AGE OF SYNTHESIS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 499, 31 October 1928, Page 15

AGE OF SYNTHESIS

FOODS OF FUTURE SAWDUST. COAL. PETROLEUM Those timorous people who foresee the human race dying of starvation when the world is over-populated will find comfort in a vision of the future sketched by the well-known American chemist, Dr. H. E. Barnard. Here is his menu for future ages: Breakfast—Foods from sunlight sources. Luncheon—Foods from the air. Dinner —Foods from sea water. Dr. Barnard looks ahead to a long distant future when the human race will have forgotten the taste of bread and meat, and no longer desires them. He even hints that men and women of that period may be endowed with three stomachs apiece, for he remarks casually that already some animals have three stomachs which enable them to digest foods which man with his one “tummy” dare not touch. But before man learns to rely on synthetic foods, Dr. Barnard foresees the opening of “food frontiers”—such as the Amazon River Valley and other great swamps and forests in tropical areas able to supply sustenance to famished humanity. Brazil, he explains, could support a population two-thirds of that occupying the world to-day, anl Africa could feed more millions than now inhabit the earth.

He opens up a vista of possibilities when the food reservoirs of the sea are put to man’s use. A litre of water, he explains, taken from the Atlantic at a depth of 500 metres contains about 5,000 cells and this number might be increased under favourable circumstances to 250,000. All this huge mass of living matter is food which supports animat life and could be made to feed humanity. The chemists of the future will ba making fats and oils, and already on paper they can form starches and sugars. Dr. Barnard scorns the thought, that the world must starve because growing plants cannot produce enough food for the billions who will inherit the earth. To believe this, he affirms, is tol doubt the courag,of the future race and their ability to use, far more effectively than we can, the natural forces awaiting release from the research laboratories. He looks far ahead and sees science, having unlocked the atom, setting solar energy to work far more efficently than does the growing gTain or forest of to-day. All is a matter of taste. The first man who ate a tomato was doubtless surprised at what he tasted, and so, in the fture, foods made from sawdust, coal, and petroleum will become palatable to the humans of that time.