The good people are not ignorant of this
adulteration -- but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it
is whiter than the meal of corn: thus they sacrifice their taste
and their health, and the lives of their tender infants, to a
most absurd gratification of a mis-judging eye; and the miller,
or the baker, is obliged to poison them and their families, in
order to live by his profession. The same monstrous depravity
appears in their veal, which is bleached by repeated bleedings,
and other villainous arts, till there is not a drop of juice left
in the body, and the poor animal is paralytic before it dies; so
void of all taste, nourishment, and savour, that a man might dine
as comfortably on a white fricassee of kid-skin gloves; or chip
hats from Leghorn.
As they have discharged the natural colour from their bread,
their butchers-meat, and poultry, their cutlets, ragouts,
fricassees and sauces of all kinds; so they insist upon having
the complexion of their potherbs mended, even at the hazard of
their lives. Perhaps, you will hardly believe they can be so mad
as to boil their greens with brass halfpence, in order to improve
their colour; and yet nothing is more true -- Indeed, without this
improvement in the colour, they have no personal merit.
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