T H E JOURNAL OF I N D U S T R I A L A N D ENGINEERIYG CHEMISTRY
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sary. A barrel of the best flour rarely retails for upwards of @.jo. During the past twenty years it has been much below this figure. Even if flour should be sold a t retail in small lots a t 5 cents per pound it would still be the cheapest and best food to form the basis of a dietary. There are other economic phases of the flour question that deserve brief mention. There are upwards of 66,000 persons engaged in various ways in the milling industry, over 40,000 as daily wage earners, I 1,000 clerks and salaried officers and about Ij,ooo proprietors and firm members. The total pay-roll is over $gj,ooo,oooannually. The flour mills represent a capital investment of over $400,000,000, pay over $z,ooo,ooo in taxes, and manufacture nearly a billion dollars’ worth of products in a year, andover 95 per cent of this sum is paid out for raw material and cost of manufacture and sales. This and similar data preCensus Reports, abstracted viously given are taken from U. and compiled in the Millers’ Almanac, 1916, published by the Northwestern Miller, Minneapolis, Minn. It is very essential that the export flour market be kept ope?, otherwise many flour mills will be idle. If all the flour mills of the country were operated to full capacity for a little over three months (100 days), they would make enough flour for home consumption. There is no industry in which there is fiercer competition for trade-both domestic and foreign-than in flour milling, and it is safe to say that the average profits per year are materially less than I O cents per barrel. 4 number of years ago my attention was called to the singular fact that a company was saved from having a deficit by using a barrel containing two less hoops than formerly. It is right that the chief food of a nation should be made not only as cheaply as possible, but also as good as possible. What is most needed a t the present time is that more attention be paid to the production of good wheats, particularly those of high protein content. Since flour enters so largely into the dietary it cannot be made too good. Professor Mendel’ aptly says: “Of all the food stuffs the proteins offer the most serious problem. They represent the indispensable staple for tissue construction; they are produced a t the greatest expense.” While in the case of some persons too much protein may be consumed, as when meats are used to excess, any trouble would be obviated and a better balanced and cheaper ration secured by the use of more bread and less meat. It is not intended to convey the idea that one “should live on bread alone,” any more than that we should live on any single food material, but if a person had to live on any one food, bread would be the best to use. Any attempt to lessen the protein content of flour and increase its starch or carbohydrate content must be regarded as a serious menace to the nutritive value of our chief article of diet. Professor Mende12 notes a tendency for a bread and potato diet to be deficient in protein. In speaking of the industrial workers coming from the country to the city, he says: “They cannot well get along with their former simple diet, because the cheap food materials which one easily obtains, as bread and potatoes, contain too little protein. They undoubtedly need an increase of proteid material.” There is certainly no need for any increase in starchy materials to combine with bread.
s.
BREAD-MAKING
Another important need is a better understanding of the principles of bread-making, and a wider diffusion of our present knowledge of the subject. There is too much poor bread and this is due to a lack of knowledge. Bread-making is an art founded upon scientific principles. Rule-of-thumb methods for bread-making should give way in our Domestic Science Courses to a study of principles, so that the manipulator will vary the method of procedure and the amount of ingredients to conform to the character of the flour used. It is just as neces1
D.
“Changes in the Food Supply and Their Relation to Nutrition,”
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LOC.cit., p. 2 5 .
1701. 8 , S o .
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sary to make slight variations in the process of bread-making as it is to make slight changes in butter-making. Generally the quantity of bread consumed is regulated by its quality. Good. bread is eaten with a relish, poor bread with indifference or not a t all. If it is desired to economize in the cost of living, the amount of bread used in the dietary must be increased, because there is no food a t ordinary market prices that furnishes such a large amount of valuable nutrients in a balanced form and a t such a low cost as flour, Hence it is economy to encourage in every way a wider use of bread and flour in the dietary. There are other gains beside economy. Mendel’ quotes Rubner as saying: “Long ago the medical profession started an opposition to the exaggerated meat diet, long before the vegetarian popaganda was started. I t was niaintained that flour-foods, vegetables and fruit should be eaten in place of the over-large quantities of meat.” Flour milling problems and nutrition questions are closely related and demand the best thought and attention that science can give. These questions must be approached in a broad way and in the right spirit. They are not questions for the charlatan, or the zealot food reformer to toy with. They are of such importance that they are destined to be studied until correct scientific conclusions are obtained. Science cannot be fooled permanently. Adulterated science has been attempted, but like other forms of adulteration it is detectable. Chemists must keep up the ethics of their profession. There should be but one scientific standard for all things. Any business or practice which is not right, or which will not stand the closest scrutiny has no claim to continue its existence. It is to be regretted that occasionally men possessing some scientific knowledge are willing to use i t for selfish ends. Such persons cannot be called scientists, because true science will not be polluted. Scientists may, and often do, differ, but when a person will distort facts, disregard the welfare or general good of the public, or by stealth or cunning injure an industry and knowingly commit unethical acts, such a person rightfully forfeits the respect of scientists. Both government experts and those employed by manufacturers should be above such practices. They should leave those who wish to follow such lines, in the language of Kipling:--. , , , , .“Sweating and stealing a year and a half behind.” MINNEAPOLIS, MIJNESOTA
MANUFACTURED FEEDS FOR LlVE STOCK By C. S. MINER
Manufactured feeds for live stock are known in the trade by a variety of names, viz., Horse, Dairy, Stock, Horse and Mule, Hen, Chick, and Scratch Feeds and usually are composed of mixtures of by-products, mixtures of grains, or mixtures of grains with by-products. The industry is one whose growth has been so recent and so rapid’ that most of us neither appreciate its magnitude nor realize the part which chemists have come to play in its control. The annual output of manufactured feeds has grown steadily until now it is measured in millions of tons and since practically all of it must be produced under chemical supervision this industry is an important one from the standpoint of the chemist. The question of chemical control, as i t happens, is by no means optional with the manufacturer. In the feed industry in its early days there were many abuses of public confidence. The use of improper ingredients, deceptive labeling, and other fraudulent practices indulged in by the unscrupulous resulted in the passing of State Feed Control Laws designed to protect not only the consumer but the honest manufacturer as well. There are now laws of this sort in over forty states-which means in all the states where there is any market for manufactured feeds-and the large majority of them are ably and energetically administered. Although the variations in the details of these 1
LOC.cit., p. 24.
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T H E J O U R N A L OF I N D U S T R I A L A N D ENGINEERING C H E M I S T R Y
laws are such as to constitute a source of considerable annoyance to manufacturers the essential requirements in all of them are substantially the same. They require that each bag of feed shall be labeled to show the ingredients of which it is composed and the minimum per cent of crude protein, crude fat, and maximum per cent of crude fiber which it is guaranteed to contain. A very few states require the label to show the guaranteed per cent of carbohydrates and there are isolated cases where guarantees of nitrogen-free extract or starch and sugar are required. I n consequence it has become the almost universal custom of manufacturers to stamp on their bags the per cent of crude protein, crude fat, crude fiber, and carbohydrates and the list of ingredients. This is done in order to be able t o use one bag for all states. It may seem to some of you that the determination of carbohydrates presents so many difficulties as to make it practically impossible as a routine determination. This difficulty is avoided by a ruling of the Department of Agriculture which permits the sum of the crude fiber and nitrogenfree extract t o be considered as carbohydrates for the purpose of the guarantee. That this saves work for the chemist and worry for the manufacturer is true-but it is equally true that it is highly inaccurate from a chemical standpoint. Since the literature previously recognized the term “nitrogen-free extract,’’which is a t least definite in its meaning, and covers the same constituents with the exception of crude fiber as are now permitted by this rule to be called carbohydrates, the recognition of this inaccurate use of the term carbohydrates appears ill-advised a t least. I n this connection it is of interest to note how the Federal authorities have acquired jurisdiction over the feed guarantees. The Federal Food and Drug Act does not require any more of an animal feed than of human food, merely that both shall be truthfully labeled and free from poisonous or deleterious ingredients. It does not require any statement of chemical composition or list of ingredients. The State Laws do and the manufacturer must label his feed to conform to their requirements. Consequently he becomes responsible under the Federal Food and Drug Act for the truthfulness of this label the instant his product is shipped across a State line. Since most of his shipments are interstate, the result is substantially the same as though the requirements of the State Laws had been written into the Federal law and the weight of Federal authority is added to that of the States t o compel the manufacturer of feeds to maintain the standard which he sets for himself by his label. It will be evident from the foregoing that the chemist’s position in the feed industry is the consequence of laws which practically make it obligatory upon the manufacturer to utilize his services. Competition forces him to make high guarantees for his feeds and the laws compel him to keep them always up t o these guarantees. Since the standard is a chemical one, the chemist’s services are indispensable. The problem of the feed chemist is, therefore, so t o control the manufacturing process as to keep the finished feeds invariably above guarantee and yet not so far above as to make the cost prohibitive from the standpoint of competition. TO do this there must be accurate analyses of all the raw materials going into the feed and of all the finished feeds. The problem consequently resolves itself into the production of the largest possible number of accurate determinations of crude protein, crude fat, and crude fiber, in the shortest possible space of time and to accomplish this the routine of the laboratory must be worked out with the same regard €or efficiency that obtains in a well regulated factory, for the laboratory where thousands of samples are analyzed annually does in fact become a factory for the manufacture of analyses. Fortunately, since the whole question is one of routine analysis, there are available the methods of the A. 0. A. C. which are accepted and used by practically all chemists connected with the industry and where these methods are rigidly adhered to there is surprisingly little variation in the results obtained by different laboratories. There are, of course, exceptions to this condition
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but most of them are due t o the apparently inevitable bookkeeping errors which occur where thousands of similar samples are analyzed, and to differences in the samples for which the chemist .is not responsible. The A. 0. A. C. methods are on the whole excellent but they are not fool-proof, especially when applied to a wide range of materials on which they were not tested before being made official.’ By simple expedients, however, it is possible to apply the official methods satisfactorily to all of the very numerous materials which are used for the manufacture of feeds. Since the manufacturer must guarantee not only crude protein, crude fat, and crude fiber, but also ingredients, the feed chemist is expected to be something of a microscopist, but in actual practice it is only the official chemist who examines large numbers of feeds microscopically. The manufacturer’s chemist knows what goes into the feed and it is not necessary for him to examine it. He should, however, make certain that the raw materials are true to name and while normally this is the case there are plenty of instances where materials purchased by manufacturers in good faith have been used in manufactured feeds and later found by state officials to have been adulterated. Screenings in malt sprouts, bran, or linseed meal constitute one of the commonest examples of such a possibility. Since screenings are almost invariably present in such products the question of determining whether to accept or reject a shipment oftentimes becomes a difficult one especially because of the lack of quantitative methods of microscopic analysis. This situation is a typical one and the result is that in most cases the chemist makes very little effort to control the raw materials by other than chemical means or visual examination, and adulteration unless gross is therefore not likely to be detected. You may have judged from what I have said that the feed industry demands only routine work of its chemists. I do not want to leave that impression. I n this industry as in others routine analysts are valuable as a class. As individuals they are readily replaceable and not highly valued. What is highly valued here as elsewhere is the ability to apply specialized training and experience to the solution of practical problems and the chemist who can do this will find himself very soon occupying the position, not of routine analyst, but of chemical director to his company. He will be consulted on all chemical phases of the business just as the attorney is consulted on all legal phases. He will pass upon the scientific accuracy of the advertising matter, upon the wording of contracts for raw materials, upon the value of new raw materials, and he will be expected to evolve new formulas or pass jydgment upon those suggested. I n fact it will be his business to give an expert judgment upon every problem involving chemistry which arises in connection with the manufacture and marketing of feeds. The future of this industry holds even greater possibilities for chemists. Our rapidly increasing fund of information concerning the factors involved in nutrition and growth, such as the amino acids, the mineral constituents of foods, and the accessory diet factors-vitamins and the like-is certain to be applied in the development of the feed industry with the result that a much more complete and accurate form of chemical control will become necessary. And ndt only routine control but research as well, for the feed manufacturer will not always be content to depend upon State institutions for research as a t present. The industry, therefore, both for its present and future possibilities is one which I can conscientiously recommend t o the consideration of the young chemist looking for his place in technical chemistry. CHICAGO, II.I.INOTS
To cite a single example we have found that peat or feeds containing considerable percentages of i t give erratic results for crude fiber because of the slow filtration. By the simple expedient of centrifuging, decanting, or otherwise partially separating the dissolved from the suspended matter before filtration and passing the nearly clear liquor through the filter before the suspended matter is added, satisfactory results are obtainable.
