Soil Scientist Predicts Greater Use Of Grass

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27733, 10 August 1955, Page 7

Soil Scientist Predicts Greater Use Of Grass

* “The Press” Special Service

ROTORUA, August 9. A prediction that completely new foods would one day be developed to feed an overcrowded world was made by Dr. E. W. Russell, a leading British soil research scientist, in an address to the Rotorua Philosophical Society. Experts, he said, were now looking for better substitutes for the presentday foods. Dr. Russell instanced the extraction of proteins from grass as a nourishing, but tasteless, meat substitute.

“I do not suggest we eat the grass directly ourselves.” he said. “But we must eventually change the system of allowing stock to grow fat on grass, and then killing thdtn for meat. Scarcely 20 per cent, of the grass eaten is converted to meat.”

Dr. Russell said that work in the extraction of proteins was still in an experimental stage. It was being carried on in Great Britain in a ‘desultory fashion.”

Plankton and other minute sea creatures were still an untapped source of human food, but the thought of an inviting meal of plankton was a fairly fishy business. The extraction of cellulose and other foods from wood waste by means of yeasts and various micro-organisms had been tried in the face of necessity during the Second World War, but had now been dropped as a line of research. Dr. Russell advocated more use of sunlight to speed food production. Green algae grown in tanks was an edible plant, as it w*as a more efficient converter of sunlight than most plants. The theme of Dr. Russell’s talk was the “appalling difficulties” faced by the sciences in feeding a great and hungry world. He said that the manufacture of new “synthetic” foods was, fortunately, not an immediate problem.