Algae Burgers for a Hungry World? The Rise and Fall of Chlorella Cuisine

Abstract

Algae Burgers for a Hungry World? The Rise and Fall of Chlorella Cuisine WARREN BELASCO Looking back from an age when “natural” and “traditional” are far more appetizing food adjectives than “synthetic” and “artifi­ cial,” it is hard to understand how anyone could ever have been intrigued by a future where air-conditioned, fully automated “sky­ scraper farms” would raise algae on raw sewage in enclosed ponds and then pipe the protein-rich green “scum” to factories synthesiz­ ing cheap hamburgers and pasta.1 Barely imaginable today, such a prospect seemed quite plausible a few decades ago—and notjust in Popular Mechanics and the science fiction pulps. In fact, for about a decade after World War II the food policy establishment was quite taken with algae. With half the people of the world hungry, global population apparently on a pace to double and then double again in the next hundred years, and farmers already struggling to grow enough food, significant doubts began to emerge about the ability of conventional agriculture to stave off catastrophe. Scientists be­ lieved that they would have to develop radically unorthodox food sources to feed a much more crowded world. Particularly exciting was new research concerning algae—specifically Chlorella pyrenoidosa , a high protein algae that grows rapidly using inexhaustible sunlight and carbon dioxide.2 Dr. Belasc.o teaches American studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). 'Lester Velie, “Food Pumped from Pipelines,” Collier’s, December 1948, pp. 914 ; Arthur James Larsen, “More Food from Sunlight,” Science Digest, September 1952, pp. 39-41. 2Roughly defined as the collective voice of mainstream or “moderate” opinion, the “food policy establishment” of the immediate postwar period consisted mainly of white, upper- and upper-middle-class European-American men who worked at elite universities, think tanks, research-oriented foundations, government agencies, international nonprofit organizations, and the most respected journals of opinion. Few women, nonwhites, or people from what were then called “developing nations” were represented in the trade books, scholarly volumes andjournals, national news-© 1997 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/97/3803-0003$02.00 608 The Rise and Fall of Chlorella Cuisine 609 Algae surfaced as a possible antidote to Malthusian catastrophe in the late 1940s, and through the 1950s it made the short list of “promising” high-tech solutions to the world food crisis. Ambitious pilot projects were sponsored by major research institutions, such as the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the University of California at Berkeley, the Atomic Energy Commission, and Stanford University. Reputable pe­ riodicals such as Scientific American, Scientific Monthly, and Science re­ ported preliminary results, while Nobel laureates and highly re­ garded leaders of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin, the Food and Agri­ culture Organization (FAO), the American Chemical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) cheered the researchers from the sidelines and urged Manhattan Project-scale funding.* I * 3 Enthusiasm flagged in the late 1950s, however, when analysts raised doubts about the economic viability of a mass-marketed chlo­ rella cuisine. In the 1960s interest revived, driven by two high-cost markets that had little to do with feeding a hungry world: the space program and the health food industry. In the 1970s space funding declined too, leaving chlorella mainly in the hands of health food marketers selling pricey nutritional supplements to an affluent sub­ culture. What happened? How could so many well-regarded experts be­ come so enthusiastic about so improbable a solution to a crucial global problem? How could they be so wrong? Was the rise and fall of chlorella cuisine a mere historical oddity, or does it remain today papers and magazines, conference proceedings, white papers, agency reports, and yearbooks that aired the discourse of this establishment and that are the primary sources for this article. These sources are now accessible through the major periodi­ cal and newspaper guides, as well as the catalog of the Library of Congress, where I did all the...