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of the character of the food that the patient was going to eat ; assum- 
ing that he is getting a genuine ice cream, he may be giving an inva- 
lid a lot of wholly indigestible materials which his stomach in its 
weakened condition would be utterly unable to digest. 
The claim that the manufacture of genuine ice cream will make it 
too expensive for common use does not seem to be based on any reli- 
able data. That real cream sells for more than an imitation and that i 
it should sell for more no one will deny. If a man buys two volumes ^ 
of a mixture containing 8 per cent of butter fat as ice cream, he may | 
pay no more for it than a man who buys one volume of real ice cream, i 
The answer to the question of increased cost would very properly be ii 
diminished volume. It would surely be advantageous to the con- 
sumer if he put into his stomach a less volume of the frozen mixture 
than he usually does when he buys an ice cream of commerce in which || 
water is the chief constituent. ! 
The claim that the dairies of the country would be unable to fur- ; 
nish cream for making genuine ice cream is wholly unfounded. The j 
dairies of the country are interested as well as the sanitarians in hav- | 
ing ice cream pure and true to the name. They will be able to supply j 
the legitimate demand for the cream of which the article is made. 
The protests against the standard for butter fat fixed by the Secre- 
tary of Agriculture under authority of Congress, in so far as the ; 
briefs and arguments which have been offered are concerned, seem to i 
be wholly without merit. The same protests were made against 
fixing a legal standard of fat in milk, against the elimination of the 
quantity of water in butter, against the requirements for purity of 
almost every food product. Whenever an attempt is made to fix a 
standard of purity for a food product, all the people who are engaged 
in making a debased article of that kind enter the same kind of a 
plea. There seems to be no basis for a protest of this kind. There 
is no ethical or legal reason why the purchaser of ice cream should 
not have some definite idea of what he is getting. The conditions I 
which obtained before the passage of the food and drugs act can not 
be urged in extenuation of their continuance under the pure-food I 
act. If this were so there would not be a single abuse which the pure- 
food law was intended to remedy which would not be continued. 
Granted for the moment, as is shown by the data cited, that the term 
ice cream before the enactment of the food law and the establish- 
ment of the standard did not mean anything. Let it be accorded 
that it meant any kind of mixture simulating cream which the com- 
pounder saw fit to make, provided it was sweet enough and fiavored 
enough to find a purchaser. These facts do not alter the relations of 
the ice cream to the consumer under the food and drugs act and the 
standards made in harmony with the act of Congress. It is evident 
that under that act every name of a food product was intended to rep- 
