Food Front

Wartime developments on the food fronts:

Queer Fish. To teach people to enjoy kinds of fish now thrown back into the sea or ground into fertilizer, the Government is publishing Wartime Fish Cookery. It contains recipes for shark steak, skate chowder, the plentiful but oily menhaden, the humble but edible alewife, the delicious ocean pout, of which Massachusetts fisheries have recently sold huge quantities. Whale meat (red but fishy) was sold in Boston during the last war.

Neglected Mussels. The edible mussel, points out the Industrial Bulletin, is a much-neglected food source. Europeans have always preferred mussels to clams--kitchen middens of the Old World contain no clamshells. Fried or frittered, roasted or chowdered, mussels may be eaten, like oysters, during the "R" months. But while oysters are not harvested during the summer because they are propagating, summer mussels are not harvested because they are dangerous if they have been feeding on a variety of plankton (Gonyaulax catenella), which contains a powerful alkaloid poison. Diggers should pass up the long, purplish-yellow mussels, tough and poor-tasting, in favor of the slate-black, chunky variety.

Synthetic Snacks. British scientists have evolved a synthetic, laboratory-made food called turula utilis ("useful cells"). Said Britain's Department of Scientific & Industrial Research last fortnight: "Our process makes it possible to manufacture B vitamins and high-grade protein in hours rather than the months it would take to produce meat." Turula is a yeast, not of the baking or brewing varieties, grown by germ culture methods in sugar or molasses. It may be served as a soup, powder, flake or paste, may be sprinkled on porridge, spread on bread, mixed with other foods. Its flavor is cautiously described as "palatable." It is rich in protein, carbon and sulfur, has a high vitamin B content.

Dry Juice. Dehydrated like blood plasma (which is frozen, dried under vacuum), a new powdered orange juice preserves both the orange flavor and the valuable vitamin C (ascorbic acid). Reported one sampler of the powdered juice mixed with water: "The color is the same, the texture is the same as strained orange juice--even to the tiny particles clinging to the side of the glass." Developed by California Food Research Institute, the process is approaching the commercial stage.

Grain Greens. From fresh wheat, oats, rye, barley and other grains and grasses, Cerophyl Laboratories of Kansas City, Mo. make a dried cereal leaf product called Grass-Tips. The shoots are cut when the first joint appears on the stem, are dried, powdered and made into pellets as green as the fields from which they come. They taste a little like a blade of grass. All vitamins (except D) are present, as well as the less-known grass-juice factor. Five generations of guinea pigs have been raised on nothing but Grass-Tips pellets and water. Quaker Oats Co. and American Dairies, Inc. own the laboratories.

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