The fortification of foods with vitamins serves as a nutritional benefit only in so far as the vitamins have not decomposed before the food is consumed. Therefore stability tests to determine the most stable conditions for a given vitamin are of utmost importance. Carotene (provitamin A) has been considered for increasing the vitamin A value of foods. By an accelerated test the stability of crystalline carotene in various oils, both with and without added antioxidants, is compared with that of a carotene concentrate prepared from alfalfa-leaf meal. The stability of the same carotene preparations in Crisco, lard, oleomargarine, white flour, soybean meal (solvent-and expeller-extracted), and soybean flour, is given. In most preparations the alfalfa carotene concentrate was the more stable. Soybean lecithin

PREVIOUS article (%) reported the isolation of carotene from green plant tissue and described a simple method ' for removing chlorophyll from an acetone extract of dehydrated alfalfa-leaf meal using barium hydroxide. A carotene concentrate was obtained which could be purified by various procedures. As large batches of meal were extracted and worked up, a number of improvements were made that have simplified the procedure, overcome some of the difficulties obtaining in the previous work, and resulted in the isolation of products other than carotene. Dehydrated alfalfa-leaf meal was used in this work because it not only ranks high in carotene content and other valuable constituents Courtesy, Denver Alfalfa Milling and Products Company (Above) Harvesting Alfalfa for Artificial Drying (Below) Freshly Cut Alfalfa Entering a Commercial Dehydrator The alfalfa is chopped, dried, ground, and bagged within a few hours from the time it is harvested.

The simplicity of the method is due to the procedure devised for removing chlorophyll and saponifiable lipoids. The efficiency of the barium hydroxide octahydrate treatment is dependent on the particle size of the solid and on the ratio of acetone to water in the solution of plant pigments. Proteins, carbohydrates, cellulose, and other plant materials not extractable are not destroyed in this procedure.

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