30 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



it renders in nourishing the weak and increasing their 

 powers of resistance to disease, and in building up strong, 

 vigorous, healthy men and women. 



Occupying, as milk does, such a unique place as a uni- 

 versal economical and nourishing food for the human family, 

 and dependent upon it as we are, we must then recognize 

 in pure milk the most indispensable of all food factors for 

 the perpetuation, nourishment and physical upbuilding of 

 the human race. 



It is only when milk is produced by diseased or filthy cows, 

 or under filthy conditions, or handled by dirty or diseased 

 people, or kept for a long time at high temperature, or neg- 

 lected or misused in the homes of the consumers, that it 

 becomes unsafe or dangerous. In comparatively rare in- 

 stances there have been outbreaks of diseases following the 

 use of milk containing ^the germs of disease, which in some 

 way had been conveyed to the milk from the body of some 

 person or animal so affected. In other instances intestinal 

 disorders have followed the use of milk containing stable 

 dirt or other foreign and filthy substances. Perhaps in the 

 production and handling of no other food product is clean- 

 liness more to be desired or more difficult to secure, and in 

 no other food product is the absence of cleanliness or the 

 practice of deception more dangerous and at the same time 

 more difficult to detect. 



The city housewife does not buy partially decayed fruit 

 or vegetables for the family without a knowledge of its 

 real condition, but she cannot judge for herself the composi- 

 tion or cleanliness of the milk she is to buy for her baby, 

 or whether it was produced by healthy or diseased cows, 

 handled by clean, healthy, careful, honest people, or by 

 people whose habits are the very opposite. It is for this 

 reason that competent, active, sensible inspectors for the 

 dairy farm, the city milk plant, and the milk supply itself 

 are a present-day necessity in every city; for the health of 

 the people should be protected by the city or by the State 

 when the people individually have neither the time nor fa- 

 cilities, or perhaps the degree of intelligence, necessary to 



