Now, the canners have handed the medicines a lump sum and asked them to prove the merit of their own statements. What is food poisoning, anyway? The canners want to know; and just how are canned goods implicated? The National Canners' Association, working in its own laboratories, has been unable to shed any light on the question itself. The laboratory in Washington, which is maintained at an annual expense of $60,000, has discovered some valuable things about canned goods that were not known to the industry ten years ago, but they have not been able to find that there was anything either in the canning or preserving process which could react upon the human digestion.
"Of course, canned goods have even been held responsible for typhoid," said a member of the canners' association, not long ago, implying that the charge was obviously ridiculous, but no more so that other equally groundless ones the industry had to contend with. "Everybody knows, or ought to know, that canned goods have been heated to a temperature that will kill any ordinary germ," he said, "but the typhoid germ is killed by a much lower temperature than the ordinary germ."
When asked if he did not think food poisoning might be caused by the eating of spoiled canned goods, the same member asserted that a man would have to be blind to do such a thing. The tin can was the most reliable article on earth, he said. As long as its contents were fresh, it remained perfectly.  Calm, but if they spoiled it immediately, swelled up, losing its former graceful outline and showing clearly that something was the matter. 