Consider the bad food first. Food is produced all over the earth, passes through many hands, and is finally selected by the housewife. She is not a trained expert, and can never be while she confines herself to serving one house. She does not handle quantities sufficient or cater for consumers enough to gain large knowledge of her business. She is, in nine cases out of ten, limited financially in her buying power. These conditions make the food market particularly open to adulteration, and to the offering of inferior materials. The individual housewife cannot herself discriminate in all the subtleties of adulterated food, nor has she the time or the means to secure expert tests of her supplies. Moreover, her separate purchasing power is so small that it cannot intimidate the seller; he has ignorance and a small purse to deal with, and he deals with them accordingly.
The purchase of food in quantities by trained buyers would lift the grade of our supplies at once. No man is going to waste time and money in adulteration subject to daily analysis, or in offering stale, inferior articles which will not appear saleable to the trained eye. The wholesale poisoning of babies by bad milk is an evil our city governments are seeking to combat, but the helpless anarchy of a million ignorant homes, unorganised, untrained, and obliged to get the milk at once, renders our governmental efforts almost vain. Insufficient food is owing, in part, to economic causes, and in part to ignorance of what the body needs. On the economic side comes in a most important view of the home as a food purveyer. The private purchase and preparation of food is the most expensive method. It is wonderful to see how people cling to their notion of "the economy" of home-cooking. By the simplest business laws, of world-wide application, the small purchaser has to pay the largest price. The expenses incident to the re-retailing of food, from the apples rotting on the ground in New York State to the apples we purchase at twenty cents a quart for New York City tables, form a large part of the cost of living. Thousands of middlemen thrive like leeches on the long, slow current of food material, as it pours in myriad dribbling streams from the great sources of production, far away, into our innumerable kitchen doors.