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Show FRUITS THAT DO NOT GROW ON TREES. Some Discoveries Made by Chemists in Emits, Jams and Jellies. (Saturday Evening Post.) Government chemists in the food laboratory lab-oratory at Washington have been subjecting sub-jecting American jams, jellies and preserved pre-served fruits to analysis. The discoveries made are astonishing. Of 214 samples of fruit products lOt were found to be adulterated. , Crystals of acid tartrate of potash were discovered in plum jam. In many samples sam-ples of jellies benzoic acid and salicylic acid hail been used as preservatives. But that was not the worst feature. As permanent per-manent color is an important item in the sale of fruit products, some of the manufacturers manu-facturers had used poisonous dyes, and as a result small quantities of zinc, copper, tin. lead, arsenic and other dangerous impurities had been Imparted to some very attractive looking jellies. As stated, some of the samples were found to be pure, and the aovernment will circulate a list of the 214 brands rxam-ined. rxam-ined. giving the name of the manufacturer., manufactur-er., the claims of purity made for the product, and the disclosures of the federal fed-eral laboratory. Some of the jt Hies were found to contain scarcely any fruit substance sub-stance at all, being composed' of glucose, starch, coal tar dye and other ingredients, ingredi-ents, with a mere llavoring of fruit. It has long been generally suspected that fruit products contained "many kinds of adulterants. The chemists in their search found in their jellv samples every alien substance that to their knowledge had been charged against jam and jeliv. with one exception. The most careful tests failed to disclose agar-agar (dried seaweed), which it was thought was used as a gelatinizing asent. . In one sample benzoic acid was found in guava jam. The chemists were informed in-formed that it hart not in th r.u ion I used as a preservative, but had come from a coal-tar dye which the manufae- 1 turera had purchased in good faith as a harmless vegetable coloring. Twenty-rive samples of jellies contained con-tained glucose, but were not s0 labeled, l ne labels of .some of those not only disavowed dis-avowed the presence of glucose, or' were silent in regard to it. but set forth that the product was packed from the choicest 'n,lt- In addition to containing glucose, rive had been dyed, and nine contained acid preservatives. |
