Ida Tarbell
McClure’s Magazine/July, 1894
“THE Municipal Laboratory,” said a physician to me in Paris, “is a chemical police service. Instead of a surveillance over men, it exercises one over compositions. It searches for poisons, microbes, and adulterations, just as the ordinary police searches for assassins, thieves, and embezzlers.”
With this remark in mind when I went to see the Municipal Laboratory for myself, I was not surprised to find it installed, as a department of the police, in the Prefecture, a massive pile of buildings facing Notre Dame, and standing in the very heart of Paris. Here it occupies some seventeen rooms in the basement and ground floor. Its present organization dates from 1881, but it really began five years earlier in a station established to detect artificiality in the coloring of wine. The purposes expanded until now the end of the department is to give the people of Paris full information regarding the composition of the food and drink offered for their consumption, and of various other articles (including children’s toys and anarchists’ bombs) likely to do them harm.
The force employed to prosecute the manifold work of the department consists of a laboratory director, M. Charles Girard, who has been at the head of the institution since the beginning, and may be said, indeed, to have created it; an assistant chief, Monsieur M. Dupres, to whom some of the most ingenious and convenient contrivances peculiar to the laboratory are due; a body of chemists who devote themselves to analysis, each having his specialty of wine, milk, water, or other substance; and a body of expert inspectors, a sort of chemical patrol, which, armed with microscopes and endowed with full police power, is free to penetrate into the inner oven of the bakery, the bottommost pit of the grocer’s cellar, to take the top layer off every display and look behind every garnish, to confiscate and destroy if it deems best, and to bring back in any case samples of everything suspicious it sees.
The inspectors bring in the larger number of the samples analyzed in the laboratory. In 1889, out of eighteen thousand one hundred and seventeen specimens analyzed, twelve thousand seven hundred and seventy-eight had been submitted by them. But the public is no indifferent patron. Is the coffee muddy, the milk blue, the wine sour, the meat tough, madame or monsieur appears forthwith at the desk where samples are received, to demand an explanation. There is something highly picturesque in the group that gathers in the obscure and rather dingy office. Often there is much that is amusing, so extraordinary are the specimens they submit, the theories they advance. And there is, too, no little that is pathetic. They are not often rich, these people. Most of them wear blouses or black aprons, and rarely is there a woman whose head is covered. Probably there are few the combined wages of whose households average over ten or fifteen francs a day, though the wife, like the husband, has worked her ten hours.
One realizes here, perhaps, as never before, what it means to be poor—that you are the first victim, not alone of epidemic and contagion, but of man’s violence and fraud; that because you have not great things, the little that you have shall be taken away. He realizes, too, what such a service may do towards restoring the quality of the poor man’s food, and he understands why it is that the proudest boast of M. Girard and his associates is that they have helped to give the Paris workingman better bread and meat and wine.
The name of the article, the date of its receipt, the address of the depositor, and that of the merchant said to have sold it, are noted, and a receipt given the applicant, with directions when to return for the result. The kind of analysis desired is also entered; that is, whether simply a judgment on the quality of the goods presented—the analysis usually asked for by the public and for which there is no charge—or a quantitative analysis, which is a report on the exact chemical constitution. Though the quantitative analysis is less frequent than the qualitative, it yields a revenue not to be despised. In 1889 this amounted to thirty-nine thousand and seventy-five francs.
The laboratories into which the heterogeneous collection of wines and liquors, milk and water, sugar and butter, brass pans and toys, bon-bons and spices, meats and vegetables, firecrackers and dynamite bombs, pickles and canned goods goes, are, in principle, like all laboratories, but still have an air of their own. The scientific operations, too, are those familiar everywhere; yet the direction they take is decided by Parisian habits, and makes the laboratory in a way a reflection of the domestic economy of the city.
Thus no one of the rooms I visited was busier than that devoted to wine. In fact, in 1889, out of eighteen thousand one hundred and seventeen analyses made, six thousand four hundred and fifty were of wines. The proportion is only in keeping with the consumption of the city, which averages about one hundred and fifty million dollars a year, and it is in harmony with the numberless evils which, from the beginning to the end of the life history of a bottle of French wine, combine to ruin its character.
These evils begin with making. Even if the natural process be followed, and the wine made honestly by fermenting fresh grapes, there are various dangerous stages which make manipulations necessary. Suppose that the grapes have been, perforce, gathered before properly ripe. There is an excess of acid in the ferment which must be counteracted, and the sugar must be increased. There are delicate and approved methods for accomplishing this, but they are not always handled skillfully or conscientiously, and some of them give opportunity for a sort of official watering; that is, prescribe a formula which saves the wine and demands enough water to double the vintage.
If the wine escapes in making, it is subject to a multitude of maladies afterwards, which must be treated; and it happens sometimes, as in human medicine, that the remedy is worse than the disease. Litharge, for example, is added to counteract acidity, and is transformed into acetate of lead. Alum is frequently used in diseased wines to give them a certain youthfulness; salt and plaster are standard remedies. But an excess of any one of these substances, or their employment in connection with certain other substances, may result in compounds positively ruinous to the health.
With such manipulations it is only in abusing them, willfully or ignorantly, that the harm lies. There are others not in themselves harmful, and the chief of them is watering. Thirty years ago this was done in a bold and gross way, simply by adding so much water. It was a fraud, but nobody’s health was injured by it. Today science has come to the aid of the defrauder. Wine weakened by water is strengthened by alcohols of inferior quality, made from grains and beets, producing drunkenness much more quickly than the natural alcohol, and entailing more fatal results. To restore the color lost in watering, various coloring matters, animal and vegetable, are used. The very bouquet is imitated.
But science does still more for the defrauder than this. All of these processes suppose a basis of grape juice. Science has found a way to make wine without this supposed essential, and so perfectly that connoisseurs and chemists hesitate to pronounce it false.
By mixing alcohol, water, saline and coloring matters, and a substance known as the oil of French wine, a composition is produced which many an expert will pass as a natural wine. There is one serious difficulty about this product, however. The oil which furnishes its savor and bouquet is, unhappily, a dangerous poison, a small quantity of which injected into the veins of a dog kills him in less than an hour.
It is the business of the laboratory to decide if any of the manipulations and falsifications hinted at above have been practised on the samples submitted to it. Expert tasters begin the work, and give their judgment on savor, color, bouquet. The chemist then takes it, testing all its fixed and volatile qualities by his sure and delicate processes.
These long and careful examinations give the laboratory the right to speak with decision on the quality of the samples submitted to it. The positiveness of its assertions and its relentless war on defrauders have naturally made it enemies. There are those who complain that the publicity given to the frauds will in the end ruin the foreign wine trade of France. But they have never silenced the laboratory. Its rigor has made the public watchful of what it buys, and more intelligent in the “points” which even an ordinary wine should show. The practice of watering it has greatly decreased.
The public health is not the only gainer. The city treasury gains largely by the decrease of the frauds practised on alcoholic drinks. In 1844 Gay Lussac estimated that Paris lost fully one-third of the octroi on wines and liquors because of the falsification which went on inside of the city walls. That it is a matter of importance one realizes when he remembers that of the thirty million dollars in octroi which the city put into her pocketbook in 1889, about thirteen million dollars came from the duty on wines and alcohols.
Side by side with the wine analysis in the laboratory are made those on beer, liquors, and ciders. The work is considerable on the first, for the use of beer has made rapid progress in France in recent years. In 1879 only two hundred and ten thousand hectolitres were drunk in Paris. In 1889 octroi was paid on 353,122.2 hectolitres. The brasserie has become a formidable rival of the café. The adulterants of beer, as those of wine, call all the discoveries of science to their aid, and make compounds which for savor, color, and bouquet deceive all ordinary consumers. Malted grains, hops, yeast, and water, the normal materials for producing beer, are all displaced. Glucose or glycerine takes the place of malt. For hops are used beef oils, aloes, quassia, absinthe, gentian, colocyntli, salacine, island moss, orange and lemon peel, and various other substances. Alum is used to clear it. The color is improved by caramel, chicory, and various manufactured mixtures.
But it is not only in the making that dangerous compounds are employed. If the dealer fears the beer will not keep, he heats it with such substances as boric and oxalic acid. Nor is this the end of the list of dangers which the laboratory signals in beer. Among the most fatal are the copper, lead, or zinc compounds which it may take up from the vessels in which it has been made, or from the pipes and faucets of the casks and reservoirs in which it is kept.
Though alcoholic drinks are in excess in the laboratory, I found that they did not absorb it. Milk, “the wine of the children,” has been since the beginning one of its chief objects of investigation. In 1881, when the investigations of the milk supply of Paris began, 50.6 percent of the samples analyzed were “bad.” In a year, thanks to the vigor of the service, this percentage was reduced to 30.7. In 1889 10.6 percent of impure were found on three thousand seven hundred and ninety-five analyses.
I was curious to get the judgment of the laboratory on the Paris water, for I had been remonstrated with persistently for drinking it. I applied to one of the chemists in the department devoted to water analyses, who, for reply, took out several bottles containing waters of the various kinds used, and named according to their source, water of the Vanne, Dhuis and Arve. “These waters,” he said, “have stood here a week. They are absolutely pure, answering to the laboratory standard of wholesome water in all particulars. A city could not have a more satisfactory water supply than we have now. It is true that it is only since last spring that there has been enough that is pure for the entire city. In the environs, the water is positively dangerous.”
This water department of the Municipal Laboratory has rendered another service to Paris in showing the danger of using the wells, of which there have been a great number within the walls. The well water is heavily impregnated with lime, and the Paris bakers claim that a sponge mixed with it is much lighter and better than that mixed with hydrant water. If in baking all possible germs were killed, there would be no danger in allowing the practice, but the laboratory has found that the heat of the oven is not sufficient. Typhus and cholera microbes both might pass through a baking unharmed. When this was established, the inspectors began a vigorous campaign against the wells, destroying them from the foundations.
The importance of thus superintending the bakers is evident when it is remembered that in Paris no one bakes at home, and that bread and pastry are always bought. Nothing could be more inviting than the public boulangeries and patisseries. They are models of neatness, good taste, and tempting displays. But “things are not always what they seem,” and there are more points to oversee in these shops than the water with which the bread is mixed.
The flour gives the Municipal Laboratory no little trouble. It is found mixed with sand, chalk, plaster, alum, phosphate of lime, carbonate of magnesium, even sulphate of copper. Wheat flour is adulterated with cheaper kinds, as rye, barley, corn, peas, beans, lentils, rice, millet, buckwheat, potatoes, even with fine sawdust. Then butter is replaced by oleomargarine; the sugar with that “sweetened illusion” saccharine. If the cakes escape the adulterated flour, butter, and sugar, they still run the chance of being colored with some injurious substance. A cake is a work of fantasy in Paris. It imitates everything created or manufactured, from a canary bird to a Swiss chalet. To carry out such ambitious designs, colors must be employed, and frequently they are poisonous, though the laboratory has published a careful list of what materials can be employed safely in coloring sugars and bon-bons.
The inspection of the markets is an especially interesting part of the service, for the cleverest devices are practised in disguising tainted fruits, vegetables, and meats, and in keeping the attention of the inspector away from the weakest spot in the stock. The agent must match address with address. In case fraud is found in any of the perishable articles, it is confiscated on the spot.
A great deal of half-spoiled merchandise is found in the carts of the wandering merchants. The confiscation of the stock is almost always a sad business. Women and decrepit men form the body of this band of merchants, and the loss often must take away the bread from them and their children.
In the survey of the butcher shops, one duty is to make sure that horse, ass, and mule meats are not masquerading as beef. Not that their sale is forbidden. On the contrary, the Municipal Laboratory itself has declared this sort of nourishment “an excellent thing.” It simply demands that the meat be sold as equine and not bovine, and that the animals which furnish it be not decrepit or diseased.
The first point is regulated by establishing shops especially for the sale of horse meat. Or, if it is sold from a cart or in a regularly licensed butcher shop, by requiring that it be marked plainly. The sale of horse meat has grown to enormous proportions since the first shop was established in 1866. The estimate is, that it is eaten now in a third of the Parisian households. In 1891 twenty-one thousand two hundred and thirty-one horses, sixty-one mules, and two hundred and seventy-five asses were sold in the Paris shops. The meat costs about half as much as beef.
The inspectors find a great deal to do in the groceries. The adulteration is particularly common in spices, tea, coffee, chocolate, and canned goods.
I was particularly struck by the number of cooking utensils I saw heaped up in one of the rooms at the laboratory. “Confiscations of the inspector,” said the chemist.
“Do you survey kitchens, then?”
“Certainly,” he responded. “Every dish used in a public restaurant of Paris, either in the kitchen or for the table; every pot, pan, and utensil in the bakeries; and every beer faucet in the wine shop—in short, everything used in preparing or serving foods, is under the care of the inspector. The law forbids the use of lead, zinc, and galvanized iron in the manufacture of cooking vessels. It orders that all copper vessels be tinned and kept in good condition. It directs that pottery which is covered with a glaze containing enough oxide of lead to yield to a feeble acid be seized. It orders that tin cans never be soldered on the inside, and that the materials used in their manufacture be conformed to a certain standard. It is the inspector’s business to look after all these things.”
“And the results?”
“That depends. There are establishments in Paris, like the great restaurants, which employ a skilled tinner regularly, and their utensils are always in order. In many little shops kept by women the copper vessels are the pride of the establishment, but in many others they are, unhappily, neglected. In 1889, out of two hundred and fifteen samples analyzed here, ninety-seven contained lead.”
We had reached the office where the samples are handed in. A woman was at the desk with a bit of cheap colored candy, which one of the service was examining. “It is no doubt this stuff,” he was saying, “which has made your baby sick. You must not buy colored bon-bons.”
“There,” said my guide, “is one of the reassuring parts of our service. That woman will receive to-day a lesson she will never forget. All her neighbors will hear it from her, and it will probably become a tradition in her family that colored sweets are dangerous. Very often, too, we give them simple methods for detecting frauds. Thus they become their own inspectors.”
“Do they often prosecute the dealers?” I asked, as the woman vented her wrath in a torrent of invectives against the merchant who would sell poisons, threatening him with arrest and imprisonment.
“No. We advise them not to. For they rarely have proof to show that the sample came from the merchant charged with selling it, and they not only lose the case, but pay expenses. Their best plan is to change merchants. As they are obliged to leave the address of the person charged with selling the goods, our inspectors examine his stock, and if the samples taken are bad, they give the court the information, which enables it to punish him promptly.”
“But the merchant may be deceived?”
“Of course. But it is his business to know the quality of what he sells. To aid him we publish full reports of processes for detecting frauds, and the laboratory is as free to him as to the retail buyers. Indeed, we urge merchants to submit samples before giving large orders, and we have arranged it so that they need not go to the trouble of bringing them here, but may leave them at the police station of their quarter, and we return them the analyses. As a rule, of course, the dealer regards us as his enemy; but we are his friend if he is an honest man, protecting him from the manufacturer.”
“But the manufacturer may be ignorant of the dangerous quality of the materials he employs.”
“According to French law such ignorance is a crime, and we do our best to inform him. Take the matter of coloring toys, for example. We publish a full list of dangerous coloring substances. We show the poisonous compound which may result from the use of certain materials in wines and beers. We show the effects of every suspected method, of every suspicious element, in the preparation of foods and drinks and the manufacture of articles. So if the manufacturer knows his business, he need not produce goods unfit for the market.”
“And you hope some day, I suppose, to prevent his doing so; to know for a certainty that nothing tainted, adulterated, or watered is sold in Paris?”
He smiled cynically. “When the Prefecture of Police is unnecessary, the Municipal Laboratory will be also; but not before.”
The Archive 