Under this head it is proposed briefly to discuss the immediate care in the kitchen of these perishable foods. Preservation of perishable foods, such as meats and fruits for use at some future time, will be discussed in detail under the heading "Food Preservation." The perishable foods are those which quickly deteriorate and become inedible because of decay, various forms of fermentation, or in the case of crisp garden vegetables, wilting and drying. No rational and consistent regime for reducing this decay of perishable foods can be devised without a knowledge of the causes at work to bring about the decay. Decay and fermentation are caused by bacterial action. The souring of milk, as discussed in the preceding chapter, is a bacterial action. Rancidity of butter, decay of fruits and vegetables, are likewise in each case the work of a microorganism. These microorganisms usually produce spores or minute dust-like particles in one phase of their life history. These dust-like spores readily find lodgment in kitchens, to be easily stirred up and settle upon the fresh-food products brought into the cellar or kitchen, and start the process of decay or fermentation in these. It goes without saying that the first step in kitchen and cellar sanitation with a view to the easy preservation of perishable foods is a complete renovation and cleaning of these parts of the house in which foods are kept. A cellar should not only be absolutely freed of its dust, but to be well adapted for the preservation of fresh fruits, vegetables, milk, and meat, it should be clean, cool, dry, and dark. Sometimes the conditions are such that it is impossible to produce all of the last three requisites of a good food cellar, but there can hardly be conditions where anything short of perfect cleanliness is excusable. All four of these requisites of a good cellar tend to inhibit, if not actually to stop, bacterial growth. If it is possible to do so, the fruit and vegetables should be kept separate from the meat and milk, because of the tendency of milk particularly to take up odors from vegetables.

In most urban homes and in some rural homes the refrigerator, cooled by ice, takes the place largely of the cellar. The refrigerator, though small and compact and artificial, may possess all of the qualities above mentioned for the cellar, and the first of all these qualities should be absolute cleanliness. Care should also be taken not to keep milk in open crocks, exposed to such vegetables as turnips, cabbage, or onions, because of the readiness with which the milk takes up the odor from vegetables.

The old-fashioned custom of keeping a garbage pail of several gallons' capacity in or about the kitchen to receive waste bits of food has in the modern kitchen sanitation been relegated to the scrap heap. No such scraps of food, waste food materials, should be permitted to accumulate even from one meal to another, but they should be transported outside of the building entirely.

A most important thing to observe in kitchen and dining-room sanitation is the protection of these rooms against flies. In the times of our fathers flies were looked upon as necessary evils, and people made the best of them. If cheese and ham and other similar meat products became infested with maggots (the larvae of flies), this condition was hardly looked upon as being more than an annoyance, no thought apparently being entertained of making such a condition impossible. Modern sanitation, however, recognizes in the fly a most perilous parasite. Typhoid fever and several other dangerous diseases are transmitted from house to house by flies. If the nurse in charge of a typhoid-fever patient is careless in her duties, excreta from the patient may be exposed for many minutes, perhaps hours, before it is disinfected, during which interim it may be visited by flies, their hairy feet may become loaded with typhoid bacilli, after which they leave the house for an excursion in the warm sunshine, to be attracted by savory smells from a near-by kitchen, to light upon the screen door, and to seek an opportunity to gain entrance to the kitchen; having found the opportunity, they pass in perhaps just in time to walk around over the just served dinner of the host. A week or ten days later some member of this neighbor's family comes down with typhoid fever, and people wonder why Providence has visited two families in the same neighborhood with this dreaded disease.