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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    food. In my opinion this point of view is going to prevail, and the strife will resolve itself into a controversy over how much benzoic acid shall be permitted to go into our daily food. But we ought to be exceedingly cautious about accepting any definite figure, certainly any large figure, as representing the permissible amount of added benzoic acid in our food. The very fact that we are in possession of an efficient process for converting poisonous benzoic acid into harmless hippuric acid indicates that there is a necessity for doing so. It suggests that even the small quantities of benzoic acid which we get with unadulterated food, or produce within ourselves, might be delete¬ rious to health except for the saving hippuric acid forming process. x\nd because that “factor of safety” is a large one with respect to the normal benzoic acid content of our food it does not follow that we can encroach on it with perfect impunity. What the effect of a general, regular encroachment on it would be cannot be determined by a few relatively short feeding experiments. It is known that while certain chemicals may be taken in sub¬ stantial quantities for a month or a year without producing demonstrably injurious effects, nevertheless the continued use of the same substances, even in smaller quantities, will eventually undermine the health. Perhaps the final solution of the benzoic acid problem could be best obtained directly from the people at large. If they were to consume benzoic acid as knowingly as they consume, for example, sodic carbonate in soda biscuits, or caffeine and theobromine in coffee and tea, it would not require more than a decade or two before we should have a well-defined and well-founded public opinion on the subject, at least in the medical profession.1 With respect to other familiar and more or less poisonous substances used to preserve foods, defense of their harmlessness is far more difficult. Formalde¬ hyde, salicylic acid, sulphurous acid, and sulphite are compounds definitely poisonous in relatively small 1 Folin, Preservatives and Other Chemicals in Foods (Harvard University Press, 1914), p. 32.
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