_It is impossible without some expert knowledge or advice to obtain for love or money a pure loaf of bread in many parts of England to-day._ The fat that is eaten with that bread, and which together with the bread forms a most important part of the food of working-class children, _when it consists of vegetable margarine, is almost useless to the body_. The various tinned fruits and meats (except perhaps tomatoes) which are also much favoured among working-class women, owing to the ease with which they can be prepared for table, also constitute inferior food, owing to the method by which they are canned. [p191] The jams, far from containing pure fruit, frequently contain no fruit at all. Add to this, that the liquor--tea--which is chiefly drunk with these inferior foods, is in every way deleterious, being neither a food, nor a tonic, nor even an innocuous means of quenching thirst; and debility, far from being an exceptional occurrence, would seem almost an inevitable static condition of our masses. (_b_) But what commercial adulteration of food, and the commercial production of inferior food, may sometimes fail to accomplish, the ignorance of the working-class housewife usually manages to consummate in the secret privacy of her kitchen. There every imaginable error is perpetrated, even in dealing with first-class foods, such as butcher’s meat and fresh vegetables; and the resulting deteriorated compounds only confirm, in the individual child or adult, a condition which by the adulteration of other foodstuffs we are doing our utmost to establish. The ignorance among the female population of England, both rich and poor, regarding the _time_ during which meat or vegetables, or milk, or fruit, or fats, can safely be allowed to boil, or to stew, or to simmer, without losing every particle of goodness they ever possessed, is frankly astonishing. One wonders how an occupation such as cooking could possibly have remained by tradition in the hands of a particular sex for generations, without more knowledge, more wisdom--even more rule-of-thumb wisdom--having collected around it, than has collected around the domestic [p192] culinary practices of the British housewife.[37]