The Last Roundup?

Electrifying food news came last week from St. Louis. There, in a vat the size of a small room (1,000 cu. ft.), molasses, ammonia, water, air and yeast were being mixed. Every twelve hours this mixture produced a ton of good rich meat--nearly as succulent as the sirloin steak it takes two years to raise on the hoof, much cheaper, and much richer in proteins and vitamins. Furthermore, this new synthetic meat is so easy to make that its inventors already look forward to performing a modern miracle of the loaves & fishes after the war among the foodless peoples of the world.

The new food is actually a new kind of yeast, with added flavors that make it almost indistinguishable from natural foods. Its makers, Anheuser-Busch, have demonstrated its possibilities by serving meals including two delicious kinds of soup, meat loaf, muffins, cheese sticks, even pie--all made of varieties of yeast. Since yeast is the richest known source of B vitamins and contains about 50% protein (twice as much as meat), it surpasses meat as sheer food. And pound for pound of protein, yeast costs only a fifth as much as meat.

As an incidental food, yeast is a veteran: in the Middle Ages, when young & old drank quantities of yeasty beer daily, it was almost a staple of the European diet. The U.S. people eat 200,000,000 lb. of yeast a year, most of it in bread. Fleischmann has developed two varieties now widely used in breakfast foods and as vitamin pills.

Crossbreeding Tells. Three years ago, however, a British chemist named A. C. Thaysen began to explore yeast's possibilities as a straight food. He developed a new strain (from a variety called Torula utilis) with a pleasant, nutty flavor, so cheap to produce (10-c- a lb.) that the British Government has started building a plant in Jamaica to make 2,000 tons of Thaysen's "food yeast" a year.* Chemist Thaysen at most expected to serve his yeast in concentrated doses to supplement a poor diet; despite its pleasant flavor, he did not conceive of Torula utilis as a candidate to upset the world's food economy.

But that idea did occur to a young research geneticist named Carl Lindegren at St. Louis' Washington University. He thought of developing yeast in a variety of flavors resembling staple food tastes. He and Mrs. Lindegren began to crossbreed yeast cells.

As students of Nobel Prize Geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan at Caltech, the Lindegrens had long crossbred fruit flies, which breed a new generation every three weeks. Yeast can produce a new generation in as little as 20 minutes. Yeast cells, usually having no sex, reproduce simply by splitting in two. Under certain conditions yeast develops sexual characteristics and, like other plants, reproduces by means of spores. The Lindegrens cultivated yeast with spores, opened the spore sacs and cross-fertilized them, in this way bred thousands of new varieties of yeast. Finally, they got some to the king's taste.

A Powder for the Future. Anheuser-Busch is now geared to produce millions of pounds a year. The process: 125 lb. of yeast is planted in a vat containing 7,000 gal. of water, a ton and a half of molasses (on whose sugar the yeast feeds) and ammonia (which provides nitrogen that the yeast converts into protein). The mixture is kept warm, stirred by 1,000 cu. ft. of air a minute (without air the yeast would ferment the sugar). After twelve hours the prodigiously growing yeast, having multiplied its original weight 16 times, is a ton of flavorsome food. In its uncooked form it is a dry, light, brownish powder with a meaty, nutty or celery flavor, depending on the variety.

As yet the new food (actually a vegetable-meat) has not been named; it will not be offered under the unappetizing title of "yeast." The Army and Lend-Lease are already buying millions of pounds. Postwar possibilities are obviously enormous, and the product's wildest enthusiasts stop at nothing: observing that a 10-ft. vat can produce as much meat in a year as 1,000 acres of pasture, they fancy that the world's cattle may be heading for the last roundup.

* The Germans also know about Torula utilis, but lack the sugar to produce it in quantity.

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