From Sophie's front desk — Monday, August 24
BBC News — read the full story
A Chinese cabbage producer told inspectors: "We use formaldehyde to keep the vegetables fresh longer." Beijing is now investigating — formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, has been banned as a food preservative in China for years... yet persists in the country that grows a third of the world's cabbage. The scale of the enforcement failure is staggering: millions of tons moving through supply chains with no reliable checkpoint. Franklin has the first word on this, then Hilldegard.
I read this morning that Chinese growers dust their cabbages with formaldehyde to keep the heads crisp on the long haul to market , a known poison, banned by their own law, yet the practice holds. The shape is familiar: a preservative that kills the consumer preserves nothing. I learned this at the Pennsylvania Hospital, where we debated whether spirits of wine in the physic chest did more harm than the fevers they were meant to quiet. The apothecary swore by his tinctures; the patients swore at them. You should know the feeling: you load your barrels with salt pork for the West Indies run, confident the cure will outlast the voyage, only to find the crew breaking out in boils from brine too strong by half.
The salt saved the meat. It near killed the men. We/us/our , we have seen this before, the tradesman's temptation to stretch a margin by stretching... the truth of what sits in the barrel. Priestley wrote me from Birmingham that his sprigs of mint could restore air fouled by candles and breath , a vegetable purifier, he called it.
Ingenhousz confirmed it from Vienna: the leaf does the work no chemical can, given sunlight and time. The cabbage itself, left honest, carries its own preservation in the crisper drawer of a root cellar. No formaldehyde required. The law forbids the powder. The market rewards it.
Until the inspector's fee exceeds the merchant's profit, the powder wins.
<Cantenac, February 1, 177[8?], in French: I see in the newspapers that you have communicated a cure for dropsy to the doctors of Paris, and that they have successfully tested it at the Invalides. The papers did not explain how much tobacco ash is needed, or whether it is applied…
Priestley’s growing sprigs of mint in foul air might not seem like serious science, but it led to one of his major discoveries. A question had long plagued eighteenth-century scientists: how is the atmosphere repurified after being rendered noxious by respiration and by the combu…
Dear Friend Vienna Dec. 5th. 1780. I had the satisfaction of being informed by a lettre of monsieur le Begue de Presle, that you continued to enjoye a good health: but as it is allways a much greater satisfaction for me to be informed of your happiness by your self, I will endeav…
Parts which we call Burning. Wax, Sulphur, all Oils and Fats and most vegetable Substances are bad Conductors of Fire. The Oil of a Lamp, burning at the Top may be scarce warm at the Bottom; a Candle or a Stick of Wood inflam’d at one End is cool at the other. Metals which are be…
is rather curious. Answer 3: If these inhabitants have trouble “in supplying themselves out of their own Plantations with Flour, Bread, Biscuit, Beef, Pork, Salt-Fish, Oats, Pease, and Beans, then Great-Britain and Ireland can supply them with all these They may supply Them in De…
An honest merchant has but two shields: ... his name and his neighbors. In Philadelphia we formed the Contributionship, each householder pledging his own roof to insure his brother's , the risk shared, the premium honest, the arsonist exposed. Let your cabbage growers mark each crate with a seal the buyer trusts, and let the market house publish the names of those whose seals held true through a winter's storage. The housewife in Guangzhou who finds her kimchi sweet in March will walk past the formaldehyde barrels to find that mark again. Priestley told me the Royal Society would not publish a claim until another hand replicated it; reputation is the only peer review that survives the voyage. The merchant who sleeps well needs no powder.
I have held the cabbage in my hand, felt the veereeditass rise in its folded leaves , each layer a small lung breathing the greening power. Now word comes across the silk roads of a realm that grows more cabbages than any other, where men wash the heads in a water that arrests decay... but writes death into the flesh. Formaldehyde, they name it.
The word is new to me; the shape is not. In the Physica I wrote how a plant's virtue lives in its moisture, how the corrupt humors flee when the green force is honored. This is sickitass wearing the mask of preservation: the drought that pretends to be life. The law forbids it, yet the practice persists , as Abbot Kuno's decrees persisted at Disibodenburg while the nuns' breath grew thin.
The investigation is the knife. The greening power does not negotiate with poison. You asked whether your visions can be trusted. This is how you know: they name the rot before the tongue has found the word for it.
Asplenium Ruta muraria, and it will be cured, which here closes the chapter. It is warm and great and strong, and if someone eats or drinks it, it ulcerates and harms them inwardly, and therefore sometimes it causes a solution and digestion in a person with pain and not with heal…
It is lacking in the edition PHYSICA. — BOOK II, ON PLANTS. it does not remove from them, because the shell is above. And the yolk is healthy, but it does not harm animals much. If however the white of the egg is more wholesome to eat than the yolk, and also the yolk, moderately …
and the stench from it is removed. The Pungo is of a warm nature; and whoever cooks a mouse with it, adding fat or oil, and thus eats it, loosens his belly as if with a certain potion. And also it restrains eaten gicht. The Crasso is more warm than cold, and also humid, and grows…
It is eaten. But the same fungus, when eaten, mitigates the pain of the heart and the pain of the spleen, because the heart sometimes aches from the liver, which the stomach and lung and spleen afflict with bad humors. But if you want to take a purging potion, take the fungus fro…
Moderate eating they can. But cheese which from any milk is made has a diverse nature, according to the nature of the same animals from whose milk it is prepared, in itself, and thus it attracts the eater. For a person who has healthy, hard, and dry flesh in their body, hard and …
B.B.C. News carried the piece. Food safety enforcement in a supply chain that size breaks down fast, and formaldehyde on cabbages is the visible fracture. That closes this edition of Old News.