Today, we try to create a new food. The University
of Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
Historian Warren Belasco
tells how we tried to solve world hunger fifty
years ago. We'd gone into WW-II badly shaken by the
"dust bowl" droughts of the mid-'30s. We came out
of it anxious about an emerging Asia, with new
political power and a huge population. Malthus's
old message rang in our ears: population rises
exponentially while the food supply can rise only
linearly.
Today, birth control has slowed or even reversed
population growth in all but poor countries where
women are denied education. But in 1950 the forces
aligned against birth control were formidable. It
seemed that our only hope (and only a temporary
hope at that) was to radically improve our food
supply.
Most of the arable land was already under
cultivation. The new plant geneticists and
biochemists were finding ways to improve crop
yields. But that was only incremental gain. We
needed some as-yet-unmined resource. That resource
appeared to be the vast oceans, which cover three
quarters of the Earth.
The severest need was for new sources of complete
protein, and a remarkable plant source showed up in
the late 1940s. It was an algae called
chlorella. Compared with other plants,
scientists expected it to convert twenty times as
much solar energy into protein and to yield fifty
times as many pounds of protein per acre. Dried
chlorella was half protein and rich in other
nutrients.
All this was any journalist's dream. A watery slime
promising to feed the millions. Scientists' hopes
outran their caution. The true manna for feeding
the hungry was here at last.
Making algae edible was the problem that kept
getting swept under the rug. While scientists
complained that people needed to "transcend their
irrational attachments to a few inefficient higher
plants," plankton soup was being tried out in a
Venezuelan leper colony. People who tried to eat
algae talked about the Gag Factor. Promoters
finally stopped talking about eating the vile stuff
directly. They began talking about adding it to
other foods.
Then economics caught up with it. An algae farm
required a huge capital investment. Algae
production was delicate and unstable. Promoters
acknowledged that it cost more than conventional
plant foods, but they thought costs would drop.
Then grain became more abundant and less costly,
while a new gourmet movement swept the country. We
wanted coq au vin, not minimal fuel
for our bodies.
So our fascination with algae burgers and plankton
soup blew away like summer smoke. Hydroponics
lingered only in science fiction. But algae might
yet be resurrected as a food source. For terrible
hunger does stalk the earth. Today, feeding the
world's six billion people is as much a problem of
distribution as it is of shortage. But, sooner or
later, I fear, we really will need some kind of
edible manna to keep our bodies nourished.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
