Page:Foods and their adulteration; origin, manufacture, and composition of food products; description of common adulterations, food standards, and national food laws and regulations (IA foodstheiradulte02wile).pdf/544

 The several schedules of additional standards recommended have been submitted, in a tentative form, to the manufacturing firms and the trade immediately interested, and also to the State food-control officials for criticism.

Respectfully, , ,, , , Committee on Food Standards, Association of Official Agricultural Chemists. , Representing the Interstate Food Commission.  June 26, 1906.

PRINCIPLES ON WHICH THE STANDARDS ARE BASED.

The general considerations which have guided the committee in preparing the standards for food products are the following:

1. The standards are expressed in the form of definitions, with or without accompanying specifications of limit in composition.

2. The main classes of food articles are defined before the subordinate classes are considered.

3. The definitions are so framed as to exclude from the articles defined substances not included in the definitions.

4. The definitions include, where possible, those qualities which make the articles described wholesome for human food.

5. A term defined in any of the several schedules has the same meaning wherever else it is used in this report.

6. The names of food products herein defined usually agree with existing American trade or manufacturing usage; but where such usage is not clearly established or where trade names confuse two or more articles for which specific designations are desirable, preference is given to one of the several trade names applied.

7. Standards are based upon data representing materials produced under American conditions and manufactured by American processes or representing such varieties of foreign articles as are chiefly imported for American use.

8. The standards fixed are such that a departure of the articles to which they apply, above the maximum or below the minimum limit prescribed, is evidence that such articles are of inferior or abnormal quality.

9. The limits fixed as standard are not necessarily the extremes authentically recorded for the article in question, because such extremes are commonly due to abnormal conditions of production and are usually accompanied by marks of inferiority or abnormality readily perceived by the producer or manufacturer.

FOOD STANDARDS.

I. ANIMAL PRODUCTS.

A.

a. MEATS.

1. Meat, flesh, is any clean, sound, dressed, and properly prepared edible part of animals in good health at the time of slaughter, and if it bears a name descriptive of its kind,