Food Front

War-made food shortages have brought many an edible ugly duckling to the table. Some recent examples:

> Apple syrup (to supplement corn and maple syrups), made by concentrating the juice of fallen and cull apples to honey-thickness, was announced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Research Laboratory at Philadelphia. But its first wide use is industrial: to replace war-scarce glycerin for keeping tobacco moist.

> The outer green leaves of lettuce, rich in food values but long eschewed by packers and housewives, are being salvaged. Jorgen D. Bering at Salinas, Calif, is preparing to process some of the 132,000 tons of lettuce culls discarded from the 14,000 carloads of lettuce to be shipped from Salinas this season. After being dried and concentrated, each ton of culls will give 80 Ib. of a protein-rich meal suitable for cattle feed, also for the extraction of vitamin A. The amount of vitamin available from U.S. waste lettuce is close to the entire output of the U.S. fisheries industry, now handicapped by war.

>Swedish Inventor J. G. W. Gentele has been awarded a U.S. patent for the dehydration of complete cooked dishes: soups, puddings, pork & beans, etc.

> Seedless tomatoes, no different from ordinary tomatoes in color, flavor, vitamins or minerals, can now be produced by treating the plants with fumes of naphthoxyacetic acid.

>Dr. Emil J. Rausch of the Arizona State Department of Health last month started a campaign to revive a pre-World War I product of the German colonies in Africa: dried banana loaves. The fully ripened bananas are dried on the plantation, pressed into 100-lb. blocks to be shipped in bulk with a 90% saving in load space, no loss by spoilage.

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