World Resources 
and this is going to cut into agricultural land considerably. 
Parkes: Can you live on half an acre and do everything else 
on it, including getting rid of your sewage? 
Clark: With some difficulty, yes. 
Haldane: I would like to quarrel with Clark’s remark that 
the vegetarian diet of Southern India is dull and uninteresting. 
In my opinion there are three centres of the culinary art in the 
world, one in France and Italy, of which we are at the margin, 
one in South China, and one in South India. The latter cuisine 
is the only one which is mainly vegetarian, and you cannot 
appreciate it until you have had no meat and fish for a month 
or two, when you begin to see what these people are getting at 
aesthetically. It is, in fact, far from dull and uninteresting. 
Although I am inclined to think you can live well on vegetables 
alone, I don’t do so myself. I have an egg a day (for breakfast) 
in addition, and when I was in Bengal I also had curds. 
I should also be interested to know why Clark thinks the 
caste system is any more of a handicap than various other econo- 
mic systems which exist in other parts of the world. It means 
that the sons of farmers remain farmers, and not very much 
more than that in the present context. 
Part of what is wrong is that agricultural research is extra- 
ordinarily conservative, inefficient, and rather corrupt. Medical 
research is less so, and zoological research less so still. We have 
got to realize that problems of tropical agriculture have to be 
worked out in the tropics and not by imitation of what has 
been done elsewhere. My colleague S. K. Roy finds that if 
you grow mixtures of different strains of rice in alternate rows, 
as often as not you will get a lower yield than with either of the 
varieties when grown separately. But there are cases where 
you get increases of anything from 10 to 25 per cent per year 
in the joint yield, repeated over several years. I suggested this 
work to him on the very simple principle that on the whole 
tropical plant communities are much more complicated than 
temperate ones, and you would expect to find more favourable 
interactions if you looked for them. A second example is even 
more surprising. Coconut palms have right or left foliate spirals; 
ig 
