Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/63

Rh, also appealed to her. The fact that starch was a comparatively cheap food, and the proteids which made the flour yellow was an expensive food, and that the bread made from the dark flour had a more delicate flavor, was lost sight of in the desire to have a "nice, white" bread to set before her guests.

But the conditions of living have changed, and now most of the bread, especially for the dwellers in the city and village, comes from the bakery. Now it is the baker who tries to fill the demand for a white loaf. With this demand comes naturally enough the effort to get a cheap flour that will make white bread, and the advent of bleached flour into the market.

That this flour is usually bleached by chemicals, just as much as your straw hat is bleached by sulfur fumes, and your sheeting is bleached by "chloride of lime" in the bleachery, is covered up by the statement that the flour is bleached by electricity. Electricity would not injure food, surely! There is no statement, however, that by the use of electricity both nitrous and nitric acid fumes as well as oxides of nitrogen are developed, and that they have, as Professor T. H. Shepard has recently shown, a powerful antiseptic action and actually retard digestion for a longer or shorter time, dependent on the strength, the action of ferments existing in saliva, in the gastric and in the pancreatic fluids. If this is true how can the product do otherwise than retard digestion?

Another phase of the bleached flour question is that this process is used to enable the miller to put on the market a larger per cent, of white flour than he otherwise could, and, of course, greatly to his advantage. This bleached flour is then plainly misbranded unless it bears the label "artificially bleached." Then the customer can purchase this chemically treated flour if he thinks best.

While discussing the use of a bleachery in the preparation of foods, what about the use of sulfur fumes in drying fruits, on the large scale? Is it not possible, the careful housewife inquires, by using a little more care and better stock to dry these fruits without the use of sulfur, or at least with the use of an extremely small quantity? It is true that the dried product may by its color suggest the article that our grandmother used to prepare on the farm. After all, was that so very objectionable, and was the flavor of a dried apple pie made from fruit that had not been bleached and processed until all flavor was gone, so very disagreeable that we did not ask for another piece?

Since the people possibly had the idea that white asparagus was better than green, and that a light-colored sweet corn was more agreeable to the customer than that having the slightly yellow color which nature had given it, the manufacturers began to bleach these products with sulfites in the process of canning. This was in deference to a