Looking Back: New Source of Food

From June 1954

A GIFT OF GOD FOR THE WORLD’S NEED

A rich new source of food has suddenly emerged from reliable laboratory researches to become what is described by Unesco News Service as the year’s most important news from science. It is good news for a world which is already suffering from inadequate nutrition and whose food problems will become more acute within the coming decades as lives are lengthened and living conditions improved.

This is not a synthetic food. It is a natural food, produced by green plants which have been growing in the waters of the earth for millions of years – unused. They are known as algae. Of these, there is one genus, known as chlorella, which has now been carefully studied and has been shown to yield at least twenty times more food per acre than any present food crop.

It is odd that so few wild plants have been domesticated in recent centuries. Thousands of years ago primitive man began to domesticate the grains, seeds, roots and green leaves, upon which all animal life depends. These were gradually improved to yield far more food than did the original wild grasses and herbs. This progress has been especially great in recent years. But even this would not give enough to feed the world well. New sources of food must be found.

Answer to the need?

The tiny green algae that grow freely in ponds, rivers and in the seas, come close to meeting this ideal. They have a far higher content of the precious body-building protein than any other plant contains. The really startling fact, however, is the rate at which the algae grow. They can produce 40 tons of dry food per acre per year. This is about 20 times the production of conventional food plants. A good yield of wheat, for instance, is 2 tons per acre, per year, while rice seldom produces more than one ton. These figures are based on recent laboratory and small-scale production. But this study is only just begun. Many improvements can be foreseen, especially in the use of still better varieties of algae. It has been predicted, for example, that production could be increased to more than 110 tons per acre. At this rate, assuming a protein content of 50 per cent, half the protein food requirements of the entire human race could be obtained from a million acres.

Is it palatable? In its present form and variety it has a vegetable flavour, resembling that of raw lima beans or raw pumpkin. It was fed for some time as ‘plankton soup’ to the patients in a Venezuelan leper colony, who found it both palatable and nutritious. Palatable breads, noodles, soups and even ice-cream containing substantial proportions of chlorella have been prepared. It promises well also as cattle-fodder.

The publication which has introduced chlorella to the public is a monograph entitled “Algal Culture, from Laboratory to Pilot Plant” issued by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The international interest in chlorella is shown by the fact that the book contains chapters written by research experts in the Netherlands, England, Japan, Germany, Venezuela and Israel.

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