Food of the Future?

Chemical processes have long been accepted as necessary steps in modem food technology. For example, margarine manufacture involves the hardening by catalytic hydrogenation of oils having too low melting points to allow them to be used in their natural state. This book does not overlook margarine and similar substances, but its main concern is the production of nutrients by their complete synthesis from simple starting materials, such as vitamin A from acetone and acetylene. Chapters deal with the syntheses of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, alcohol, vitamins, and another section covers flavours, odours, and colours. "Texturization" gets special attention, with the forecast that artificial meat may eventually be made from protein fibres, presumably in much the same way as stockings are now made from nylon. In that event some of the protein will doubtless originate from yeast cultures grown on sludge residues from the petroleum industry. If alginates replace the protein "synthetic non-foods" may be produced, capable of satisfying appetite without causing obesity. The topics covered range from solid achievement to others verging on science fiction. Fifteen dedicated volunteers, Pyke reports, lived for nearly five months on a diet of mixed purified nutrients, of which only vitamin B12 has not yet been synthesized by chemists. The taste of the diet can hardly have been attractive, and its cost must have been prohibitive for other than experimental purposes. But while the manufacturing chemist may not yet be able to compete with the sugar cane in the economical production of carbohydrate, or with the dairy cow for the production of highquality protein, he has already bested Nature by producing synthetic vitamins at a fraction of their cost from natural sources. Even the difficult vitamin B12 can be efficiently obtained with biological help from Streptomyces griseus, as a by-product to streptomycin. A vision of the world's ever-increasing population being supported by the diversion of funds from armaments to innumerable, highly sophisticated food factories, using starting materials such as coal and atmospheric nitrogen, may not therefore be entirely fanciful. Inevitably this book has been written with a strong chemical bias, and numerous structural formulae are included. No work by this wellknown author, however, is likely to prove dull to the general reader; he has a flair for seeing old facts from a new angle. Why, for example, has whisky to be matured in oak casks? Something must be slowly extracted from the oak which has no nutritional or intrinsic value, but which persuades the connoisseur to pay handsomely for the authentic article. Perhaps the day will come when the chemist will succeed in making "instant whisky" by the addition of "matured oak extract" and water to chemically pure alcohol. Or will the simulation of whisky, and other timehonoured foods and drinks, prove even more difficult than now expected ? Possibly hope for the future lies in the invention of entirely new products, with attractions of their own, rather than copying old ones.