SOLIDIFIED SUNSHINE
All life and all that life accomplishes depend upon the supply of solar energy stored in the form of food. The chief sources of this vital energy are the fats and the sugars. The former contain two and a quarter times the potential energy of the latter. Both, when completely purified, consist of nothing but carbon, hydrogen and oxygen; elements that are to be found freely everywhere in air and water. So when the sunny southland exports fats and oils, starches and sugar, it is then sending away nothing material but what comes back to it in the next wind. What it is sending to the regions of more slanting sunshine is merely some of the surplus of the radiant energy it has received so abundantly, compacted for convenience into a portable and edible form.
In previous chapters I have dealt with some of the uses of cotton, its employment for cloth, for paper, for artificial fibers, for explosives, and for plastics. But I have ignored the thing that cotton is attached to and for which, in the economy of nature, the fibers are formed; that is, the seed. It is as though I had described the aeroplane and ignored the aviator whom it was designed to carry. But in this neglect I am but following the example of the human race, which for three thousand years used the fiber but made no use of the seed except to plant the next crop.
Just as mankind is now divided into the two great classes, the wheat-eaters and the rice-eaters, so the ancient world was divided into the wool-wearers and the cotton-wearers. The people of India wore cotton; the Europeans wore wool. When the Greeks under Alexander fought their way to the Far East they were surprised to find wool growing on trees. Later travelers returning from Cathay told of the same marvel and travelers who stayed at home and wrote about what they had not seen, like Sir John Maundeville, misunderstood these reports and elaborated a legend of a tree that bore live lambs as fruit. Here, for instance, is how a French poetical botanist, Delacroix, described it in 1791, as translated from his Latin verse:
Upon a stalk is fixed a living brute,
A rooted plant bears quadruped for fruit;
It has a fleece, nor does it want for eyes,
And from its brows two wooly horns arise.
The rude and simple country people say
It is an animal that sleeps by day
And wakes at night, though rooted to the ground,
To feed on grass within its reach around.
But modern commerce broke down the barrier between East and West. A new cotton country, the best in the world, was discovered in America. Cotton invaded England and after a hard fight, with fists as well as finance, wool was beaten in its chief stronghold. Cotton became King and the wool-sack in the House of Lords lost its symbolic significance.
Still two-thirds of the cotton crop, the seed, was wasted and it is only within the last fifty years that methods of using it have been developed to any extent.
The cotton crop of the United States for 1917 amounted to about 11,000,000 bales of 500 pounds each. When the Great War broke out and no cotton could be exported to Germany and little to England the South was in despair, for cotton went down to five or six cents a pound. The national Government, regardless of states' rights, was called upon for aid and everybody was besought to "buy a bale." Those who responded to this patriotic appeal were well rewarded, for cotton rose as the war went on and sold at twenty-nine cents a pound.
PRODUCTS AND USES OF COTTONSEED
PRODUCTS AND USES OF COTTONSEED—Continued
But the chemist has added some $150,000,000 a year to the value of the crop by discovering ways of utilizing the cottonseed that used to be thrown away or burned as fuel. The genealogical table of the progeny of the cottonseed herewith printed will give some idea of their variety. If you will examine a cottonseed you will see first that there is a fine fuzz of cotton fiber sticking to it. These linters can be removed by machinery and used for any purpose where length of fiber is not essential. For instance, they may be nitrated as described in previous articles and used for making smokeless powder or celluloid.
On cutting open the seed you will observe that it consists of an oily, mealy kernel encased in a thin brown hull. The hulls, amounting to 700 or 900 pounds in a ton of seed, were formerly burned. Now, however, they bring from $4 to $10 a ton because they can be ground up into cattle-feed or paper stock or used as fertilizer.
The kernel of the cottonseed on being pressed yields a yellow oil and leaves a mealy cake. This last, mixed with the hulls, makes a good fodder for fattening cattle. Also, adding twenty-five per cent. of the refined cottonseed meal to our war bread made it more nutritious and no less palatable. Cottonseed meal contains about forty per cent. of protein and is therefore a highly concentrated and very valuable feeding stuff. Before the war we were exporting nearly half a million tons of cottonseed meal to Europe, chiefly to Germany and Denmark, where it is used for dairy cows. The British yeoman, his country's pride, has not yet been won over to the use of any such newfangled fodder and consequently the British manufacturer could not compete with his continental rivals in the seed-crushing business, for he could not dispose of his meal-cake by-product as did they.
Photo by Press Illustrating Service Cottonseed Oil As It Is Squeezed From The Seed By The Presses
Photo by Press Illustrating Service
Cottonseed Oil As It Comes From The Compressors Flowing Out Of The Faucets
When cold it is firm and white like lard
Let us now turn to the most valuable of the cottonseed products, the oil. The seed contains about twenty per cent. of oil, most of which can be squeezed out of the hot seeds by hydraulic pressure. It comes out as a red liquid of a disagreeable odor. This is decolorized, deodorized and otherwise purified in various ways: by treatment with alkalies or acids, by blowing air and steam through it, by shaking up with fuller's earth, by settling and filtering. The refined product is a yellow oil, suitable for table use. Formerly, on account of the popular prejudice against any novel food products, it used to masquerade as olive oil. Now, however, it boldly competes with its ancient rival in the lands of the olive tree and America ships some 700,000 barrels of cottonseed oil a year to the Mediterranean. The Turkish Government tried to check the spread of cottonseed oil by calling it an adulterant and prohibiting its mixture with olive oil. The result was that the sale of Turkish olive oil fell off because people found its flavor too strong when undiluted. Italy imports cottonseed oil and exports her olive oil. Denmark imports cottonseed meal and margarine and exports her butter.
Northern nations are accustomed to hard fats and do not take to oils for cooking or table use as do the southerners. Butter and lard are preferred to olive oil and ghee. But this does not rule out cottonseed. It can be combined with the hard fats of animal or vegetable origin in margarine or it may itself be hardened by hydrogen.
To understand this interesting reaction which is profoundly affecting international relations it will be necessary to dip into the chemistry of the subject. Here are the symbols of the chief ingredients of the fats and oils. Please look at them.
| Linoleic acid | C18H32O2 |
| Oleic acid | C18H34O2 |
| Stearic acid | C18H36O2 |
Don't skip these because you have not studied chemistry. That's why I am giving them to you. If you had studied chemistry you would know them without my telling. Just examine them and you will discover the secret. You will see that all three are composed of the same elements, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Notice next the number of atoms in each element as indicated by the little low figures on the right of each letter. You observe that all three contain the same number of atoms of carbon and oxygen but differ in the amount of hydrogen. This trifling difference in composition makes a great difference in behavior. The less the hydrogen the lower the melting point. Or to say the same thing in other words, fatty substances low in hydrogen are apt to be liquids and those with a full complement of hydrogen atoms are apt to be solids at the ordinary temperature of the air. It is common to call the former "oils" and the latter "fats," but that implies too great a dissimilarity, for the distinction depends on whether we are living in the tropics or the arctic. It is better, therefore, to lump them all together and call them "soft fats" and "hard fats," respectively.
Fats of the third order, the stearic group, are called "saturated" because they have taken up all the hydrogen they can hold. Fats of the other two groups are called "unsaturated." The first, which have the least hydrogen, are the most eager for more. If hydrogen is not handy they will take up other things, for instance oxygen. Linseed oil, which consists largely, as the name implies, of linoleic acid, will absorb oxygen on exposure to the air and become hard. That is why it is used in painting. Such oils are called "drying" oils, although the hardening process is not really drying, since they contain no water, but is oxidation. The "semi-drying oils," those that will harden somewhat on exposure to the air, include the oils of cottonseed, corn, sesame, soy bean and castor bean. Olive oil and peanut oil are "non-drying" and contain oleic compounds (olein). The hard fats, such as stearin, palmitin and margarin, are mostly of animal origin, tallow and lard, though coconut and palm oil contain a large proportion of such saturated compounds.
Though the chemist talks of the fatty "acids," nobody else would call them so because they are not sour. But they do behave like the acids in forming salts with bases. The alkali salts of the fatty acids are known to us as soaps. In the natural fats they exist not as free acids but as salts of an organic base, glycerin, as I explained in a previous chapter. The natural fats and oils consist of complex mixtures of the glycerin compounds of these acids (known as olein, stearin, etc.), as well as various others of a similar sort. If you will set a bottle of salad oil in the ice-box you will see it separate into two parts. The white, crystalline solid that separates out is largely stearin. The part that remains liquid is largely olein. You might separate them by filtering it cold and if then you tried to sell the two products you would find that the hard fat would bring a higher price than the oil, either for food or soap. If you tried to keep them you would find that the hard fat kept neutral and "sweet" longer than the other. You may remember that the perfumes (as well as their odorous opposites) were mostly unsaturated compounds. So we find that it is the free and unsaturated fatty acids that cause butter and oil to become rank and rancid.
Obviously, then, we could make money if we could turn soft, unsaturated fats like olein into hard, saturated fats like stearin. Referring to the symbols we see that all that is needed to effect the change is to get the former to unite with hydrogen. This requires a little coaxing. The coaxer is called a catalyst. A catalyst, as I have previously explained, is a substance that by its mere presence causes the union of two other substances that might otherwise remain separate. For that reason the catalyst is referred to as "a chemical parson." Finely divided metals have a strong catalytic action. Platinum sponge is excellent but too expensive. So in this case nickel is used. A nickel salt mixed with charcoal or pumice is reduced to the metallic state by heating in a current of hydrogen. Then it is dropped into the tank of oil and hydrogen gas is blown through. The hydrogen may be obtained by splitting water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen, by means of the electrical current, or by passing steam over spongy iron which takes out the oxygen. The stream of hydrogen blown through the hot oil converts the linoleic acid to oleic and then the oleic into stearic. If you figured up the weights from the symbols given above you would find that it takes about one pound of hydrogen to convert a hundred pounds of olein to stearin and the cost is only about one cent a pound. The nickel is unchanged and is easily separated. A trace of nickel may remain in the product, but as it is very much less than the amount dissolved when food is cooked in nickel-plated vessels it cannot be regarded as harmful.
Even more unsaturated fats may be hydrogenated. Fish oil has hitherto been almost unusable because of its powerful and persistent odor. This is chiefly due to a fatty acid which properly bears the uneuphonious name of clupanodonic acid and has the composition of C18H28O2. By comparing this with the symbol of the odorless stearic acid, C18H36O2, you will see that all the rank fish oil lacks to make it respectable is eight hydrogen atoms. A Japanese chemist, Tsujimoto, has discovered how to add them and now the reformed fish oil under the names of "talgol" and "candelite" serves for lubricant and even enters higher circles as a soap or food.
This process of hardening fats by hydrogenation resulted from the experiments of a French chemist, Professor Sabatier of Toulouse, in the last years of the last century, but, as in many other cases, the Germans were the first to take it up and profit by it. Before the war the copra or coconut oil from the British Asiatic colonies of India, Ceylon and Malaya went to Germany at the rate of $15,000,000 a year. The palm kernels grown in British West Africa were shipped, not to Liverpool, but to Hamburg, $19,000,000 worth annually. Here the oil was pressed out and used for margarin and the residual cake used for feeding cows produced butter or for feeding hogs produced lard. Half of the copra raised in the British possessions was sent to Germany and half of the oil from it was resold to the British margarin candle and soap makers at a handsome profit. The British chemists were not blind to this, but they could do nothing, first because the English politician was wedded to free trade, second, because the English farmer would not use oil cake for his stock. France was in a similar situation. Marseilles produced 15,500,000 gallons of oil from peanuts grown largely in the French African colonies—but shipped the oil-cake on to Hamburg. Meanwhile the Germans, in pursuit of their policy of attaining economic independence, were striving to develop their own tropical territory. The subjects of King George who because they had the misfortune to live in India were excluded from the British South African dominions or mistreated when they did come, were invited to come to German East Africa and set to raising peanuts in rivalry to French Senegal and British Coromandel. Before the war Germany got half of the Egyptian cottonseed and half of the Philippine copra. That is one of the reasons why German warships tried to check Dewey at Manila in 1898 and German troops tried to conquer Egypt in 1915.
But the tide of war set the other way and the German plantations of palmnuts and peanuts in Africa have come into British possession and now the British Government is starting an educational campaign to teach their farmers to feed oil cake like the Germans and their people to eat peanuts like the Americans.
The Germans shut off from the tropical fats supply were hard up for food and for soap, for lubricants and for munitions. Every person was given a fat card that reduced his weekly allowance to the minimum. Millers were required to remove the germs from their cereals and deliver them to the war department. Children were set to gathering horse-chestnuts, elderberries, linden-balls, grape seeds, cherry stones and sunflower heads, for these contain from six to twenty per cent. of oil. Even the blue-bottle fly—hitherto an idle creature for whom Beelzebub found mischief—was conscripted into the national service and set to laying eggs by the billion on fish refuse. Within a few days there is a crop of larvae which, to quote the "Chemische Zentralblatt," yields forty-five grams per kilogram of a yellow oil. This product, we should hope, is used for axle-grease and nitroglycerin, although properly purified it would be as nutritious as any other—to one who has no imagination. Driven to such straits Germany would have given a good deal for one of those tropical islands that we are so careless about.
It might have been supposed that since the United States possessed the best land in the world for the production of cottonseed, coconuts, peanuts, and corn that it would have led all other countries in the utilization of vegetable oils for food. That this country has not so used its advantage is due to the fact that the new products have not merely had to overcome popular conservatism, ignorance and prejudice—hard things to fight in any case—but have been deliberately checked and hampered by the state and national governments in defense of vested interests. The farmer vote is a power that no politician likes to defy and the dairy business in every state was thoroughly organized. In New York the oleomargarin industry that in 1879 was turning out products valued at more than $5,000,000 a year was completely crushed out by state legislation.[2] The output of the United States, which in 1902 had risen to 126,000,000 pounds, was cut down to 43,000,000 pounds in 1909 by federal legislation. According to the disingenuous custom of American lawmakers the Act of 1902 was passed through Congress as a "revenue measure," although it meant a loss to the Government of more than three million dollars a year over what might be produced by a straight two cents a pound tax. A wholesale dealer in oleomargarin was made to pay a higher license than a wholesale liquor dealer. The federal law put a tax of ten cents a pound on yellow oleomargarin and a quarter of a cent a pound on the uncolored. But people—doubtless from pure prejudice—prefer a yellow spread for their bread, so the economical housewife has to work over her oleomargarin with the annatto which is given to her when she buys a package or, if the law prohibits this, which she is permitted to steal from an open box on the grocer's counter. A plausible pretext for such legislation is afforded by the fact that the butter substitutes are so much like butter that they cannot be easily distinguished from it unless the use of annatto is permitted to butter and prohibited to its competitors. Fradulent sales of substitutes of any kind ought to be prevented, but the recent pure food legislation in America has shown that it is possible to secure truthful labeling without resorting to such drastic measures. In Europe the laws against substitution were very strict, but not devised to restrict the industry. Consequently the margarin output of Germany doubled in the five years preceding the war and the output of England tripled. In Denmark the consumption of margarin rose from 8.8 pounds per capita in 1890 to 32.6 pounds in 1912. Yet the butter business, Denmark's pride, was not injured, and Germany and England imported more butter than ever before. Now that the price of butter in America has gone over the seventy-five cent mark Congress may conclude that it no longer needs to be protected against competition.
The "compound lards" or "lard compounds," consisting usually of cottonseed oil and oleo-stearin, although the latter may now be replaced by hardened oil, met with the same popular prejudice and attempted legislative interference, but succeeded more easily in coming into common use under such names as "Cottosuet," "Kream Krisp," "Kuxit," "Korno," "Cottolene" and "Crisco."
Oleomargarin, now generally abbreviated to margarin, originated, like many other inventions, in military necessity. The French Government in 1869 offered a prize for a butter substitute for the army that should be cheaper and better than butter in that it did not spoil so easily. The prize was won by a French chemist, Mége-Mouries, who found that by chilling beef fat the solid stearin could be separated from an oil (oleo) which was the substantially same as that in milk and hence in butter. Neutral lard acts the same.
This discovery of how to separate the hard and soft fats was followed by improved methods for purifying them and later by the process for converting the soft into the hard fats by hydrogenation. The net result was to put into the hands of the chemist the ability to draw his materials at will from any land and from the vegetable and animal kingdoms and to combine them as he will to make new fat foods for every use; hard for summer, soft for winter; solid for the northerners and liquid for the southerners; white, yellow or any other color, and flavored to suit the taste. The Hindu can eat no fat from the sacred cow; the Mohammedan and the Jew can eat no fat from the abhorred pig; the vegetarian will touch neither; other people will take both. No matter, all can be accommodated.
All the fats and oils, though they consist of scores of different compounds, have practically the same food value when freed from the extraneous matter that gives them their characteristic flavors. They are all practically tasteless and colorless. The various vegetable and animal oils and fats have about the same digestibility, 98 per cent.,[3] and are all ordinarily completely utilized in the body, supplying it with two and a quarter times as much energy as any other food.
It does not follow, however, that there is no difference in the products. The margarin men accuse butter of harboring tuberculosis germs from which their product, because it has been heated or is made from vegetable fats, is free. The butter men retort that margarin is lacking in vitamines, those mysterious substances which in minute amounts are necessary for life and especially for growth. Both the claim and the objection lose a large part of their force where the margarin, as is customarily the case, is mixed with butter or churned up with milk to give it the familiar flavor. But the difficulty can be easily overcome. The milk used for either butter or margarin should be free or freed from disease germs. If margarin is altogether substituted for butter, the necessary vitamines may be sufficiently provided by milk, eggs and greens.
Owing to these new processes all the fatty substances of all lands have been brought into competition with each other. In such a contest the vegetable is likely to beat the animal and the southern to win over the northern zones. In Europe before the war the proportion of the various ingredients used to make butter substitutes was as follows:
| AVERAGE COMPOSITION OF EUROPEAN MARGARIN | |
| Per Cent. | |
| Animal hard fats | 25 |
| Vegetable hard fats | 35 |
| Copra | 29 |
| Palm-kernel | 6 |
| Vegetable soft fats | 26 |
| Cottonseed | 13 |
| Peanut | 6 |
| Sesame | 6 |
| Soya-bean | 1 |
| Water, milk, salt | 14 |
| ___ | |
| 100 |
This is not the composition of any particular brand but the average of them all. The use of a certain amount of the oil of the sesame seed is required by the laws of Germany and Denmark because it can be easily detected by a chemical color test and so serves to prevent the margarin containing it from being sold as butter. "Open sesame!" is the password to these markets. Remembering that margarin originally was made up entirely of animal fats, soft and hard, we can see from the above figures how rapidly they are being displaced by the vegetable fats. The cottonseed and peanut oils have replaced the original oleo oil and the tropical oils from the coconut (copra) and African palm are crowding out the animal hard fats. Since now we can harden at will any of the vegetable oils it is possible to get along altogether without animal fats. Such vegetable margarins were originally prepared for sale in India, but proved unexpectedly popular in Europe, and are now being introduced into America. They are sold under various trade names suggesting their origin, such as "palmira," "palmona," "milkonut," "cocose," "coconut oleomargarin" and "nucoa nut margarin." The last named is stated to be made of coconut oil (for the hard fat) and peanut oil (for the soft fat), churned up with a culture of pasteurized milk (to impart the butter flavor). The law requires such a product to be branded "oleomargarine" although it is not. Such cases of compulsory mislabeling are not rare. You remember the "Pigs is Pigs" story.
Peanut butter has won its way into the American menu without any camouflage whatever, and as a salad oil it is almost equally frank about its lowly origin. This nut, which grows on a vine instead of a tree, and is dug from the ground like potatoes instead of being picked with a pole, goes by various names according to locality, peanuts, ground-nuts, monkey-nuts, arachides and goobers. As it takes the place of cotton oil in some of its products so it takes its place in the fields and oilmills of Texas left vacant by the bollweevil. The once despised peanut added some $56,000,000 to the wealth of the South in 1916. The peanut is rich in the richest of foods, some 50 per cent. of oil and 30 per cent. of protein. The latter can be worked up into meat substitutes that will make the vegetarian cease to envy his omnivorous neighbor. Thanks largely to the chemist who has opened these new fields of usefulness, the peanut-raiser got $1.25 a bushel in 1917 instead of the 30 cents that he got four years before.
It would be impossible to enumerate all the available sources of vegetable oils, for all seeds and nuts contain more or less fatty matter and as we become more economical we shall utilize of what we now throw away. The germ of the corn kernel, once discarded in the manufacture of starch, now yields a popular table oil. From tomato seeds, one of the waste products of the canning factory, can be extracted 22 per cent. of an edible oil. Oats contain 7 per cent. of oil. From rape seed the Japanese get 20,000 tons of oil a year. To the sources previously mentioned may be added pumpkin seeds, poppy seeds, raspberry seeds, tobacco seeds, cockleburs, hazelnuts, walnuts, beechnuts and acorns.
The oil-bearing seeds of the tropics are innumerable and will become increasingly essential to the inhabitants of northern lands. It was the realization of this that brought on the struggle of the great powers for the possession of tropical territory which, for years before, they did not think worth while raising a flag over. No country in the future can consider itself safe unless it has secure access to such sources. We had a sharp lesson in this during the war. Palm oil, it seems, is necessary for the manufacture of tinplate, an industry that was built up in the United States by the McKinley tariff. The British possessions in West Africa were the chief source of palm oil and the Germans had the handling of it. During the war the British Government assumed control of the palm oil products of the British and German colonies and prohibited their export to other countries than England. Americans protested and beseeched, but in vain. The British held, quite correctly, that they needed all the oil they could get for food and lubrication and nitroglycerin. But the British also needed canned meat from America for their soldiers and when it was at length brought to their attention that the packers could not ship meat unless they had cans and that cans could not be made without tin and that tin could not be made without palm oil the British Government consented to let us buy a little of their palm oil. The lesson is that of Voltaire's story, "Candide," "Let us cultivate our own garden"—and plant a few palm trees in it—also rubber trees, but that is another story.
The international struggle for oil led to the partition of the Pacific as the struggle for rubber led to the partition of Africa. Theodor Weber, as Stevenson says, "harried the Samoans" to get copra much as King Leopold of Belgium harried the Congoese to get caoutchouc. It was Weber who first fully realized that the South Sea islands, formerly given over to cannibals, pirates and missionaries, might be made immensely valuable through the cultivation of the coconut palms. When the ripe coconut is split open and exposed to the sun the meat dries up and shrivels and in this form, called "copra," it can be cut out and shipped to the factory where the oil is extracted and refined. Weber while German Consul in Samoa was also manager of what was locally known as "the long-handled concern" (Deutsche Handels und Plantagen Gesellschaft der Südsee Inseln zu Hamburg), a pioneer commercial and semi-official corporation that played a part in the Pacific somewhat like the British Hudson Bay Company in Canada or East India Company in Hindustan. Through the agency of this corporation on the start Germany acquired a virtual monopoly of the transportation and refining of coconut oil and would have become the dominant power in the Pacific if she had not been checked by force of arms. In Apia Bay in 1889 and again in Manila Bay in 1898 an American fleet faced a German fleet ready for action while a British warship lay between. So we rescued the Philippines and Samoa from German rule and in 1914 German power was eliminated from the Pacific. During the ten years before the war, the production of copra in the German islands more than doubled and this was only the beginning of the business. Now these islands have been divided up among Australia, New Zealand and Japan, and these countries are planning to take care of the copra.
But although we get no extension of territory from the war we still have the Philippines and some of the Samoan Islands, and these are capable of great development. From her share of the Samoan Islands Germany got a million dollars' worth of copra and we might get more from ours. The Philippines now lead the world in the production of copra, but Java is a close second and Ceylon not far behind. If we do not look out we will be beaten both by the Dutch and the British, for they are undertaking the cultivation of the coconut on a larger scale and in a more systematic way. According to an official bulletin of the Philippine Government a coconut plantation should bring in "dividends ranging from 10 to 75 per cent. from the tenth to the hundredth year." And this being printed in 1913 figured the price of copra at 3-1/2 cents, whereas it brought 4-1/2 cents in 1918, so the prospect is still more encouraging. The copra is half fat and can be cheaply shipped to America, where it can be crushed in the southern oilmills when they are not busy on cottonseed or peanuts. But even this cost of transportation can be reduced by extracting the oil in the islands and shipping it in bulk like petroleum in tank steamers.
In the year ending June, 1918, the United States imported from the Philippines 155,000,000 pounds of coconut oil worth $18,000,000 and 220,000,000 pounds of copra worth $10,000,000. But this was about half our total importations; the rest of it we had to get from foreign countries. Panama palms may give us a little relief from this dependence on foreign sources. In 1917 we imported 19,000,000 whole coconuts from Panama valued at $700,000.
SPLITTING COCONUTS ON THE ISLAND OF TAHITI After drying in the sun the meat is picked and the oil extracted for making coconut butter
From "America's Munitions"
THE ELECTRIC CURRENT PASSING THROUGH SALT WATER IN THESE CELLS DECOMPOSES THE SALT INTO CAUSTIC SODA AND CHLORINE GAS
There were eight rooms like this in the Edgewood plant, capable of producing 200,000 pounds of chlorine a day
A new form of fat that has rapidly come into our market is the oil of the soya or soy bean. In 1918 we imported over 300,000,000 pounds of soy-bean oil, mostly from Manchuria. The oil is used in manufacture of substitutes for butter, lard, cheese, milk and cream, as well as for soap and paint. The soy-bean can be raised in the United States wherever corn can be grown and provides provender for man and beast. The soy meal left after the extraction of the oil makes a good cattle food and the fermented juice affords the shoya sauce made familiar to us through the popularity of the chop-suey restaurants.
As meat and dairy products become scarcer and dearer we shall become increasingly dependent upon the vegetable fats. We should therefore devise means of saving what we now throw away, raise as much as we can under our own flag, keep open avenues for our foreign supply and encourage our cooks to make use of the new products invented by our chemists.