I would like also to suggest to the Committee that in my opinion no class or special type of food products should be exempt from the application of the provisions for standards, wherever there is a need, and it is possible to define and make standards of identity of the product or products.

My reason for making this suggestion is that there are proprietary foods that are prescribed by physicians, recommended and advertised by manufacturers, and sold particularly for the use of babies and children, invalids and convalescents, and certainly products of this kind should be subject to standardization the same as any other type of food product.

There have been some discussions and recommendations made in connection with reasonable tolerances. It may be said that from a practical standpoint it makes no difference if the tolerances are, or are not, provided for in this bill for the reason that it is necessary for officials enforcing laws to give the most careful and intelligent consideration to what in fact is a reasonable deviation or variation from the declared standards of foods. This was a routine practice during the years that I was engaged in work in connection with the enforcement of the Federal Food and Drugs Act, as applied to all classes of products subject to the law, and I have not the slightest doubt but that the same practice is enforced at the present moment. There is one other point in connection with this bill, upon which I would like to speak, and it is in connection with dealing with minor violations of the act. Dr. Woodward this morning objected to the following provision, on page 23, beginning with line 3, which reads as follows:

Nothing in this act shall be construed as requiring the Secretary to report for prosecution or for the institution of libel or injunction proceedings, minor violations of this act, whenever he believes that the purpose of the act can best be accomplished by suitable notice or warning.

It seems to me that this is a very wise and a very desirable provision to put into this bill, for the following reason. In practical enforcement of a law, like a Federal Food and Drugs Act, there must of necessity be many cases, particularly in connection with misbranding, where the objections are minor, inconsequential, and not substantial. There may be a word misplaced here. There may be a poor selection of a word or of a phrase. When those cases come up for consideration by administrators of this law, there is no authority whatever to deal with those cases, except as you would deal with a case of gross or wanton or wilful violation. Officials, in the past, in many instances, have acted without authority in placing those cases in abeyance, and if authority were granted, it would be in the interest of the consumer, for the reason that attention could be given to cases of real merit, which would be in the interest of the law enforcing official, and which would be fair to the manufacturer. There have been thousands of dollars wasted in dealing with this kind of a case. In my opinion this is a very desirable provision to retain in this law, and it cannot possibly in any way work to the detriment of the consuming public, and it will save thousands of dollars to the taxpayers.

That is all that I have to present.

The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Laurence V. Burton.

STATEMENT OF DR. LAURENCE V. BURTON, NEW YORK CITY, MCGRAW-HILL PUBLISHING CO., EDITOR "FOOD INDUSTRIES '

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Dr. BURTON. Mr. Chairman, I am L. V. Burton, editor of the magazine "Food Industries ", published by the McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. My purpose in coming here is as an unofficial, unauthorized representative of the food manufacturers. There are 50,000 food manufacturers in the country, many of whom are subscribers to our magazine.

I myself have been a food manufacturer for some 20 years, and I have had nearly 20 years contact with the present food and drugs law.

The CHAIRMAN. What is your product, Doctor?

Dr. BURTON. I am the editor of a magazine.

The CHAIRMAN. I know, but you said you had been a manufacturer. What was the product?

Dr. BURTON. Principally canned foods.

The CHAIRMAN. Principally which?

Dr. BURTON. Principally canned foods; and although I have been also connected with the manufacture of pickles, ice-cream cones, macaroni products, and sauer krout; also one proprietary product, about which I will speak a bit later.

I am coming here in a purely constructive way, hoping that I can add valuable information to the committee, in its efforts to make a decision that, at best, is a very difficult one to make, regarding all of these recommendations.

We are making what I consider to be reasonably good progress toward satisfactory improvement in the food and drugs law. I am not here in opposition to this bill. I think that it is worthy of the support of a great many-in fact, all of the best type of food manufacturers in the country-but there are a few details that could be changed, I think, in the interest of the public and in the interest of the food manufacturer.

Particularly I want to speak about section 7 (f). That is the provision that requires that when a food has no published standard of legal identity, that it shall declare on the label the ingredients "in order of predominance by weight."

Now, there are three types of objections to conforming to such a provision that I wish to speak about. I am only speaking for those who have nothing to conceal.

The first class of objection is based entirely on the cost of complying with such a requirement. In the biscuit- and cracker-baking field the various manufacturers have a multitude of labels, all of which would have to be modified by compliance with this particular requirement. It costs about $25 to change a plate from which a label is printed, and one concern, which is not the largest, has approximately 6,000 plates which would have to be changed. The cost is about $25 per plate, or it will cost that one company $150,000 to comply with that one section, when there is no effort on the part of that company to conceal any of the information.

It is customary in the food business, as in many other lines of business, to revise labels from time to time, and I believe certainly that practically everyone in that line of food industry would be

willing to comply with section 7 (f) in the deliberate, natural order of doing things, if they did not have to do it all in 1 year.

Now, a year like 1934 is one where most of us would like to save what money we can, but this law will compel the biscuit and cracker bakers alone to spend about a million dollars, or possibly a little less. I think that is a very conservative estimate for the cost of changing their labels.

Now, at present, there are no standards of identity for most of the products which biscuit and cracker bakers put out, so far as my knowledge goes.

The second type of objection was mentioned the other day by Dr. Jordan. It is the objection made from the fact that a declaration of ingredients "in order of predominance by weight" is a constructive disclosure of a formula, where the principal benefit to anybody else will be to a competing manufacturer. I am sorry that Dr. Jordan was in such a rush that he did not bring out one or two illustrations that would cover that point. The belief has been stated on a number of occasions that there is no difficulty for a competitor to duplicate a product. Well, having been a manufacturer myself, I know something about the difficulty of trying to duplicate a competitor's product, and I would just like to relate one instance in my manufacturing days, where we started out to produce what seems to most folks to be a trivial product-canned spaghetti. It was impossible for me to find out how anybody else manufactured it. We spent some 2 or 3 years in trying to work out a satisfactory product before we put it on the market. And then the competitors commenced to try to find out what we were doing. One young man came to the office one time, and wanted to go through the factory, and I was a little bit suspicious of his looks. I did not feel that he was just the ordinary type of visitor, so I dissuaded him. Then he wanted to know if he could get a job there, and I dissuaded him from that, and then I told him that if he would work for nothing I could not give him a job, because we had a full complement of help. Then I dismissed him, and instead of going out at the door, he went into the factory. I had to go out and speak to him and tell him that I thought he had gotten lost and I was going to try to help him find the right direction.

That incident did not end there. He was so persistent in wanting to get in, I thought I would follow him and see where he went. Although he was in overalls, he went two blocks away and went around the corner and got in a Packard limousine and drove away. Later I found out he was superintendent of a competing plant that wanted to find out how we manufactured the product.

Now, we had had chemists working on that, trying to find out how our competitors made up their formula, and they could not, and there was nothing in our product, and there was nothing in the competitors' product, but what is found in almost anyone's kitchen, if they wanted to buy the particular kind of cheese.

Now, Dr. Jordan could have mentioned one thing. I am going to steel a little bit of his thunder and tell you about nougats. A quarter of 1 percent of one ingredient of nougat will make a considerable difference in the quality of the product, and it is not known to every confectioner, and that particular ingredient is pec

tin, a substance found in generous abundance in nature, largely in fruits, and yet this law would require you to disclose the very thing that makes your product better than the other fellow's, and it doesn't help the consumer to know that in any way. The consumer is eating pectin all the time. Every time he eats any fruit, he is getting some pectin. Information of this kind does help the competitor, and only the competitor.

Now, I admit that products can be duplicated in time, but there is a novelty value that a manufacturer likes to retain, and Dr. Jordan's suggestion that a certificate of composition be filed with the Department of Agriculture in lieu of disclosure of all these things, so that the Department should say whether or not those were suitable ingredients, I think is a vast improvement over disclosing this information on the label.

The third objection, and then I am through with this phase, is the statement that we have heard here several times, that there are allergic individuals who should be protected by their ability to discover what is in the product. Now, there are more than 25,000,000 people in a day who are eating meals away from home, in restaurants and hotels, where they cannot even see a label. It seems to me that that proposal is not a sound one.

Now, these proprietary foods, such as A-1 sauce, Worcestershire sauce, or kitchen bouquet-I happen to have worked for the company that made kitchen bouquet, and we were always attempted victims of duplication, or efforts to steal the formula, or attempts to get into the factory, and all that, and yet there was nothing in the product but what every housewife has in her own kitchen, at one time or another.

There was nothing occult about it, or unusual, but we feel that allergy is not a valid excuse for disclosure of one's proprietary rights.

Now, the disclosure is unfair and unwarranted, because it is only a half-truth. It does not disclose all of the material, or the skill or the excellence that goes into a product. It discloses only part of the ingredients, and excepts flavors, colors, and spices, but yet the differences in manufacturing methods are not disclosed. I told you about canned spaghetti. In making spaghetti sauce, it is possible to take the same identical formula, and make it up in thousandgallon batches, and to produce a sauce of considerably different quality-enough different in quality so that one is a satisfactory sauce and the other is not satisfactory, and using identical ingredients, and merely by the method of processing. I won't take your time to tell you how that happens, unless you want to know, but yet if the competitor has a product bearing a label, listing the ingredients, of which there are about 15, and this one over here, also with a listing of 15 ingredients, the inference that the customer is expected to get is that these two are identical. Actually they constitute a half-truth, and as a half-truth it is almost a lie.

It puts me, as a manufacturer, if I were back in the business again, in the position of proving to the public that the other fellow's stuff was equivalent to mine. At the present time, when the ingredients do not have to be disclosed, which requires that the burden of proof of identicality is upon the competitor.

Now, you have heard of price cutting and chiseling and all these things that are popular terms of today. A storekeeper can possibly desire to force a price concession out of me. We will say that I am back manufacturing again, and he can get hold of a competing product that is an imitation of mine, and he can urge his clerks to force the sale of that thing, and it can be done to a large extent, especially when the price is cheaper. The only weapon of defense that I have is the quality of my product, but supposing that my label has to show the list of ingredients, and the competitor, who does not have as good a product, may have identically the same ingredients, processed in a different way or with slightly different, cheaper methods. The nearest simile I can use to describe such a thing is to say that this particular provision would force me to go out and cut a switch with which I am to be licked, and then, if you can imagine it, to administer the licking to myself, and yet there is nothing in my product, the original genuine product, that need be concealed by the most selfish manufacturer, except for this economic

reason.

I think every one of them would be perfectly willing to file with the Department the list of ingredients, but I do not think it is fair to declare it on the label. Now, if one wanted to go into mock sentimentality, he could talk about defrauding the consumer. However, if the half-truth, misinterpreted on the label, were used to persuade a consumer to buy something other than the original, that would be, in a sense, a defrauding, if the imitation was not as good as the original.

Now, the best analysis that I can give of this particular provision of the bill seems to be that if the consumer is protected by these disclosures on the label-the allergic consumer, the one who has a certain food idiosyncracy. But if we would apply that reasoning to the rest of the bill, we would find that the principle does not hold.

Now, I have not been able to, or I have not found out from the bureau or the department, whether allergy is really the reason for keeping that there or not, but if that reason is proposed, it is not a valid one, because wherever a product has been given a standard, it does not force him to declare on the label the ingredients.

Take mayonnaise, which can be made from various vegetable oils. Now, at least two of the vegetable oils, corn oil and cottonseed oil, do affect certain individuals, and produce this allergic reaction, and eggs do the same thing. And now, the consumer, of course, is supposed to know that, under this theory, all of these things can be in mayonnaise.

I read an article in Forum a few days ago, where a consumer wrote that she did not know that mayonnaise was not always made with olive oil. That philosophy implies that a consumer will know all of these things, which I think is not true, and I think therefore that section 7 (f) should either contain the provision that Dr. Jordan proposed, for a certificate of composition, to be filed with the Food and Drugs Administration, to exempt the necessity for declaration of ingredients, or that it should be omitted entirely. I think it is entirely unfair to the proprietary manufacturer.