Food poisoning / by Edwin Oakes Jordan.

  • Edwin O. Jordan
Date:
[1917]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Food poisoning / by Edwin Oakes Jordan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    stages of decomposition, are ripened in various ways by the Chinese and eaten as a delicacy after the lapse of months or years. The preserved ducks’ eggs known as pidan are stored for months in a pasty mixture of tea, lime, salt, and wood ashes. “They are very dif¬ ferent from fresh eggs. The somewhat darkened shell has numerous dark green dots on the inner membrane. Both the white and yolk are coagulated; the white is brown, more or less like coffee jelly.”x Increase of ammoniacal nitrogen has taken place to an extraor¬ dinary degree in these eggs, indicating much decompo¬ sition of the egg protein. The ammoniacal nitrogen in pidan is considerably higher than in the eggs known by egg candlers as black rots. It is evident, therefore, that bacterial growth in substances used as food is not necessarily injurious and may in some cases increase the palatability of food without destroying its wholesomeness. Little or nothing is known about the correlation of visible signs of decom¬ position with the presence of poisonous products, and it is at present impossible to say at what point in the process of decomposition a food becomes unfit to use owing to the accumulation of poisonous substances within it. There seems to be no connection between the natural repugnance to the use of a food and its unwholesomeness. Under ordinary conditions the nau¬ seous character of very stale eggs is proverbial, and yet few nitrogenous foods have so clear a health record as eggs or have been so infrequently connected with food poisoning outbreaks. 1 K. Blunt and C. C. Wang, Jour. Biol. Chem., XXVIII (1916), 125.
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