FOOD VALUE AND USES OF POULTRY. 15 
and progressive retailers sometimes even use refrigerated show cases. 
The consumer should insist that the birds be kept in a cold place 
until they are delivered to him, and should use them as soon as 
possible after they reach his home. 
Sometimes, especially in hot weather, poultry which is to be sold 
as fresh—that is, within a few weeks of killmg—is frozen before it is 
shipped. As a general rule, however, the term frozen poultry is used . 
to describe that which has been held ata very low temperature (some- 
times below 0° F.) until the birds are frozen very hard, and which 
is then stored at a temperature below freezing for several months— 
sometimes for many months. Dealers with cold-storage warehouses 
buy up large quantities of chickens when they are most plentiful, — 
freeze them, and carry them over to be marketed during the next off 
season. 
When poultrymen first began to freeze poultry it was claimed that 
- no changes took place in the flesh while it was held at these low tem- 
peratures. Experiments conducted by the Bureau of Chemistry of 
the United States Department of Agriculture under commercial con- 
ditions and with the cooperation of poultry warehousemen ! have not 
confirmed this. Chemical and bacteriolovical changes do take place, 
though they may be too slight to be noted b7 sight, smell, or touch, 
even when the carcass is thawed. These changes depend very largely 
_on the way in which the bird was dressed and handled before the freez- 
ing, as well as on the length of time it is held in the frozen condition. 
Most of the objection to the frozen poultry of the past arose from 
careless preparation for storage and from the refreezing of thawed 
poultry by poultry dealers. In the past there was also a tendency, 
when the market conditions were bad, for dealers to freeze ‘‘fresh”’ 
stock on the verge of decay, that it might not be a total loss. This 
practice has injured the entire poultry industry because it substituted 
an article of peor quality for a good one. With the better under- 
standing of cold storage such occurrences are becoming less and less _ 
frequent and frozen poultry is, therefore, improving. 
The length of time durmg which poultry properly prepared for 
storage can be kept hard frozen without injury to quality is fairly 
well known. Researches in the Department of Agriculture have 
shown that such birds may be kept for 9 to 10 months and still be not 
only wholesome but of good table quality. This makes the season for 
cold-storage birds coincide with the seasons of natural scarcity and 
insures a continuous supply, especially of younger birds, such as 
broilers and tender roasting chickens. The change most likely to be 
noticed in a bird held for a considerable period in cold storage is a loss 
_ of juiciness in the flesh, but it is not always easy to detect the difference 
— 
1U.S. Dept. Agr., Bur. Chem. Circ. 64 (1911). 
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