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 National Canners Association 
 
 New York Convention 
 1915 
 
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 Address of Dr. Carl L. Alsberg, Chief of Bureau of Chemistry, 
 Washington, D. C. 
 
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 Address of Dr. Carl L. Alsberg, Chief of Bureau of Chemistry, Depart- 
 ment of Agriculture, before the Convention of the National 
 Canners Association at New York, Feb. 11, 1915. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. President: 
 
 Last year I had the privilege of addressing this Association in 
 Baltimore, and at that time I had the opportunity to point out to you 
 that not only the consumer benefited by the rigid enforcement of the 
 Food and Drugs Act, but also the honest manufacturer, who was 
 protected from unfair competition — I believe I used that term at that 
 time — and since then that phrase has become more widely used. 
 
 I nnde appeal to you to look at the law from that angle, because 
 
 I felt sure that those of you who had not looked at it from that angle, 
 
 M A who stopped to think, would see that the law was quite as valuable 
 
 o you in protecting you from the unfair competition of some of your 
 
 rivals as it was in protecting the consumer from fraud and from 
 
 objectionable, deleterious food products. 
 
 This year I am going to talk, if you will bear with me kindly, 
 on an entirely different matter. I feel that this year I am acquainted 
 with you, that we can have a little family talk about certain matters 
 that are of the greatest interest and importance to all of us. I am 
 going to talk on some rather technical matters, which are of interest 
 primarily to you gentlemen as manufacturers. I may say that I 
 proposed to discuss hygienic matters. 
 
 First is the question of sanitation in the factory. I know that 
 many of you have plants which vie with a hospital ward in cleanliness 
 and neatness; I know also that some of you have plants which do not 
 reach this ideal by a good deal. My experience and the experience of 
 the inspectors who assist me in the work of the Bureau has been that 
 when the conditions in one of your plants are not what they should 
 be from the sanitary or cleanliness point of view, it is, as a rule, the 
 result of a misunderstanding of what the term "cleanliness" means, 
 and not any willful intent to put out a product that is anything but 
 clean, as manifestly it is to nobody's advantage to put out a product 
 that is not clean. 
 
 The canning industry is a new industry; it is not much over half a 
 century, if it has really half a century of history, since with many 
 other food industries it was transferred from the home kitchen to the 
 factory. The introduction of steam has resulted in the complete revo- 
 lution of our industrial life. They used to card and spin wool at home; 
 it is now done in the factory. They used to weave linen in the home; 
 it is now done in the factory. 
 
 This industrialization has not been limited to the manufacturing 
 
 2 
 
of machinery, clothing and similar objects of use, but it has spread and 
 is ever spreading to the manufacture of food. We have been for half 
 a century or more undergoing a revolution in our methods of feeding 
 ourselves, and more and more of the processes which were formerly 
 done in the home are being transferred to the factory. 
 
 Many of us unquestionably regret that condition, but regrets will 
 not stop the course of events and we must be prepared to face a con- 
 tinual change and revolution in the manufacture of food products. 
 There will continue to be a larger and larger percentage of them 
 manufactured in the factory, and a smaller and smaller percentage 
 of them manufactured in the home. 
 
 This change which has been going on in the manufacture of food 
 products is a fairly recent one, and the transfer has been from the 
 kitchen of the home to the factory, and naturally, in making that 
 transfer, the manufacturer applied the same methods that were used in 
 the home to the factory. Now, those methods are not applicable. 
 What is cleanliness in the kitchen, what is good enough for the house- 
 wife, from the point of cleanliness, is not good enough for the factory. 
 (Applause.) 
 
 It is perfectly natural that the average man in your line of 
 business is inclined to think that what is good enough in his wife's 
 kitchen is good enough for his factory, and to realize that is not the 
 case is to understand what the real principles of cleanliness are- 
 the principles that have become a matter of routine in the hospital 
 ward. I do not mean to imply that you have to have your buildings 
 without any corners and have disinfecting apparatus around, but in a 
 way the same principles that are applied in the hospitals must be ap- 
 plied in your factories. They are perfectly simple and perfectly inex- 
 pensive to apply if every one of you were thoroughly familiar with 
 them. 
 
 There is an industry which has had a history somewhat similar 
 to the history of your industry, only its change from the home and the 
 kitchen to the factory happened some centuries ago. That industry is 
 the industry of brewing. Some hundreds of years ago, beer was manu- 
 factured at home; it was a house industry. Every farm house in 
 Europe, at least in Northern Europe, grew its own barley, made its 
 own malt, grew its own hops, made its own beer. But economic 
 reasons forced that industry to change from a house industry to a 
 factory industry some centuries ago. In consequence, that industry 
 has some centuries of history behind it which you gentlemen as yet 
 have not, and in the course of those centuries of history, that industry 
 has learned exactly what is necessary for it to do in order to put out 
 a cleanly product. 
 
 Now, this industry had a greater incentive for absolute cleanliness 
 in the factory than the canning industry has had till recently, and that 
 incentive is that any slop or lack of cleanliness in a brewery ruins the 
 product, spoils the flavor. 
 
 Brewing depends upon the growth of a very definite plant in the 
 extract of malt, which is known to the brewer as wort, and which, 
 after it has become fermented by this plant growing in it, is termed 
 "beer." Now, beer is made by the growth of this plant, yeast, in the 
 extract of malt, and it is necessary that only this one species of plant 
 
should grow in the malt extract. The brewer is constantly subjected 
 to the danger that some other plants may grow in his wort, and 
 then he gets a product which is bad in flavor and unsalable. Only by 
 exercising the greatest degree of cleanliness to prevent the infection 
 of his product with some strange yeast or mould can he be sure of 
 putting out a uniform and satisfactory product. As a result of this 
 absolute necessity of having only what is termed a pure culture of 
 yeast growing in the wort in order to get the proper beer, the brewing 
 industry in the course of centuries has developed a certain definite 
 technique of construction which will enable brewers to keep their 
 plant and every part of it clean from undesirable yeasts, enabling them 
 to turn out a uniform product. 
 
 It has been the work of centuries. There is not now the same 
 need to take centuries to develop in any other industry the same kind 
 of technique, because we have made scientific progress today which 
 enables us to do in a few years what was learned in centuries by the 
 trial and failure method. 
 
 Until a few years ago, there was really no incentive for the canner 
 to develop a technique similar to that which the danger of losing his 
 beer through spoilage compelled the brewer to develop, but the 
 passage cf the Food and Drugs Act gave to those of the canners that 
 were paying no attention to this matter the necessary incentive. I am 
 glad to say there has been an enormous stride forward in sanitation 
 in canning factories within the last decade. It is really an exceedingly 
 simple matter to observe the necessary precautions in a plant. I 
 would like to illustrate by a concrete example. Some time last summer 
 we had a communication from a manufacturer of pulp. He said he 
 had a model plant, he bought the best tomatoes, he sorted them 
 thoroughly, but his bacteriologist, who was controlling his plant, 
 turned in reports that he would rather not tell us about, because if he 
 told us we might seize some of his goods. 
 
 Following the policy of the department, that it is better to make 
 prosecutions unnecessary than to make a record of a maximum 
 number of notices of judgment, we sent an expert to this man's 
 factory. It was quite evident the man was straight and thoroughly 
 sincere, and that he really was doing the best that he could, but 
 nevertheless turning out a product of which he was ashamed. 
 
 Our expert reached the plant. He found that looking at it super- 
 ficially, it seemed an excellent plant; the sorting was being done 
 adequately, and I would like to digress here a moment and say that in 
 the making of pulp, or catsup, the most important step in the whole 
 process, as far as we can see, is adequate sorting, is having sufficient 
 help to do the sorting so that you are quite sure that very little 
 decayed material gets into your product. 
 
 An investigation of this man's equipment showed that his crushing 
 box was not being properly cleaned. Although superficial inspection 
 showed that it seemed to be clean, it revealed a series of wooden 
 piping that you could not get at, through which the pulp was pumped 
 or allowed to flow; it revealed tanks placed under machines where 
 you could not see whether they were clean or not, that you could not 
 get at; and it revealed a lack of stiff brushes and similar ordinary 
 mechanical cleaning devices in the factory. Our expert took a sample 
 of the material that covered the surfaces of the crushing box — not 
 
the product that was going through the crusher, but the material that 
 was clinging to the sides of the box — and found that the number of 
 moulds in that material was infinite, which was his way of stating that 
 they were more than he could count under the microscope; that the 
 yeast count was five hundred and nineteen. This is not in the pulp 
 that was going through, but this is in the material that clung to the 
 wall of the crusher. He reported that there were one and a half 
 million bacteria in that material and also a certain number, a very 
 considerable number, of nematodes, minute microscopic worms which 
 occur in enormous quantities in water and in soil. Sometimes a single 
 cubic foot of soil may contain some millions of these tiny animals. 
 They are to the soil and to water perhaps what inspects are to the 
 atmosphere, they may be so numerous. He found that the material 
 that he could scrape off the wooden pipes had an enormous number 
 of moulds, over four thousand yeasts, and over a million bacteria. He 
 found that the catsup which was being made contained a count of 45 
 moulds, 75 spores and about 50,000,000 bacteiia. 
 
 Then he showed the men how to keep the place clean; he had 
 them take the tanks and make them removable so that you could get 
 at the inside of them and see what you were doing; he made them 
 arrange the pipes so that they could be cleaned. The total expenditure 
 of the whole thing was probably not $25, and the amount of labor that 
 was necessary was entirely insignificant, very much less than .hey had 
 used in keeping their place clean before he came. They has been 
 applying their efforts to all the places in the plant that were easy to 
 get at, and overlooking the dark corners and the covered places. 
 
 The day after they had their first cleaning, the count was worse, 
 the reason, of course, perfectly plain — they had loosened everything 
 up so that a certain percentage of the material clinging to the wall of 
 the tanks and the pipes was washed off. The second day the count 
 came back to what it was before the cleaning- had taken place. On 
 the third day they were down to 30 moulds, 21 yeasts and spores, and 
 9,000,000 bacteria. And after they cleaned 15 or 20 times, the usual 
 routine of cleaning, they were down to 15 moulds, 7 yeasts or spores, 
 and 7,000,000 bacteria. The total cost was not $50, and the total 
 amount of labor was no more than they had been putting in before; 
 in fact, it was less work to clean when it was properly done, and the 
 plant had been revamped so that every dark corner and every hidden 
 spot could be gotten at than before. 
 
 We feel confident that most of the trouble that you gentlemen 
 have been having in connection with your work, let us say in connec- 
 tion with tomato pulp, can come from two sources — one is that you 
 have not sorted properly, and the other is that your plant is so con- 
 structed that you cannot get at every dark corner, into every pipe, and 
 keep it clean. It is very inexpensive to readjust a plant so that the 
 problem of labor that is involved in cleaning a plant, is no greater 
 and probably less than in a plant in which everything is screwed down, 
 and you cannot take anything out and get at it. 
 
 Another difficulty that you gentlemen are having is based on the 
 fact that there are only a limited number of people who might be 
 called professional canners. Until recently, almost anybody, as far as 
 I am informed, who had some administrative ability might be used as 
 a manager of a cannery. It strikes me that yours is a profession as 
 truly as almost any other, that sooner or later your industry will have 
 to come down to the point of training people for the management of 
 
the canneries. To go back again to the brewers. If they keep their 
 breweries clean it is because if they do not they ruin their product 
 and lose their trade. The brewers have found that if they want to have 
 people run their plants, they have to train them, and brewing schools 
 have been old institutions. They have been training brewers abroad, 
 I do not know how long, but certainly for 75 years. There are brewing 
 schools in this country. Now, I do not think anyone of us will for a 
 moment believe that it takes less skill and less brains to make a series 
 of canned goods than to make beer. I for one think that it takes more 
 skill to run a cannery, putting out a large number of different prod- 
 ucts, than to run a brewery, which brews perhaps only one or two 
 products. I feel confident that the time will come when you gentlemen 
 will want to employ people whom you can train for your business, 
 when you will not want to experiment with men who have not been 
 trained to run your plants. The need for such men is particularly 
 great because you cannot centralize the canning business, since you 
 have to be where the products are to can. You cannot build one enor- 
 mous plant that will handle the product of a whole state; you have to 
 have smaller plants scattered where your raw material is. It appears 
 to me that one of the things you need is to have people who are 
 trained for your work. I do not believe that the problem of training 
 those people will be solved by getting a university or an agricultural 
 college or a technical school to give courses in industrial canning. 
 You gentlemen do not want scientists for your plants; you need the 
 help and advice of the scientists, but you cannot employ a scientist for 
 every tomato pulp plant that you happen to have. You do not need 
 trained chemists and bacteriologists for every plant. You need in your 
 industry, as far as I can see, men of the same type of training and 
 education as the average brewmaster; a man who has learned how to 
 make beer, but a man who need not necessarily be trained to make a 
 chemical analysis. You need chemists, you need bacteriologists; you 
 do not need one for each plant everywhere. Now, the brewing schools 
 have usually centered around the trade laboratory. They have them 
 in Europe, on the Continent as well as in England, and I should not 
 wonder that if some day you will find it necessary in connection with 
 your scientific laboratory to establish a training school for the men 
 who will be the practical men to run your plants. I think that you 
 would get better men for that particular purpose than if you expected 
 to get them from a university. 
 
 The third subject that I wish to discuss is the question of the value 
 of canned goods in the diet. I think I see in scientific literature of 
 the day a certain amount of information which, in the hands of the 
 laymen, might be converted unintentionally into misinformation. 
 There is in the scientific literature at the present time a great deal of 
 active work being done on certain diseases such as scurvy, for example, 
 and the question has been raised by scientists what effect canned goods 
 may have in such cases. We are confronted with a situation which is 
 a good deal like the case of so-called polished rice. I hope you will 
 pardon me for digressing a moment. There is a disease in those 
 portions of the tropics where rice is the main article of diet called 
 "beri-beri," which is characterized by paralysis of the nerves that lead 
 to the extremities, weakness of the heart and dropsy. Now, it has 
 been found out that if you do not eat anything else but polished rice, 
 that is to say, rice from which the outer layer has been removed, you 
 get "beri-beri." From that it has been assumed by those who did not 
 full understand the situation, that if we here in America eat polished 
 rice, we run a danger of getting beri-beri. Now, I do not know any- 
 
body in the United States, unless it be a Chinaman or a Japanese, 
 who eats practically nothing but rice, and I do not know of any 
 case of beri-beri that has ever occurred in the United States excepting 
 on the part of the few negroes from the rice plantations in South 
 Carolina, who had idiosyncrasies of taste and lived on very little 
 but rice and pork. If we were rice eaters instead of consuming less 
 rice than most of the civilized nations — England consumes 25 per 
 cent more rice per capita than we do — there might be some sense in 
 the argument that the sale of polished rice in the United States is 
 injurious to health. Rice for us is only a vegetable; we eat it as we 
 eat potatoes, and no one is likely to get beri-beri because he has 
 eaten polished rice. What we mean bv polished rice is not what 
 the Oriental means by polished rice. The Oriental calls rice that 
 has had the hull removed a polished rice; we call a polished rice 
 one that has had the hull removed and has been polished with glucose 
 and talc. I am not discussing the coating but just the polishing. 
 
 There have been in the literature some tincritical statements about 
 canned goods, that canned goods were not entirelv wholesome because 
 in the process of canning certain valuable ingredients may have been 
 altered. Whether that be true or not. the argument is no more 
 binding: in the case of canned sroods than it is in the case of vour 
 polished rice for the United States. The argument onlv holds\ where 
 canned goods are the main article of diet — but that is true of, any 
 diet in which a single definite article is the main or sole article^of 
 diet. 
 
 The fishermen of Newfoundland become diseased in the course of 
 the winter because they live almost exclusively on wheat flour. Are 
 we going to cease eating wheat flour because if you eat nothing but 
 wheat flour you are eoing to he sick? That fact is that no diet that 
 is one-sided, that no diet which lacks variety, that not diet which lacks 
 change, is a wholesome diet: and in making- it possible to vary the 
 diet, to give a wide range of foods, the canning industry has done as 
 much as any industry because it has made it possible to vary the 
 diet at all seasons of the year and under all conditions. 
 
 The psychic factor in diet is one of the most important factors 
 that we have to deal with. Tt is not for nothing that we put on, 
 in some oarts of the world, our best clothes when we go down to 
 dinner. The psychic effect of the expectation of something good 
 to eat, as it is vulgarly expressed, "watering of the mouth," is a real 
 and valuable physiological phenomena, and so the variation in the diet 
 is one of the most important things in keeping the public, the average 
 man. in sound and good health. And canned goods in connection 
 with refrigeration are the two most important factors in making this 
 variation in the diet possible in winter in strange corners of the earth, 
 and in times of stress, such as the Belgians, for example, are under- 
 going today. A century ago even had we had steam transportation 
 and steam vessels that cross the ocean in the time that they do now. 
 it would have been quite impossible to have afforded the Belgians 
 such measure of relief as they have been afforded today. But such 
 an industry as that of canning, of refrigeration, of dessication, has 
 made it possible to take care of such emergencies, and the famines 
 which were a common thing in the Middle Ages we shall never see 
 again. " l " 
 
 Thpse are the three points that I wish to present to you gentlemen 
 in this talk. The first, it is a very simple thing to keep your factory 
 
014 422 3573 
 
 in such a shape that you will have no trouble from contamination with 
 micro-organisms; the second, that you need some machinery to train 
 your people to run your factories for you; and the third, that you 
 need not be afraid in regard to the status of your problems in the 
 diet, since they make the varied diet possible, which is one of the 
 most important things in nutrition that we have to look out for. I 
 thank you very much. (Applause.) 
 
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