uckwheat;
wheat flour is bleached with nitric oxide to improve its appearance.
Fancy French peas are colored with sulphate of copper. Bottled ketchup
usually contains benzoate of soda as a preservative. Japanese tea is
colored with cyanide of potassium and iron. Prepared mustard usually
contains a large quantity of added starch and is colored with tumeric.
Ground coffee has recently been adulterated with roasted peas. So-called
non-alcoholic bottled beverages often contain alcohol or a
habit-forming drug and are usually colored with aniline. Candy is
commonly colored with aniline dye and often coated with paraffine to
prevent evaporation. Cheap candies contain such substances as glue and
soapstone. The higher-priced kinds of molasses usually contain
sulphites. Flavoring extracts seldom are made from pure products and
usually are artificially colored. Jams are made of apple jelly with the
addition of coloring matter and also of seeds to imitate berries from
which they are supposed to be made; the cheap apple jelly is itself
often imitated by a mixture of glucose, starch, aniline dye, and
flavoring. Lard nearly always contains added tallow. Bakeries in large
cities have used decomposed products, as decayed eggs. Cheap ice-cream
is often made of gelatin, glue, and starch. Cottonseed-oil is sold for
olive-oil. The poison saccharine is often used in place of sugar in
prepared sweetened products.

The attentive reader of the public prints in the recent years can
greatly extend this humiliating recital if he choose. It is our habit to
attach all the blame to the adulterators, and it is difficult to excuse
them; but we usually find that there are contributory causes and
certainly there must be reasons. Has our daily fare been honest?

_The admiration of good materials_

Not even yet am I done with this plain problem of the daily fare. The
very fact that it is daily--thrice daily--and that it enters so much
into the thought and effort of every one of us, makes it a subject of
the deepest concern from every point of view. The aspect of the case
that I am now to reassert is the effect of much of our food preparation
in removing us from a knowledge of the good raw materials that come out
of the abounding earth.

Let us stop to admire an apple. I see a committee of the old worthies in
some fruit-show going slowly and discriminatingly among the plates of
fruits, discussing the shapes and colors and sizes, catching the
fr