WOMAN’S WORLD

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19347, 29 June 1925, Page 7

WOMAN’S WORLD

THE CLEAN FOOD PROBLEM' IN ENGLAND, FRANCE AND AMERICA Muriel Harris writes as follows in the Manchester Guardian: —The new regulations concerning meat which have just been issued by the Ministry of Health are long overdue. English people are accustomed to dirty milk, exposed bread, and a general uncleanliness in the treatment of food, but even they have been long offended by the disgusting displays of raw meat which meet their eyes at every turn. The disgust, it is true, has often been aesthetic rather than hygienic, and it has been worse to look at so revolting a display than to eat it. In France conditions arc even worse, largely owing to the street markets. The dirty transport of meat strikes the eye even more forcibly, though this may bo partly due to the fact that the mote in

one’s brother’s eye is bound io be more conspicuous than that which is in.one’s own. But bread is carried about frankly under the arm in France. It is left upon the doorstep more often than in England; it is even dusted in the shops with a brush which, kept for the purpose, has been in use long enough not to be clean.

j At the other extreme comes America. • You do not notice a butcher’s shop in ; America. You do not sec the meat; you have no opportunity of poking and lingering it. It is also true that meat is not nearly so good in America, though this has probably nothing to do with the fact that it is sold with decency and cleanliness. Americans who

come to Europe for the first time must find it hard to stomach the food conditions here, for while perhaps food is sterilised and devitalised almost out of existence on the other side of the Atlantic, it is above all things clean. It looks clean, and clean milk is so much a matter of course that the very i poorest—if they arc not newly import- j ed Europeans—expect to have it. ICE IN BUTCHERS’ SHOPS Americans have been partly obliged by their climate to reduce their food i conditions to some sort of decency. The great cohl and the great heat have implied the regulation of heat and cold generally. Ice is a matter of course, whether in public or in private housekeeping. It is easy to get in America, ; and ice-cutting in the winter and the i storing of huge quantities of ice is a regular occupation. Ice regulates the | keeping of meat and milk, and it really ! regulates the conditions under which j both are kept. There is no display of . meat in an American butcher’s shop, unless it is under glass. The meat is

kept in the ice-room. The customer states her want, and the butcher goes to the ice-room to satisfy it. It is

true that the customer has only a negative choice in the matter. She can say that she does not like a particular piece of meat, or she can complain of it with a view to next time. But she has no opportunity of choosing one piece instead of another, and above all she cannot touch the meat* until she has actually bought it. This might, of course, leave her entirely at the mercy of the butcher. But as a matter of fact the meat is officially graded. Every piece that is bought in New York, for instance, is stamped officially and thus to a certain extent standardised. For

J individual choice cleanliness is substi- ! j tuted and a very horrible sight is abol- I ished, just as an operation, however ; 1 beneficent, is not held in public. There is another point concerning the • American shop, which is also partly , due to climate. In the summer at j < least all the doors and windows are covered with wire blinds. In the greatest heat no insect can get into the. shop, unless the door is accidentally ‘ left open. There is none of the hor- • rible buzzing of flies which is often | the case in England where food is eon- j corned, and the risk of infection must j 1 certainly be greatly reduced. , MILK | The cleanliness of the American food ' i arrangements arc so well established ' [ that they do not particularly strike the ; ’ foreigner until he or she returns to the dirty conditions which obtain in ; Europe. It is amusing, of course, to find Jumps of sugar in restaurants each ■ wrapped up in separate papers. Bread ; also is sold in sealed paper. Fund- , wiehes are, each one of them, wrapped ‘ up in air-tight lunch paper. But it becomes very quickly a matter of course to buy nothing but bottled milk, . and to have plenty of milk and plenty ■ of cream of a very high quality. Anicri- j ! cans are bad cooks; their food to ! European taste leaves much to be de- i sired, and a good deal of it is highly - indigestible. But their milk supply is ! excellent. They drink a great deal of ■ milk; they use a good deal of milk and : cream in cooking. The milk is graded, ! so that they know exactly the quality that they are getting, and, whatever that quality, they know that it is clean. The mere fact of being able to get guaranteed, good clean milk as a matter of course and without inquiry for special dairies or particular conditions is a boon that cannot be overestimated. It is a boon, too, the building up of i which might well be studied closely in : other countries. Americans have a great deal of money and they are very | extravagant. But they are extrava- 1 gant over social experiments as well as ' over things of less import. And, hav- I ing succeeded in establishing an excc’lent system, their method, without their extravagance, might well be extended to other countries.

There is, of course, the point of view which holds that by eliminating the. dangf rs of food contamination we are also destroying our own natural powers of combating them. It is quite true that the French peasant mixes water with his wine which would give tyhpoid to the crd.’nary Englishman. At the same time, no one would contest the desirability of a pure water supply, any more than a pure milk supply—at at least for babies —can be construed as anything but a blessing. We have a long way to travel yet before we become over-clean, and even with the much-needed and long delayed regulations concerning meat there will still be countless opportunities for our natural forces to combat the dirty conditions under which much of our food comes to us. THROUGH THE “JADE GATE’’ TO THE WORLD OF FASHION Probably very few women who buy necklaces and carrings or other jewellery made of jade have any idea that this hard, tough, emerald-green stone is of any use than ornamental, or even know of its history or whence it comes. There arc two species of jade—jaditc and nephrite; the latter “pathologically” indicating the Spanish origin of the former word, for “jade” is derived from the Spanish ’word “yjada” —“side” —which they gave to it when discovered in Mexico in 1565 because they learned it was reputed by the natives to be valuable in the cure of kidney disease, our word “nephritic” being used in that connection. NINE VARIETIES Jade is highly prized by the Chinese, as may be noted by the number of carved images made of it which one sees in curiosity shops; for they value it almost as much for its medicinal properties as they do for its beauty and suitability for domestic articles, for which it was used in primitive times all over the world. For over 3,000 years caravans have passed through Yu Men, the “Jade Gate” in the Great Wall of China, bearing loads of crude jade from

the quarries of Barkul and Khotan to be worked into numerous articles of use and ornament by Chinese and Japanese lapidaries, as well as into medicines by their chemists.

The Chinese since time immemorial have distinguished nine varieties of the stone duo to colour, ranging from the clear white kind almost like rock crystal to the brilliant emerald green wo chiefly sec in England, which now comes only from Burma. Some of these varieties, one, for instance, resembling the blue of the kingfisher, arc so rare that their value may be said to be priceless, and specimens are only to bo seen in some museum, private or otherwise. Jade is very nearly as hard to cut as a. diamond, and is worked in very much the same manner with dust harder than itself. As the beautiful colours are streaky and not .massed through the mineral, the great art of the carver is so to adapt his design that what he wishes to make will follow these streaks of colour. In vain have V.’esrern potters tried to imitate the glorious glazes of Chinese porcelains, the lovely colours of which derive their ortg:n from the intermediate grey to green shades of jade, tints which for neauty are nnsnrpa sed anywhere. To the Chinese all varieties of jade hre symbols of long life and eternity: auo those wrongly so-called “mmI c.-irm sceptres” sold in the shops are really tokens of friendship and good- : will ’which they give to their freinds, land call ”ju’i,” signfying “as you 'and call “ju’i,” signifying “as you | “Commo vous le dcsirez.”