Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/358

354 reality belong to more than one class, as milk, oatmeal, green beans, etc., could be assigned according to their analyses and according to the judgment of a referee board of physiologists, which would then have a constructive economic function to perform instead of a reviewing function which has been discharged by the Remsen Board; for to determine the real physiologic and therefore the real economic value of certain foods would require long and careful experimentation. The regulations as to labeling would naturally be different for the different classes.

Obviously there should be no relaxation of the present vigilance of the law as to preservatives which have been proved harmful, nor as to the permission of unwholesome constitutents nor as to the presence of adulterants—meaning by that term anything which reduces or impairs the food value. But the bureau of chemistry of the Department of Agriculture should be enlarged into a bureau of food economics so that its function should become more constructive in the sense in which the bureau of plant industry and the bureau of animal husbandry is more economic. It has become a truism that the government pays more attention to the health of pigs than it does to the health of men. Unless we mistake the spirit of true progressivism this will not properly express the functions of government a generation hence. A very material advance, educative in its influence and highly economic in its results, would be the establishment of this new standard of purity in foods.