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The Food Bill has emerged from the Grand Committee on Trade, and will shortly be submitted, as amended, to the House of Commons. Whatever further amendments may be introduced, the Bill, when passed into law, will but afford one more example of the impotence of repressive legislation in regard to the production and distribution of adulterated and inferior products. We do not say that the making of such laws and their enforcement are not of the highest importance in the interests of the community; their administration—feeble and inadequate as it must necessarily be—produces a valuable deterrent effect, and tends to educate public opinion and to improve commercial morality. But we say that by the very nature of those laws their working can result only in the exposure of a small portion of that which is bad without affording any indications as to that which is good, and that it is by the Control System alone that the problem can be solved. This fact has been recognised abroad, and is rapidly being recognised here. The system of Permanent Analytical Control was under discussion at the International Congress of Applied Chemistry, held at Brussels in 1894, and at the International Congress of Hygiene at Budapest in 1895, and the facts and explanations put forward have resulted in the introduction of the system into various countries. The establishment of this system in any country must be regarded as the most practical and effective method of ensuring the supply of good and genuine articles, and affords the only means through which public confidence can be ensured.

An appeal under the Food and Drugs Acts, reported in the present number of the BRITISH FOOD JOURNAL, is an apt illustration of the old saying, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In commenting upon the case in question, the Pall Mall Gazette says: “The impression among the great unlearned that the watering of the morning's milk is a great joke is ineradicable; and there is also a common opinion among the Justice Shallows of the provincial bench that the grocer who tricks his customers into buying coffee which is 97 per cent. chicory is a clever practitioner, who ought to be allowed to make his way in the world untrammelled by legal obstructions. But the Queen's Bench have rapped the East Ham magistrates over the knuckles for convicting without fining a milkman who was prosecuted by the local authority, and the case has been sent back in order that these easygoing gentlemen may give logical effect to their convictions.”

In 1899 the medical practitioners of Dublin were confronted with an outbreak of a peculiar and obscure illness, characterised by symptoms which were very unusual. For want of a better explanation, the disorder, which seemed to be epidemic, was explained by the simple expedient of finding a name for it. It was labelled as “beri‐beri,” a tropical disease with very much the same clinical and pathological features as those observed at Dublin. Papers were read before certain societies, and then as the cases gradually diminished in number, the subject lost interest and was dropped.

The President of the Board of Agriculture has introduced in the House of Commons his long‐promised Bill for preventing the sale of butter containing large amounts of water, and the proposed measure appears to have been received with general approval on both sides of the House.

From a recently published letter addressed to a well‐known firm of whisky manufacturers by Mr. JOHN LETHIBY, Assistant Secretary to the Local Government Board, it is plain that the Board decline to entertain the suggestion that the Government should take steps to compel manufacturers of whisky to apply correct descriptions to their products. The adoption of this attitude by the Board might have been anticipated, but the grounds upon which the Board appear to have taken it up are not in reality such as will afford an adequate defence of their position, as the negative evidence given before the Select Committee on Food Products Adulteration and yielded by the reports of Public Analysts is beside the mark. The introduction of a governmental control of the nature suggested is not only undesirable but impracticable. It is undesirable because such a control must be compulsory and is bound to be unfair. It would be relegated to a Government Department, and of necessity, therefore, in the result it would be in the hands of an individual—the head of the Department—and subject entirely to the ideas and the unavoidable prejudices of one person. It is impracticable because no Government or Government Department could afford to take up a position involving the recommendation of particular products and the condemnation of others. No Government could take upon itself the onus of deciding questions of quality as distinguished from questions merely involving nature and substance. A system of control, in order to be effective and valuable alike to the public and the honest manufacturer, must be voluntary in its nature in so far as the manufacturer is concerned, and must be carried out by an independent and authoritative body entirely free from governmental trammels, and possessing full liberty to give or withhold its approbation or guarantee.

As a result of the changes caused by the preparation of foods gradually passing out of the home into the hands of manufacturers, there has arisen an absolute need for a complete supervision of the public food supplies. A supervision which shall place some limit upon the substitution of cheaper and inferior methods and dangerous materials in place of the standard formerly used in our homes.

The Milk and Dairies Bill introduced by Mr. SAMUEL aims at securing better inspection of dairies, including all premises in which milk is obtained, stored, or sold, such as cowsheds, milk depots, and milk shops. It also aims at the tracing of impure milk and the prevention of its infection, as well as the elimination of cows yielding tuberculous milk.

In the multiplicity of facts and factors which bear upon the feeding of nations the question of transport is the predominant partner.

There is no nation more ready for self‐sacrifice for the common good than the British. The “ Authorities ” have been put to the proof by the war and the future of the Empire largely depends upon how far they are prepared to abandon nepotism and to accept the service of a man at its value alone. For effective national service means the employment of every available man in that capacity in which he is able to give of his best; it means the very antithesis of the square‐peg‐in‐the‐round‐hole policy so popular with the Government Official ; it means that ability shall no longer subserve insolent ineptitude, nor influence continue to shield the incompetent ; it means the employment of those who for the past four years have offered their services to their country in vain ; it means, in short, the destruction of all those idols which official‐dom loves and the worship of which stands between us and victory. Voices, crying in the wilderness, have raised a plca for cleaner politics, for an imperial and not a party policy, but the plea, so far, has met with little sympathy. But it is not politics alone which are in need of cleansing. The cancer of nepotism, of the necessity for lick‐spittling to secure advancement, has sunk deep into the national life, and even four years of dire peril and unprecedented bloodshed have not mitigated the disease. Knowledge still waits in the ante‐chamber of the clerk ; skill sits on the benches of the Labour Exchange. The introduction of a true and not of a “ camouflaged ” system of national service would afford an opportunity of destroying a system which is sapping the energy of the whole nation. It would be the severest test of the State Department yet devised. No compulsion would be necessary if an honest attempt were made to give every man a fair chance and, if only for this once, to put the right man in the right place.

When men still alive to‐day were young, not a single cargo of chilled or frozen meat, of fruit or of dairy produce from the Southern Hemisphere, had been landed in this country. We have, that is, lived in the last generation through a dietetic revolution which has left us to a large and increasing extent dependent on foodstuffs grown at the ends of the earth and consumed weeks or even months after they leave the places of their origin. Fifty years ago Australia was importing butter, and a century ago the first cow was imported into New Zealand—where there are to‐day more cattle than men. This change in the balance of trade has created a series of new problems in practical science. Some of these have been solved in part, others remain impregnable, and all urgently call for solution; for every year, and almost every month, damage to cargoes is suffered that has its origin in our imperfect knowledge of how to submit perishable goods to the ordeal of prolonged ocean carriage. Beef, to take an obvious example, is hard to bring satisfactorily from Australia. There are two methods by which meat may be preserved, freezing and chilling. The same installation is used in both cases, but for the former, the machine requires to be more powerful, since the temperature of the meat must remain well below 32 degrees F. Mutton lends itself perfectly to freezing, but beef, owing to structural and other causes, is deteriorated if frozen. The tissues are ruptured by expansion, and so, when the meat is defrosted, much of the nutritive liquid escapes. It is possible, that this problem of “drip” may be solved. It is also possible that beef from Australia may be transported to Europe in a chilled (not frozen) state. Experimentally this has already been achieved, but much remains to be done before small scale experiment can be converted into current commercial practice. When it is remembered that there is available in Australia land which would feed a further seven to ten million head of cattle, the importance of the investigations now being conducted into means of transport will be understood. The ocean carriage of fruit involves inquiries equally fascinating and, perhaps, less known. An apple or an orange is not killed by being plucked, but continues to live and “breathe,” that is to say, to absorb oxygen from the air and yield in its place carbon dioxide. In consequence, a ship's hold packed with fruit would quickly resemble a Black Hole of Calcutta were not certain precautions taken. The crowded living cargo threatens to suffocate itself, and the remedy lies in lowering the temperature of the fruit so that it may breathe more slowly, and in the provision of adequate ventilation. Cold, and to a certain extent the expired gas, CO2, itself, lower the rate of living—that is to say, the rate of chemical change, so that the fruit ripens more slowly. It is in this state of delayed ripening that apples from Australia or oranges from South Africa can be brought to this country without damage. Stated in this way, the problem sounds simple enough; given some degree of cold and ventilation, all will be well. As a matter of fact, the limits of temperature and of ventilation within which it is permissible to move are narrowed by both engineering and biological considerations. Living matter does not suffer coercion gladly or passively, and the attempt to delay ripening, though it undoubtedly succeeds, does not leave the fruit at the end where it would be if it had ripened normally. The sequence of chemical change is different; flavouring substances abnormal in character or in amount are apt to be produced, and the problem of successful storage is to hit upon that combination of temperature humidity and ventilation, which will in the end present the product to the palate of the consumer in a state as near to the normal as may be. Fruit, moreover, has its recognisable storage diseases, and, though much advance has been recorded in recent years, losses are still suffered regularly. As an example of the tricks that can be played with plants, it may be mentioned that a rose bush, just budding, can be kept at its “freezing” point and its growth arrested. Then, if it is sheltered under a hothouse roof so that light shines upon it continuously, it will bloom to perfection many months later, when its temperature is allowed to rise. Roses in December arc, in fact, a practical proposition. The stowage of fruit naturally requires particular care. On banana boats, for instance, the chambers are subdivided into pens by portable rails supported in special stanchions, and from the air trunk access may be had to the bananas for inspection during the voyage. To check the danger caused by bulging cases it is sometimes the practice to fit battens around the case ends of thickness equal to the amount of bulge, thus preventing pressure on the fruit itself when the ship rolls. Mere ventilation without refrigeration is sometimes found to be adequate. Provided a good, regular circulation of air is secured, fruit can be brought here and even to America in this manner from the Mediterranean. Ingenious precautions are taken to see that rough weather does not affect storage conditions. In the old days one of the popular methods of artificial lowering of temperature was that of the direct expansion cold air machine. The air from the cargo spaces was sucked into the machine, compressed, cooled, expanded and sent back through the cargo spaces. This system proved, however, unsatisfactory, and has virtually been scrapped. The problem of the elimination of loss from fruit cargoes begins not in the cold store but in the orchard. A layman might expect different varieties of apples to vary in their carrying quantities. But experience has shown that apples of the same kind, even when grown near together and showing no difference if eaten as soon as plucked, vary considerably in their keeping power according to the soil on which they are grown. Thus Victoria plums under standard uniform conditions of commercial storage have had a life varying from one to six weeks. In another case Allington Pippin apples of the 1925 crop, taken from two different trees growing in the same garden less than 15 yards apart, showed a commercial storage life in the same cold store until January, 1926, in one instance, and in the other until May, 1926. Evidently growers, shippers and all concerned in the fruit trade dare not allow such results to be possible, for waste has to be paid for, and if the damage is charged to the public the consumption of fruit is liable to be lowered. It may be feasible to vary keeping quality by modifying soils, and this aspect of the matter, which is, of course, extremely complicated, is being strenuously tackled. If the tasks before scientific investigators are hard, the prizes are valuable. For, apart from the desirability of adding to knowledge, huge commercial interests are at stake. Our capacity for consuming fruit imported from the Southern Hemisphere is only beginning to be tested. It is scarcely too much to say that until after the war we had been accustomed to enjoy apples and oranges only in the colder months. The supplies now on the market all through the summer come wholly from the Southern Hemisphere. South Africa only started exporting oranges in the first decade of the present century, and then only in very small quantities. Now she sends nearly a million cases every season, and it is estimated that this figure could be multiplied tenfold in the next fifteen years if the demand were sufficient. It is such considerations that have led the Empire Marketing Board to give a substantial grant to the Low Temperature Research Institute at Cambridge, which is enabling the Institute to build a new and enlarged station, and considerably to extend its activities in all directions. But producers and consumers are alike dependent on workers in the spheres of low temperature research and soil investigation. These scientific inquirers have much ground to cover before we can claim completely to have learnt the art of carrying perishable cargoes half round the world.—(The New Statesman).