SCIENCE HELPS

Taranaki Daily News, 20 July 1935, Page 6 (Supplement)

SCIENCE HELPS

GIVING APPLES ROOM TO BREATHE COLD STORAGE AND HEATING. Nothing comes amiss to science in dealing with our daily lives, says the Children’s Newspaper. Flats and Cox’s orange pippins, iron and steel and jellies and sweets, the designs Of ships and aeroplanes, blast furnaces arid coal, herrings and kippers, cottori and leather, roads and wool, headlights and fire- risks, and bread, the staff of life, all crime under the inquiring eye of the British Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. This Government department is thg beneficent Dora of the citizen. ....

Among so many things “it is not easy to pick out one of greater advantage to the public than the rest, but we may well suppose that most people are more interested in their food than anything else. Here the department offers its aid and sympathy to the flour millers who are applying science to the baker’s art and are trying to find why flour from one kind of wheat produces better bread than that from another kind. The answer is a curious one because it appears that there is not merely a chemical reason for it, but one assorted With the stretching power of the Cells of the dough. Different flours have different powers of gassing the dough to produce the sponge-like quality of the breadcrumb. What the millers are trying to find is the best way of getting the gas to work and the cells of the dough tq work with it. In time they Will be able to make unerringly the sweet country loaves of grandmother’s day; but scientific men are exploring fields that grandmother never heard of, those of the fruit, vegetables and meat coming from overseas as well as that produced at home and kept in cold storage. This year something went wrong with many of the nectarines brought from South Africa. The experts in refrigeration are inquiring into this as well aS into the best way of carrying Dominion apples and giving them room to breathe in the storage chambers. This is a very delicate business, for what suits one apple will not suit another. Storage atmosphere has been worked out so as to enable a Cox’s orange pippin to keep its matchless flavour after six months of freezing. Cold storage also promises to give us more delicately flavoured salted herrings and better kippers. AU will welcome the promise that a felllttip

new process will produce wool that will hot shrink whatever the laundry may do to it, that a new campaign against clothes moths promises well, and that there is a prospect that in future furs put into storage will return no worse than they went in.