SYNTHETIC MENU

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6884, 13 April 1929, Page 13

SYNTHETIC MENU

SAWDUST AND COAL ; FOODS FOR THE FUTURE? A V , Those timorous people who foresee : the- human race dying of starvation 'J when the world is over-populated will find comfort in a vision of the future sketched by the well-known American chemist, Dr. H. E. Barnard. • Here is his menu for future ages:- ; : Breakfast: Foods from sunlight sources. . ; Luncheon: Foods from the air. Dinner: Food? from sea water. Dr. Barnard looks ahead to a long distant future when the human race will have forgotten the taste of bread and meat, and no longer desires them, ft He even hints that men and women of that period may be endowed with three stomachs apiece, for he remarks casually that already some animals have three stomachs which enable them to digest foods which man with his one “tummy” dare not touch. ; But before man learns to rely on synthetic foods, Dr. Barnard foresees the opening of “food frontiers”—such places as the Amazon River Valley and other great swamps and forests in tropical areas able to supply sustenance to famished humanity (Bays the New York correspondent of the London “Daily Mail”). Brazil, he explains, could support a population two-thirds of that occupying the 1 world to-day, and Africa could feed more millions than now inhabit the earth.

He opens up a vista of possibilities when the food reservoirs of the sea are put to man’s use. A litre of water, he explains, taken from the Atlantic at a depth of 500 rdetres contains about 5,000 cells, and this number might be increased under favourable circumstances to 250,000. All this huge mass of living matter is food which supports animal life and could be made to feed "humanity. The chemists of the future will be making fats and oils, and already on paper they can form starches and sugars. Dr. Barnard scorns the thought that the world must starve because growing plants cannot produce enough food for the billions who will inherit the earth. To believe this, he affirms, is to doubt the courage of the future race and their ability to use, 1 far more effectively, than we can, the natural forces awaiting release from the research laboratories. He looks far ahead and sees science, having unlocked the atom, setting solar energy to work far more efficiently than does the growing grain or forest of to-day. All is a matter of taste. The first man who ate a tomato was doubtless surprised at what he tasted, and so in the future foods made from sawdust, coal and petroleum will becomej palatable to the humans of that time,