Your Nose Is Safest Guard Against Poison

1920

Impure Foods Can Be Detected by Sense of Smell

It may not be an elegant thing to do, but if people would smell their food before eating it there would be fewer cases of poisoning, scientists declare. One's nose can generally be depended upon to protect him from injurious foods, if only he would follow the dictates of his sense of smell.

In making an investigation in connection with a case of ptomaine poisoning recently, the experts stated that "in every case known the canned food that contained the dangerous bacilli had an abnormal and usually offensive odor." The ripe olives that have caused such disasters lately do not have an agreeable scent. Where meat causes the trouble, a tainted odor is easily perceptible. So it seems that all one need to is to follow his nose, or at least be guided by what it suggests to him.

"Nature knew what she was going when she gave us the sense of smell. It is more inherent than the sense of taste or of vision. It was the only way we had of telling what was good to eat, in the beginning, for neither the eyes nor the sense of taste is so precise in the matter of protecting us from harm. The so-called lower animals still depend upon the sense of small to protect them from noxious vegetation, and we have not gotten so far away from the animal that we can ignore Nature's greatest of all safeguards."

--The Saturday Blade, Chicago, March 27, 1920, page 7.