The Last Aggie Joke
Texas A&M is going to save the world. No kidding.
(Page 3 of 4)
Milk is only the beginning. There is cheese—“people are crying for cheese. I know pizza manufacturers who are substituting meat for cheese”—yogurt, anything from the dairy case. It must be admitted that, symbolically, peanut milk is one of the less enticing blessings of the future, and one hopes that labels will tell us the difference. But unless we are ready to take unlikely steps—cutting demand for dairy proteins, enormously increasing our dairy herds—there may be no alternative.
Unless, of course, it is the tamunut. This item brings us back (puff puff) to the beginning of our story, and the original purpose of the “Cottonseed Processing Laboratory.” For years cottonseed oil has been a staple of the American kitchen, and its flour has gone to feed the people of South America in uplifting high-nutrition, not-always-popular products like “Incaparina.” But the cottonseed’s usefulness, as food for animals and for people, was severely handicapped by an apparently unavoidable feature of the cottonseed. In standard varieties of cotton the seeds—like, indeed, the rest of the plant—are covered with dozens of tiny, dark pigment glands, which contain a substance called “gossypol.” Gossypol turns cotton oil the color of ox blood and gives the flour an orange-brown hue; it is also poisonous when eaten in any quantity.
But twenty years ago, researchers (from elsewhere than A&M) discovered among the Hopi Indians of the Southwest a type of “glandless” cotton whose seeds were free of gossypol. They developed these plants into a usable commercial breed, and this innovation has given the Food Protein Center the start it needed. One of the first uses was simply to toast the seeds, which yielded a product with an indefinable but vaguely pleasant nutty taste, since christened “tamunuts.” While research is underway to make a high-protein concentrate from cottonseeds, the A&M projects are primarily concerned with immediate commercial outlets for the seeds and flour. According to Dr. Mattil, a businessman in Waco is offering growers a premium to plant the glandless seeds, which have certain disadvantages when it comes to pest resistance. He then plans to toast the seeds making them into tamunuts, and sell them at 35 cents per pound to candy makers, cookie bakers, purveyors of pecan pies, and others who are used to paying $1 per pound and more for the nuts their products require.
I have eaten an ersatz Baby Ruth prepared in this fashion by Dr. Mattil and Dr. Carl Cater, the Julia Child of the Food Protein Center, and I will testify to its wholesomeness—as I will to the quality of a chocolate chip cookie made of glandless cottonseed flour. Obviously, these processes will not restore health to every swollen-bellied babe of the Sahel, but they will bring the Texas farmer a larger share of the dollar and open up one more source of protein that was not there before.
The Sorghum Also Rises
Near the end of a long day at College Station, the Virgil of this tour, an affable young PhD from the public relations department named Dudley Smith, is hustling his visitor on to—what this time?—an interview with Dr. Leonard Pike, world-famed breeder of triple-cross cucumbers (a high-yield, commercially successful innovation too complicated to explain in this story). The guest has kept Dr. Pike waiting for at least an hour, and he feebly mumbles his apologies. “I got tied up with the sorghum men. They wouldn’t stop talking. I hope you understand.”
A smile spread across Dr. Pike’s face. From the other side of the room an assistant says, “Those sorghum people. . . .” The effect is clearly conveyed, that Certain People have let success go to their heads.
The accomplishments of the sorghum people are not to be minimized, even if the straight story about them can be obtained only at considerable personal cost. From the electron microscope to the experimental garden plot, from the trail of Dr. Rooney to the Sorghum Family Chart, the reporter must trek to come home with the story. His imagination must carry him to Puerto Rico and faraway Ethiopia, although the trail begins closer to home, in the Cereal Quality Lab at College Station.
The first things a visitor to the Cereal Quality Lab notices are the unusual objects hanging from the rafters, apparently small brooms of different shapes and color with various amber-to-brown grains stuck on the end of the fibers. The reporter was gazing at this crazy-quilt profusion, this surplus of variety, and wondering—as he often does when killing mosquitoes—whether God really intended to create all the things for which he has been given credit. These reveries had reached the tsetse fly and Ronald Reagan when speculation was cut short by the entrance of a swiftly moving object, later identified as Dr. Lloyd Rooney of the sorghum program.
Although Rooney’s bearing was genial (like, indeed, everyone’s at A&M) and his eagerness to help unlimited, it soon became clear that the very volume with which he dispensed information would be the reporter’s greatest handicap. Rooney was scheduled to leave for India almost immediately, and in his haste to tell the whole sorghum saga before departing, he slipped into mile-a-minute doubletalk that left the reporter reeling.
First he ran to the sorghum chart, on which, as far as the reporter could make out, contented little grains were portrayed as they went about their business. One heart-rending scene was portrayed, in which a family of grains was broken up when the children were sold down the river on the auction block. From his left ear, which was poised two inches from Dr. Rooney’s mouth, the reporter took in an indistinct stream of words.
“. . . we grow out the F2, then select and backcross with some of the original light-sensitive exotics. . . .”
From somewhere Rooney came out with photographs taken through the electron microscope.
“. . . these globular structures here signify the greater lysine concentration in the protein. . . .”
Rooney disappeared momentarily, and then was back, with still more photos.
“. . . the high-lysine strain in sorghum is similar to the Opaque II corn. . . .”
“. . . foliar leaf disease. . . .”
“. . . greatest breakthrough since cytoplasmic sterility and hybridization. . . .”
The reporter was on the ropes when Rooney used his final feint, a timely phone call from his wife asking when on earth he was going to come home. Rooney slipped out, eventual destination Hyderabad, mission accomplished, reporter confused.
For many journalists this might have been the end, but the reporter, who had tracked senators and CIA men through the tangles of Washington, D.C., was not to be stymied by the sorghum breeders of Texas A&M. Not long after his humiliation at the hands of Dr. Rooney, he had run two of the prime figures to ground in the very same Cereal Quality building. They were Dr. Fred Miller, one of the chief plant breeders, and Don Sullins, a research associate who, while still a graduate student, had taken pictures with the electron microscope which have given the breeders an enormous advantage over the cruder old-fashioned techniques. From them, the following tale was extracted:
Like Idi Amin, sorghum comes from northeast Africa. The first grains made their way to the New World shortly after Columbus did, and by the time agriculture had established a firm hold in Texas, so had sorghum. Texas now produces nearly half of the nation’s crop, and in this state sorghum has been the backbone of the feedlot industry. Outside of the United States sorghum is a major human food, with only 25 per cent of the crop being fed to animals. In the United States, less than one per cent goes directly to human consumers.
Sorghum has posed quite a variety of problems for the Texas producer, many of them connected to its exotic origins. For reasons which will be explained more fully in a moment, these plants from the equatorial zone had an annoying tendency when transplanted to the soil of the Texas High Plains; instead of putting out an efficient seed head after producing a modest amount of greenery, they seemed to grow leaves forever, soaring ten, twelve, fourteen feet into the sky (when they didn’t fall over of their own weight) before deigning to produce grain very late in the season. Over the years, Texas farmers had used catch-as-catch-can methods of selection to find those strains that were somewhat more stubby than their fellows. But it was only with the pioneering generation of sorghum breeders, led by Mr. Grain Sorghum himself, J. Roy Quinby of A&M (who later joined the Pioneer Hibred Seed Company of Plainview, where he is now Geneticist Emeritus) that sorghum production left the Stone Age and moved into the modern era of high technology.
It is perhaps worth recalling that Gregor Mendel’s theories of genetics and heredity are about a century old (they were published in 1866) and that his findings were not generally accepted in the world of plant breeders until the early 1920s. Not long after that, Quinby and his associates began the work that would lead them to the first great breakthrough in sorghum production—the creation of a hybrid sorghum.
Not an easy task, mainly because the male and female portions of the sorghum plan are so numerous and so close together that it is virtually impossible to keep the plants from fertilizing themselves. The only obvious way was the agonizing tedium of removing the several hundred male portions of every plant one by one—a prospect which understandably retarded work on the hybrid-sorghum frontier. For a while Quinby and others attempted to cope with the problem through the “hot water emasculation” process, a Rube Goldberg affair which involved covering the flower head of the plant with a big metal cup, pouring in water hot enough (118°) to kill the pollen—but not the one degree hotter that would kill the ovules as well.
This method had its limited usefulness, but the hybrid era did not really get underway until 1952, when researchers discovered “cytoplasmic male sterility”—that is, plants which could not fertilize themselves, and were therefore easy to crossbreed, because their own male portions failed to develop. What happened next is history. As Texagreport, an annual publication of the experiment station, put it in a recent feature on Quinby, “The hybrids completely changed the face of the grain business in Texas and other states and led to new prosperity undreamed of only a few years before.”
The coming of the hybrids was a first great step; the second, going on even as you read, is the production of a race of supersorghums. This involves incorporating a wide variety of desirable traits—resistance to the dread downy mildew and midge, increased digestibility through alterations in the internal protein-starch configurations, and improved protein quality through the creation of “high-lysine” sorghum.
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