FOOD PRESERVATIVES It is not only legitimate, but in every way most desirable, to keep food over from a season of superabundance to a season of scarcity. From time immemorial food has been preserved by drying, smoking, or salting, and, in modern times, by refrigeration and by heat (canning). These latter methods have come to play a large part in the food habits of civilized communities. Since food spoils because of microbic action, all methods of preservation are based upon the destruction of the microbes or the restraint of their growth by various physical and chemical agencies. The use of certain chemical preservatives such as strong sugar and salt solutions, saltpeter brines, and acid pickles has long been known and countenanced. In recent times the employment of chemical preservatives has acquired a new aspect through the increasing tendency of manufacturers to add to food products antiseptic chemicals in wide variety and of dubious physiological effect. It is not so easy and simple as it might appear to declare that no substance that is poisonous shall be added to food. The scientific conception of a poison is one involving the amount as well as the kind of substance. Common salt itself is poisonous in large doses, but, as everyone knows, small amounts are not only not injurious, but absolutely necessary to health. Well-known and very powerful protoplasmic poisons such as strychnine and quinine are frequently administered in minute doses for medicinal purposes, without causing serious results. How complicated the question of using food preservatives really is appears in the case of smoked meats and fish, which owe their keeping qualities to the creosote and other substances with which they are impregnated by the smoke. Although these substances are much more highly poisonous than chemical preservatives like benzoic acid, over which much concern has been expressed, but little if any objection has been made to the use of smoked foods. The use of benzoic acid (benzoate of soda) as a food preservative illustrates several phases of the controversy. Observations by Wiley in 1908 upon so-called "poison squads" were thought by him to indicate that benzoate of soda administered with food led to "a very serious disturbance of the metabolic functions, attended with injury to digestion and health." On the other hand, the experiments of the Referee Board of Scientific Experts (1909), conducted with at least equal care and thoroughness, were considered to warrant the conclusions that: