CHEMISTRY AND FOOD 249 



FOOD CHEMISTRY. Chemistry has already made and 

 will surely continue to make many important contri- 

 butions to the problems of food supply. Soil problems; 

 fertilizer problems, including the fixation of atmospheric 

 nitrogen and the utilization of the potash which would 

 otherwise be lost in the cement industry or remain un- 

 claimed in the desert lakes or in the sea; the problems of 

 properly handling and preserving the food crops; the 

 inrention, development, and control of manufacturing 

 operations in the food industries; as well as the inspec- 

 tion of their products in the interest of the consuming 

 public all these are problems largely for the chemist to 

 solve and fields of work in which chemistry has already 

 shown noteworthy achievements and must continue to 

 play a leading part. 



Perhaps the most important of all the services of food 

 chemistry lies in the formulation of the requirements of 

 human nutrition in explicit, scientific, and practical 

 terms, and in determining the relative values of different 

 foods in nutrition and the ways in which they supple- 

 ment each other so that we may know how best to use 

 our food supplies to the end that all people may be as 

 well nourished as possible. For good nutrition is an 

 even larger factor in health, happiness, and efficiency 

 than we have previously supposed. 



Until recently the application of chemistry to food 

 problems, which has been uppermost in the public 

 mind, has been in the use of chemical analysis to detect 

 adulterations in food. There was justification for the 

 charge sometimes brought against the food chemist that 

 he ''spends his time finding out what we shouldn't eat 



