessitated by the extra care required in handling on the farm, in transit, and in retailing. Investigation has shown that contamination of jaa.uk takes place roughly as follows: —About 40 per cent, on the farm, about 20 per cent, on the railways, about 20 per cent, in the dealers' hands, and about 20 per cent, in the consumers' houses. The commonest causes of contamination on the farm are dirt falling into the pail during milking, the use of unsterilised milk pails, tho straining of milk through _ a common strainer, the use of unsterilised coolers and churns, and the admixture ol fresh with stale milk. In the towns the milk is exposed too much, and there also dirty cans and churns are used. Now it should not bo a really great expense either to farmer or retailer to amend these matters, and an extra price, we believe, would readily be paid for milk of Grade A, delivered in sealed bottles, which would cover the extra cost of precautions and still make it more profitable to retail pure milk than impure. To fix a flat_ rate for milk without regard to quality is to ensure that milk will universally be of poor quality Why should anybody aim. aX producing a clean, wholesome milk if his careless neighbour gets exactly the same price. In almost every other _ article sold prices are differentiated by quality. It is so in our clothes, hats, boots, bacon, meat, whisky, wine, tobacco; in our houses, our railway cariages; but milk seems to hi simply milk, though one tumbler may b< life-giving and the other may be death' dealing to the child that drinks it._ The ordinary man would refuse to drink ft glass of water which seemed to him to b«l cloudy or filled with particles of dust. He has enough common sense to set it aside because he knows that drinking dirty water may give him typhoid. He swallows without reflection, and allows his family to swallow, milk containing- as many germs as an ordinary glass of sewage, simply

because milk is not transparent, and what tho eye does not see the imagination does not take into account. Simply as a business proposition, without any sentimental appeal to tho milk producers not to kill children, we believe that at the present timo there aro enough thousands of people in Dublin, Belfast, and Cork ready to pay for milk of Grade A a price which would remunerate those who supply it, and wo think that the supply could be organised through the co-operative dairy societies. Already in Ulsteyr a group of Ulster creameries are tackling this problem, and we think ihe 1.A.0-S. mitrht trv to organise on business linos a supply of milk of Grade A pasteurised and sold in bottle 3. It is inevitable, as we say, that tho tho grading of milk, now widespread in American cities, just beginning in Great

Britain, will be extended to Ireland, and the group of producers and milk vendors who can at once supply the higher grade will get a practical monopoly of the best paying trade for a year at least, until the other vendors can grade up, and it will be strange if they cannot keep their monopoly and make themselves the permanent channel through which farmers whole milk for consumption must vend their milk. Various suggestions have been raade as to how this should be done; some think the producers should organise eiid sell their milk directly through ther* own agencies; others think tho coosumeyj should bo cooperatively organised impose conditions on farmers supplying milk We think it would be easier for farmers to impose conditions upon themselves and regulate their own methods of production, and we suggest

that the 1.A.0.5. should try to evolve plans for co-operative supply of milk in consultations with experiencey creamery managers. We are of opinion that the future of our butter and cheese industries is precarious, and that dairy farmers ought to be prepared to specialise in the sale of whole milk, on butter-making, cheese-making, or condensed milk production, whichever seems best. One thing, however, is almost certain: there will always be a demand for wholo milk, which it is unlikely will ever be imported from the colonies or America, while cheese and butter will be, and margarine will eat its way into the butter industry more and more. There is a natural protection for the producer of whole milk, and the farmers ought to organise to gain control over it. It is one of the things which might well be discussed at the annual general meeting of co-operative societies and at district conferences of dairy societies. " The zealots of the sect of regulation < havo their eye on this industry, and it is better for farmers to arrange well their business than to have it arranged by a bureaucracy which might be very_ well tyrannical, and will certainly be vexatious. — The Irish Homestead.