Suppress Alumned Food

Suppress Alumned Food.

The doctors inform us that alum is a poison, and that alum baking powders should be avoided because they make the food unwholesome. Prominent hygienists, who have given the matter most study, regard these powders as an evil that should be suppressed by state action. In Minnesota and Wisconsin alum powders are not permitted to be sold unless they are branded to warn consumers of their true character, while in the District of Columbia the authorities have under the direction of congress adopted regulations to prohibit the use of alumn in bread altogether.

Are not the people of the other states, as well as those of Minnesota and Wisconsin, entitled to warning of danger which is apparently menacing them at close hand, and is not the whole country entitled to absolute protection, as the people of the District of Columbia are protected, by legislation which is entirely prohibitive?

Until we can have protection in the form of a statute, how can our state boards of health, state analysts or food commissions better serve the public than by publishing in the newspapers from time to time the names of the baking powders which they find to be made from alumn? Meantime it will aid the housewife in designating these alumn powders to remember that all powders sold at 25 cents or less per pound are of this dangerous class. Pure cream of tartar powders are usually sold at from 45 to 50 cents a pound.

Capt. .T. J. Parshall, the peach grower of Ann Arbor town, reports a very singular condition among his peach trees. He says he does not know what to make of the peach blossoms. They are a different color this year than usual, being a pale white. Some of them contain an embryo peach but many do not. Numbers of his young trees as also plum trees were frozen. He says he does not become discouraged but replants where a tree is dead.