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operating cold storage or refrigerating warehouses. In so far as storage 
may affect the quality of food stuffs there is no difference between the large 
public warehouse and the private ice box, except that in all probability 
goods cannot be handled as successfully at the smaller plant. However, 
the stock of goods held at the hotel or butcher shop for local consumption 
is never so great as to influence the market, and for that reason the gen- 
erally recognized necessity for the publication of storage holdings does not 
obtain. Moreover, unless legislation presumes to label cold storage goods 
all the way from the warehouse to the consumer’s table, there is no neces- 
sity in the case of the individual plant for the system of marking followed 
by the warehouseman. Goods taken from storage are sent to the hotel 
kitchen or to the home of the consumer without delay, and deterioration is 
avoided, as might not be the case with the careless handling of goods 
drawn from cold storage for distribution over a larger area. 
Recognizing a strong sentiment for cold storage regulation and the 
fact that such legislation is already in force, not only in Western States 
where no warehouses are in operation, but in the populous Eastern States 
of Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, it behooves 
the industry to demand adequate protection by federal legislation, protec- 
tion against unwise state legislation, protection against the loudly expressed 
yet admittedly erroneous statement that the cold storage industry is em- 
ployed to manipulate prices to the detriment of the consumer, protection 
against the firmly established impression that goods deteriorate markedly 
in storage, protection against the oft-repeated tale that food-poisoning 
follows the ingestion of cold stored goods. Legislation that accomplishes 
these facts will not operate to curb the development of the industry, but 
rather to stabilize and encourage the use of refrigeration by the producer 
and of cold stored foods by every consumer. 
With the passage of adequate cold storage legislation and the develop- 
ment of a practice of labelling which declares the character of the goods 
to the purchaser, the idea now held that cold storage is an artifice used by 
the speculator to force higher prices and a practice which spoils food 
instead of preserving it will no longer obtain. 
And when cold storage is no longer feared, our markets will be wi- 
dened and the food supply enlarged by the thousands and hundreds of thou- 
sands of tons of edible products which now rot on the ground for want of 
facilities to preserve them to such a time that they can find a profitable 
market. 
