THE world need never go hungry as long as the sun shines. So the chemists have declared at the Institute of Politics, at Williamstown, Massachusetts; and since scientists say so, it must be so.
Food in the future, it appears, is to be obtained from the light of the sun and the nitrogen of the air. Proteins and carbohydrates-those elements of nutrition which you hardly can escape getting in a good dinner whether you like them or not-will probaly be made in the factory rather than raised on the farm. “Thirty men in a factory the size of a city block can produce in the form of yeast as much food value as 1,000 men working on 75,000 acres under ordinary agricultural conditions.” These words of good cheer come from the same wise men who recently promised to do away with wars over fuel-oil fields by methods of extracting petroleum from coal shale. What the 970 superseded farmers would be doing, and whether they would like their food in the form of yeast when they got it, were questions left to other prophets.
All the rest of us have to do, it seems, is to trust to the chemists. We all like, at times, to imagine to ourselves the happy life of South Sea Islanders, lying under trees in the sun and allowing ripe breadfruit and bananas to drop into their laps. But in these less kindly northern latitudes, where the sun sometimes fails to shine and occasionally it rains, no such easy solutioji of the problem of living is in sight.
To be fair to them, the chemists did admit that-so far as we can see-we never can be free from the care and cultivation of the soil. But H. Foster Bain, Secretary of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, sounded more realistic in his treatment of the world’s task of developing and using its resources. He called some of the chemists’ predictions “fairy promises” which fail to deal with the hard facts of life. He discarded chemical synthesis as a solution of the problem of dealing with limited mineral resourèes. Engineers, he said, are interested in dealing with present values, and not with the hope in some far-off future of “marvelous synthetic substances held up to dazzle our eyes.” He warned the -public against being “lulled to sleep by a false sense of security” as a result of the theoretical possibilities of chemistry, and remarked: “Substitution and synthesis usually require some form of preparation or manufacture. Both of these absorb power. It would be only by happy and rare accident that production of new raw materials produced rather than used power.” Time for many wars and years of troubled peace, he suspected, remained before the needs of modern civilization can be met by synthetic panaceas. There are the words and thought of the practical technician.
Day dreams are delightful. But afterwards it is salutary to direct the mind back to the immediate actualities of a hard-worked world.
Source: The Outlook, Sept 1, 1926
