Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value - Harry Snyder (e book reader pc TXT) 📗

class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 293]"> of air. It seems not to be generally understood that all fermentation changes do not cease when food is placed in refrigerators, and this often leads to neglect in their care. Cleanliness is equally as essential, or more so, in the refrigeration of food as in its handling in other ways. Too often the refrigerator is neglected, milk and other food is spilt, filling the cracks, and slow decomposition sets in. A well-cared-for refrigerator is an important factor in the preservation of food, but when it is neglected, it becomes a source of contamination. Unclean vegetables and food receptacles, impure ice and foul air, are the most common forms of contamination. The chemical changes which foods undergo during refrigeration are such as result in softening of the tissues.

288. Soil.—The soil about dwellings and places where foods are stored frequently becomes polluted with decaying animal and vegetable matter, and in such soils disease-producing organisms readily find lodgment. Poorly drained soils containing an excess of vegetable matter furnish a medium in which the tapeworm and the germs of typhoid fever, lockjaw, and various diseases affecting the digestive tract, may propagate. The wind carries the dust particles from these contaminated places into unprotected food, where they cause fermentation changes and the disease germs multiply. In considering the sanitary condition of a locality, the character of the soil is an important factor. Whenever there is reason to suspect that a soil is unsanitary, it should be disinfected with lime or formaldehyde. Soils about dwellings need care and frequent disinfecting to keep them in a sanitary condition, equally as much as do the rooms in the dwellings.[99] In the growing of garden vegetables, frequently large quantities of fertilizers of unsanitary character are used, and vegetables often retain mechanically on their surfaces particles of these. To this dirt clinging to the vegetables have been traced diseases, as typhoid fever and various digestion disorders.

289. Disposal of Kitchen Refuse.—Refuse, as vegetable parings, bones, and meat scraps, unless they are used for food for animals or collected as garbage, should preferably be burned; then there is no danger of their furnishing propagating media for disease germs. Garbage cans should be kept clean, and well covered to protect the contents from flies. Where the refuse cannot be burned, it should be composted. For this, a well-drained place should be selected, and the refuse should be kept covered with earth to keep off the flies and absorb the odors that arise from the fermenting material, and to prevent its being carried away by the wind. Lime should be sprinkled about the compost heap, and from time to time it should be drawn away and the place covered with clean earth. It is very unsanitary to throw all of the kitchen refuse in the same place year after year without resorting to any means for keeping the soil in a sanitary condition. Although composting refuse is not as sanitary as burning, it is far more sanitary than neglecting to care for it at all, as is too frequently the case.

Ground polluted with kitchen refuse containing large amounts of fatty material and soap becomes diseased, so that the natural fermentation changes fail to take place, and the soil becomes "sewage sick" and gets in such a condition that vegetation will not grow. Failure to properly dispose of kitchen refuse is frequently the cause of the spread of germ diseases, through the dust and flies that are attracted by the material and carry the germs from the refuse pile to food.