THE COMPARATIVE RATE OF DECOMPOSITION IN 

 DRAWN AND UNDRAWN MARKET POULTRY. 



SCOPE AND PLAN OF THE INVESTIGATION. 



During the season of 1909-1910 a series of studies was made to 

 determine the relative rate of decomposition in undrawn poultry as 

 compared with that from which the viscera had been either com- 

 pletely or partially removed. The conditions of the experiments 

 were strictly commercial. That is, the fowls were killed and dressed 

 by the regular employees of a poultry packing house; they were 

 shipped in the usual commercial one-dozen-to-the-box package in a 

 car-lot of dressed poultry. They were received by a wholesaler and 

 handled side by side with his stock. They went to the retailer when 

 he purchased fowls from the same car-lot and were kept in his shop 

 for the period which the market happened to require for their sale. 

 Observations of the usual sort, commonly called " inspections," were 

 made in the packing house, at the end of the railroad haul, when the 

 fowls left the commission man, and during retailing. Thermographs 

 accompanied the shipment from the time the newly killed chickens 

 entered the chillroom in the packing house until the last sample left 

 the retailer. Descriptions of surroundings and records of the practices 

 and vicissitudes of marketing were kept in full detail. 



Visual inspections vary with the individuals making them, even those 

 by the same person differing somewhat from day to day. Neither have 

 we any accurate method of stating the findings based on the color 

 of the skin, the odor, etc. To obviate this difficulty, and to estab- 

 lish a series of observations acquired by a uniform method and ex- 

 pressed in accordance with scientific usage, each sample was sub- 

 jected to an examination in the laboratory. This consisted in esti- 

 mating the amount of free acid in the fat, since the rise in the acidity 

 of fat is an excellent index of the progression of general flesh changes 

 and in estimating the amount of ammonium salts in the muscle tissue, 6 



a Pennington and Hepburn, The determination of the acid value of crude fat and its application in the 

 detection of aged foods, J. Amer. Chem. Soc., 1910, 32 (4) : 568. 



& Pennington and Greenlee, An application of the Folin method to the determination of ammoniacal 

 nitrogen in meat, J. Amer. Chem. Soc., 1910, 32 (4): 561. 



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