The Work of the American Bakers Association in the Development of a Sanitary Code for the Baking Industry

Abstract

THE control of the food supply has long been a governmental function. For some thousands of years, laws and regulations have been in force, and inspectors at work protecting the consumer against fraud and injury to health. Under the conditions created by rigid food laws, adulterations by the use of inferior substitutes, injurious colors and preservatives, and all the fraudulent practices which have harassed trade and worried the consumer, have become, for the most part, a thing of the past. Food control has entered a new phase-that of the rigid sanitary supervision of the manufacture and distribution of food products. As we recall how recently this work has been developed, it is somewhat mortifying to remember that Moses laid down splendid sanitary laws for the Children of Israel 3400 years ago, and that long before the Christian era Athens and Rome had market and meat inspectors. Although we have been a long time establishing these very desirable sanitary regulations, it is gratifying to know that at the present time almost every state in the Union has a sanitary food law on its statute books; that every large city has a comprehensive sanitary code, and that the duties of the sanitary inspector as an agent of the health department are recognized by the consumer as an important and necessary function. Within the last few years the food industries have come to appreciate the importance and value of sanitation. It is still not unusual to hear the remark, If you saw it made you would never want to eat it again; but modern food factories are being constructed and run on the theory, If you see it made you will buy a case. These comments, with such opposite conclusions, represent well the changes which have taken place in food manufacture since it came to be understood that visible dirt is not the most dangerous, and that the invisible molds and bacteria are evidences of uncleanliness that if allowed to develop will turn good raw material into garbage and carry poison instead of food to the consumer. No industry depends so fully upon the good will of the consumer as the baking industry. Women have not yet lost the art of baking. Bread can still be made in the home, but it is rapidly becoming a factory product because the housewife has learned that she can buy a better product than she can make, and buy it more cheaply than she can produce it in her own oven. So long as flour can be purchased in small qua-ntities at the grocery store and readily converted into desirable food in the home, the baker will be forced to make quality products. As a matter of fact, the baking industry has reached the point where force and coercion are quite unnecessary arguments toward the production of desirable bread. Indeed within the last few years the baker has stepped out into the limelight and has come to the front as an idealistic food manufacturer. He has fortified his industry by providing it with laboratories devoted to research and service; he is establishing schools for the instruction of the men who will be the bakers of the future, and now he is proposing to operate his industry under sanitary and ethical codes which he has designed for