VEGETABLE PAPER.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 145, 11 August 1911, Page 7

VEGETABLE PAPER.

Whoa a paper-bag cook demands that the bags shall be of “vegetable paper,” it sounds appropriate, but rather puzzling. For arc! not all, or nearly all, varieties of paper manufactured from vegetable substances? Linen rags vciil first occur to us us a. foundation of paper palp, and linen itself is neither animal nor mineral, ft is not. however, a gracious idea that food should Ire enclosed in stuff prepared from the world’s rag-bags, and passed through the many chemical processes necessary for cleansing. So the new cookery demands that our substitutes, for saucepans shall be the pleasanter type of thing derived direct from the vegetable kingdom, and not applied beforehand ro any other use than that of cookery. There is plenty, of choice amongst papers made without a rag in them. Almost every plant that grows will yield paper material, although few, perhaps, go satisfactorily through all the processes of complete manufacture. Wood, straw, maize husks, and that excellent plant called “asparto,” “alfa,” or “diss,” supply the greater part of the world’s writing and wrapping paper. ■ In the United States, some time ago, the “Philadelphia Record” made a test as to' the speed with which a tree in the forest could be converted into a newspaper ready for sale. The time, from the first stroke of the axe upon the tree, to the.shouting of the “latest edition” by stronglunged newsboys, was precisely 22 hours. A Sunday newspaper in the States, using about 100 tons of paper for one issue, is credited with consuming 12b 'cords of wood, and so clearing off’ 'about six acres 'of wellgrown spruce timber laud for every week that it appears. In Europe pine and aspen woods have been converted into paper, and in Japan, .there) is an immense consumption of tho “paper mulberry,” with a considerable use of;.tlip hark of various other trees. Roods and rushes, of course, have been in favour since the earliest Egyptian split and pressed and dried the membrane of the papyrus sheath. Wool, fur, and leather waste are amongst the few purely animal substances applied to paper-making; but cooks may be happy to know'that, excluding these, and the doubtful, product worked up from rags hud from collected waste paper, the mills deal really with most poetical stuffs. These bags, according to their place of origin, may be made from American spruce, or grass from the South of Spain. Or they may be manufactured in some manner too mysterious to understand, from bamboos, hopviucs, or mallow stems; from yellow iris, or French beans; from bryony

roots, pine-apple leaves, and seagrass; from broom and heather, or from Mew Zealand flax.