PJ36 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



excepting with a few factories that really make good cheese, and that is 

 all snapped up for local consumption or absorbed in some definite line of 

 .trade. The retail trade gets little of it. That the general customer is 

 discouraged about cheese and is stepping its use is only stating the truth 

 in its simplest terms. The old timer is thoroughly mad about it, and the 

 mew generation that is coming up, having never known good cheese or 

 developed an appetite for it, hardly counts cheese among the articles of 

 diet, so we have practically killed the appetite and the demand for one 

 of the finest of dairy products. We have laid all our butter troubles at 

 the door of butterine, but American cheese has had no such competitor. 

 .It was killed by its own inherent badness. 



Regarding milk and butter, the conditions arc not so bad, but are 

 "tending in the same direction if trade indications mean anything, and 

 the plain unvarnished facts are about as follows as to dairy products: 



1. It is next to impossible for housekeepers, who are obliged to buy, 

 to secure a good quality of either milk, butter or cheese in the retail 

 anarkets. ..o other articles of living are half so troublesome except 

 -eggs. 



2. The consumer who ought to be our friend and whose money we 

 covet, is in a bad frame of mind. He is rapidly passing from a general 

 condition of ugly irritation to one of fear as regards milk, hopeless dis- 

 couragement as regards cheese, and active anger as regards butter. This 

 latter feeling has in many individual instances already passed through 

 all the stages experienced in cheese and they have gone over to butter- 

 ine as by all odds the most generally satisfactory. They have worn 

 ithemselves out hunting butter and have given up the chase. 



3. The effect of all this is to work a permanent injury to the dairy 

 .trade and to arrest the proper development of this industry. 



I have said in substance that a good quality of dairy products is 

 liardly to be had at retail. Enough has been said as to cheese, and as 

 to what is known as to the milk trade, the less said about it the better. 

 The conditions surrounding the butter trade are peculiarly aggravating. 

 The dealer always has some good butter "if you will take creamery but- 



