WHERE IS THE PRESERVER?

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 413, 23 October 1889, Page 6

WHERE IS THE PRESERVER?

SiMULTANJiouhLY with the news that New 'Zealand Food Preserving Companies have 'obtained ten prizes out of eleven awarded. ! by the French Exhibition Commissioners 'for preserved provisions, comes the tidings •that a consignment of Victorian honey 'sent by the Agricultural Depart!ment to the Royal Agricultural Show, (lately held at Windsor, arrived in •such a damaged condition as to be unfit for sale, while tihat sent to the same Exhibition by the Victorian Beekeepers' iAssociaton would have been unsaleable, 'even had it not been damaged in transit, 'by reason of its inferior flavour. Now 'these two reports taken together ought to set people thinking, and ought to lead to a decided alteration in practice. 'We have in Victoria the best) food, as far as quality goes, which the whole wide woild can show. Some things we have not at all, such, for instance, a*, the exquisite game and the magnificent fish which make the dinner table of a wealthy Englishman such a delight to a gourmand. We cannot supply pheasants and grouse, nor salmon and turbot, but we have a long range of comestibles in which we cannot be beaten, and these our interests imperatively command us to place on the European market. But our gains at the Paris Exhibition in this line are, so far as the reports to hand show, limited to a single bronze medal for preserved sausntrep, while New Zealand grets ten distinct and different prizes, varying from a gold medal down to honourable mentiou. Yet, after spending so much money in being represented, it might have been thought that our manufacturers and preservers would have tried to put their best efforts before the world. The failure to gefc the honey to England in .good condition is even less excusable. ;With moderately careful packing, a little draining of the combs is the outside damage jtbat should have accrued. The truth is that our people give all their attention ito production, and very little to packing, whereas this portion of fcheir work is quite as important as the other. It is indeed by judicious packing rather than by fine quality that Californian fruits .command the New York market. They arrived in first-class condition at the exact moment when they are most required. t Our Agricultural Department could not possibly make itself more useful than by taking this work in hand. It has facilities that private people cannot afford to procure, and influence that private people never possess. Models of liretclaBS packages, illustrations of good modes of packing, and instructions for methods of carriage which will bring food and fruit to market without injury in transit, are of more importance just now than treatises on cultivation. The soil and the sunshine ot Victoria help the tiller of the earth to a bountiful harvest, but the rulers who undertake to guide him will have to tell him how to make the best use ot it. — "Melbourne Herald."