The Last Aggie Joke
Texas A&M is going to save the world. No kidding.
(Page 2 of 4)
The can-do ethic is not one of the classic agrarian attitudes, since even the most highly mechanized Iowa farmer must have a minimum of patience with nature’s slow processes and a maximum of fatalism about the thousand woes to which his crop is prey. Dr. Mattil explains this discrepancy by pointing out that his work is not “agriculture” but “food engineering,” a distinction (to mix the metaphors) like that between shaping human souls at a Montessori school and shaping them at a Marine Corps boot camp.
Dr. Mattil comes naturally by his role as drill sergeant to undisciplined farm products. Before joining A&M seven years ago, he had spent nearly a quarter of a century in the research division of Swift and Company, working on new formulations for shortenings and vegetable oils, and finally supervising a team which ran a desperate, losing race to develop the first textured vegetable protein. He retains a certain disdain for the high-minded public-interest types who detest the “agribusiness giants” like Swift, and who, even as they berate the United States for failing to feed the hungry of the world, are suspicious of every devious plot to introduce synthetic foods into their diet. “You can get grant after grant to do another study of how malnourished the children of Latin America are,” Dr. Mattil said. “But it seems that nobody’s interested in supporting work that will actually do something to help people.”
If truth be told, helping the people of the world was not exactly the prime motive behind the founding of the Food Protein Center. It sprang instead from the same well-established political tradition which gave the world the Food for Peace program when the U.S. had farm surpluses, and cut it off when the surpluses vanished—namely, getting the American farmer out of a jam. In its original incarnation, as the “Cottonseed Processing Laboratory” in the 1940s, its purpose was to find new, more profitable uses for that humble agricultural by-product, the cottonseed. Over the years, its work has expanded to embrace other locally produced “oilseeds,” such as peanuts, almost always with the goal of helping Texas farmers unload their products at a profit. But, as if to prove that every cloud has a silver lining, starvation and death throughout the underdeveloped world have recently given the Aggies an ennobled role in the front ranks of the world’s hunger fighters.
In most parts of the world, the “food shortage” is really a protein shortage. The significance of the A&M center’s work is that, for many poor countries, the greatest opportunity for increasing supplies of protein comes not from the miraculous soybean, hitherto heralded as the answer to all problems, but from the oilseeds growing in their own back yard. “Soy protein is fine for Japan, Germany, England, France—the countries that have the cash to pay for it,” says Dr. Mattil. “For the rest, it’s a question of making the best use of what they’ve got.” What most of them have are the very oilseeds on which Aggies have been working all these many years.
Dr. Mattil gave one example of how the Aggies were helping others help themselves. At this very moment, an Aggie team directed by Dr. Robert Hagenmeir is in the Philippines, setting up a plant which should help the country make better use of a major crop, coconuts. The coconut, standard fixture of many tropical reveries, is the world’s largest oilseed, and a surprisingly rich source of protein. As the world’s largest producer of these enormous seeds, the Filipinos produce enough protein to satisfy one-sixth of their total needs—if only they could find a way to recover it.
Before the arrival of the Aggies, nearly all the protein was lost because of the crude way the commercially valuable oil is extracted. (This oil, by the way, is one of Europe’s favorite ingredients for margarine. American gourmands are denied this item because, once again, of the mysterious workings of politics. Back in the days when the margarine lobbyists were fighting their death-battle against butter, they realized that they would have a far greater chance of winning political approval if they could avoid the dread taint of being a foreign industry. They promised to use only domestically produced oils in the production of margarine, which left coconut oil out. That is why when you confront coconut oil in this country, it is likely to be in shampoo or fine soaps.)
It is a long way from the coconut grove in the Philippines to the stick of margarine in Europe, and the way is fraught with perils for the Filipinos. When the coconuts are ready for harvest, they are split open with machetes, and the white meat is pulled out by hand. The meat is then left to dry in the sun. As it dries, it is subject to the depredations of birds, rats, mold, bacteria, and similar pests. This is not unduly worrisome to the Filipinos, for usable oil may still be pressed from the dried meat, which is called copra. If the copra is not too badly contaminated, the residue is fed to animals in the developed countries. But more and more frequently, customers have rejected the copra, and all its valuable protein has simply been thrown away. (“The Filipinos think that the rising rejection rate is some kind of insidious CIA plot,” Dr. Mattil says. “They think we’re trying to hold their prices down.”)
Meanwhile, as all this protein is going to animals or down the drain, the Philippines has to import massive quantities of protein for its own people, mainly in the form of dried and condensed milk. The awkwardness of the arrangement is that to import each pound of imported protein, Filipinos must export three pounds of coconut protein. Clearly there had to be a better way.
The A&M project attempts to plug that protein gap with a new oil-extraction process. It works on the principle that protein dissolves in water, and oil does not. The coconut is ground up into a fine emulsion, mixed with water, and then placed in a centrifuge. The oil skids off in the centrifuge, and—after a number of purifying steps—out the other end comes what Dr. Mattil calls “a product similar in composition to, and with many of the same properties as, nonfat dried milk—but with a sweet coconut taste.” It is high in protein and ready to be introduced to whatever its taste would not be a drawback—in ice cream, for example. “I don’t think it will be difficult to get it into the food supply,” Dr. Mattil says. “The best milk companies, even some of the beer companies, which have the best distribution and marketing systems in the country, are interested.”
And serendipity has even lent a hand. The only drawback to the process was that, while it produced a lot of protein, it also yielded a lot of tough, apparently unusable coconut fiber as well. “We didn’t have any idea of what to do with the stuff, but now fiber is coming into its own,” says Dr. Mattil, referring to the recent medical findings that the low-fiber American diet works a variety of evils on the American colon. “This may turn out to be a big export item too.”
Since so few Texans make their living growing coconuts, this is an unusual application of Aggie talent—and might not have been undertaken at all were it not related to work underway in the closer-to-home discipline of peanut technology. Although the United States is berated, with some justice, for its voracious consumption of animal protein, we have taken one step toward efficient use of vegetable protein that no one else has dared. The U.S. is the only major country where people consume most of the peanuts; elsewhere, they are squeezed for oil and the dry remainder fed to animals.
Even so, the peanut growers have grown restless. No matter how many peanut butter sandwiches our children eat, we do not consume all the peanuts we grow. American farm policy has deliberately kept the federally subsidized domestic price for peanuts well above that on the world market, and, until quite recently, has left us with large surplus stocks which became grist for the oil-and-cattle feed mill.
Even worse, from the peanut industry’s point of view, was that a great deal of the peanuts did not make it even as far as the cattle yard; the villain was the loathsome threat of “aflatoxin.” There is a certain kind of mold which attacks many crops when they are stored, but which had a particular affinity for peanuts. It thrives in high humidity, and when it grows it produces a substance of extreme toxicity, called aflatoxin. So terrible is the threat of aflatoxin that all shipments of peanuts in this country are inspected, once when they leave the farm, and again when they reach the packing house, for traces of aflatoxin down to the parts-per-billion. If any is detected, the oil can be salvaged, but the meal must be destroyed. There is a cure for aflatoxin—sodium hypochlorite, which is the main ingredient of common household bleach—but no one knew how to disperse it evenly enough through the peanuts to neutralize all the poison.
No one knew, that is, until the Aggies came on the scene. A water-separation system (similar to the one which is now the pride of the Philippines) was developed for peanuts by Khee Choon Rhee, a scientist at the Food Protein Center who is described in A&M press releases as “small” and “intense.” Because of his system, we may soon have peanuts in our milk.
In Rhee’s system, the peanuts are ground into fine powder, which is then mixed with water. The protein dissolves but the oil does not; and when the emulsion goes into a centrifuge, the oil goes sliding away. In the meantime, the aflatoxin has been neutralized (one hopes and prays) by the sodium hypochlorite dissolved in the water.
Simple? Elegant? Ah, yes—but the surprise is still to come. What is left over when the process is completed is one of the more technically bizarre items in the entire Aggie repertoire. It is a peanut-protein substance which, as Dr. Mattil describes it, is “bland, colorless, very soluble in water, and [has] a low viscosity index.” What this means is that it is ideally suited for use in liquids, and what that means, Dr. Matill will explain:
“I always go back to the market . . . you have to ask, where is the demand? Worldwide, we know there is a growing demand for dairy products, and a shrinking supply. In the United States the per capita production of milk is declining, but the demand for dairy products continues to rise. There is a gap that has to be filled.
“The latest figures I saw indicated that the growth market in fluid milk was two per cent milk—the low-fat type. Now, what’s the easiest way to make two per cent milk? Right, you dilute whole milk. But the FDA says you can’t do that. You have to replace the proteins and minerals, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Now, if you use soy protein to do that, you get a product that’s like a milk shake in texture. But we think we can do it with peanut protein. It’s got better solubility, it’s got the mouth feel, the viscosity, the bland flavor. It’s a real opportunity.”
My Library
