EDIBLE WOOD

Waipa Post, Volume 38, Issue 2269, 16 February 1929, Page 3

EDIBLE WOOD

FOOD POSSIBILITIES.

Proposals that wood may be used as a food do not mean that one may stop along the highway and lunch on a few pine boughs nor attempt to appease his hunger by taking a bite out of a handy hickory tree. The German chemist who has announced that wood for nourishment is a possibility of the future makes it clear that some chemical processes are necessary before trees may be served up in salads, stews, or sandwiches. For the present therefore, no boy need be disturbed over any prospect of being sent to\ the shed to cut up a portion of wood for dinner (says the Christian Science Monitor).

The possibilities of wood as a food lie only in the fact that there is vegetable matter in wood. This, however, is reclaimed only, after technical processes which make such reclamation a rather expensive proposition from a commercial standpoints It is said that when a common little pulp molecule is left alone—presumably not annoyed by extraneous activities —it becomes sugar of starch. Stir in one well-selected little molecule of water, and the result is an edible carbonhydrate. There is nothing else to do —no half a cup of milk, the white of an egg, nor bake to a deep brown—just two little molecules, one water and one wood, and in a jiffy it done.

But all this is not as simple as it seems. It is a complex laboratory undertaking which cannot be transferred to the field of industrial activity until many difficulties have been overcome. In the meanwhile it is to be hoped that the practice of a misguided farmer, whoi is said to have coaxed his horse into a sawdust diet by placing green glasses over its eyes, will not be generally adopted.