8i8 
NOV. 2i 
THE FOOD SUPPLY OF THE FUTURE. 
•‘Is the evil time comiug when popula¬ 
tion will exceed the capacity of the earth 
for production and the ever fiercer struggle 
for existence will leave the weakest to 
starvation ? ” is a question which Prof. 
Atwater propounds and discusses in an able 
way in the Century Magazine for Novem¬ 
ber. 
Such is the direful import of the doc¬ 
trine of Malthus, a doctrine which has 
weighed heavily upon the minds of phil¬ 
osophers and philanthropists, and which 
has greatly influenced thought if not legis¬ 
lation. But science to day seems to offer a 
different answer to this question. Chem¬ 
istry and physiology, in defining the laws 
of plant-growth, show that the old ideas 
which limit vegetable production by land- 
area and soil-fertility are incorrect, and 
imply that the capacity of the earth for 
yielding food for man is almost unlimited. 
In this view of the possibilities of plant- 
production, which the whole tenor of scien¬ 
tific research and practical experience 
make more and more certain, the prospect 
for the future of the race is not one of Mal¬ 
thusian dreadfulness, but full of inspiring 
hope. 
The agricultural production of the 
United States to day is one-sided. Our 
animal and vegetable food products, taken 
together, contain relatively too little of the 
flesh forming ingredients—that is, those 
which make muscle and tendon—and too 
much of those which serve as fuel. Or, 
speaking in chemical language, they have 
relatively too little protein and too much 
carbohydrate and fat. The reason for this 
is simple. From careless culture and in¬ 
sufficient manuring, or other reasons, our 
vegetable products, and especially the 
grasses and grains, have come to contain 
small proportions of protein, smaller by 
from 25 to 40 per cent or more than the same 
products grown in Europe. Furthermore, 
our great staple grain, corn (maize), is poor 
in protein at best. This helps to explain 
the relative fatness of our meats. Animals 
fed on products poor in protein and rich in 
carbohydrates tend to excessive fatness. 
Our national dietary has likewise come 
to be one sided. Our food has relatively 
too little protein and too much fat, starch 
and sugar. This is due partly to our large 
consumption of sugar, and partly to our 
use of such large quantities of fat meats. 
In the statistics above referred to the quan¬ 
tities of fat in the European dietaries range 
from one to five ounces per day, while in 
the American the range is from four to six¬ 
teen ounces. In the daily food of the well- 
to do professional men In Germany, who 
were amply nourished, the quantity of fat 
was from 3 to 4>£ ounces per day, while In 
the dietaries of Americans in similar con¬ 
ditions of life it ranged from 5 to 7% ounces. 
The quantities of carbohydrates in the 
European dietaries are from 9 to 24 ounces, 
while in the corresponding American 
dietaries the carbohydrates were from 24 
to 60 ounces. 
People in this country eat what is set be¬ 
fore them, asking no questions for econo¬ 
my’s sake, provided it suits their taste. 
We are a generation of sugar and fat 
eaters. The one-sidedness of our dietary 
is a result of the one sidedness of our agri¬ 
cultural production. 
A large amount of soil-product is re¬ 
quired to make a small amount of meat. 
We eat much more meat than is needed to 
supplement our vegetable food. Our meat 
is much fatter than would be necessary 
anyhow. The sugary and starchy foods of 
which we consume an excess make the fat 
still less necessary. It is clear then that 
by the present method of meat production 
and use a very considerable amount of the 
grass and corn of our farms and grazing 
regions is wasted, and worse than wasted. 
A reform must come, but it will come 
no faster than our farmers learn to produce 
crops richer in nitrogen, and to make more 
meat and leaner meat from less vegetable 
material, and consumers learn to buy and 
use meats and other foods of the kinds and 
in the proportions best suited to their ac 
tual needs. The agricultural reform will 
lead to the production of more food from 
less land. The dietary reform will result 
in the eating of less food per person and 
food better adapted to the demands of 
health, work and purse. 
In various ways an immense amount 
of plant food ultimately finds its way 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
through soils, sewers and streams Into the 
sea. What makes the matter worse is that 
the costliest and most precious of all of the 
elements of plant food, nitrogen, is the one 
which is most carried from the land into 
this great receptacle. The plant food thus 
conveyed to the ocean is commonly looked 
upon as lost for future use. But we recover 
it to some extent, and may recover far 
more. 
There is vegetation in the sea as well 
as on the land. That on the land yields us 
bread and meat. That in the sea yields fish. 
Here is the source for an almost inexhaust¬ 
ible supply of nourishment for man. Such 
reliable authorities as the late Professor 
Baird, of the United States Fish Com¬ 
mission, and Professor Huxley, serving in 
a similar capacity in England, have made 
calculations of the quantities of fish in the 
rivers, the lakes, and the sea, and of the 
possibility o r increasing this supply by fish 
culture. The conclusion as to the amounts 
of fish which may be made available for 
food for man seems almost incredible until 
we look Into the facts and find how well 
they are founded. But this is only part 
of the story. Fish is especially rich in 
protein. This fact is brought out very for¬ 
cibly in a series of chemical studies of the 
more important species of fish and shell¬ 
fish used for food, made under the auspices 
of the Smithsonian Institution and the 
United States Fish Commission. In other 
words, by the culture and use of fish we 
effect a three-fold saving. We obtain the 
protein which is needed to supplement 
vegetable products of the soil as food for 
man. We thus reduce the demand for meat, 
for the production of which the product 
of so much land Is necessary. And, finally, 
we bring back from the sea in the protein 
of fish the precious nitrogen which Is 
needed to restore fertility to our exhausted 
soils. 
Incidentally we have here an argument 
for fish-culture the force of which Is not 
usually understood. Fish-culture not only 
supplies most valuable nourishment for 
man, but does so by utilizing material that 
would otherwise go to waste. It makes the 
sea supplement the land by producing the 
very food ingredient that is most lacking 
in the produce of the soil. It helps materi¬ 
ally toward both the increasing and the 
balancing of products for human consump¬ 
tion, which are so essential for the welfare 
of the race. 
In short, if we make leaner pork and 
leaner beef, and thus use less soil product 
to make fat, of which we now have an ex¬ 
cess, and if we get more protein from the 
sea in fish, and raise correspondingly fewer 
animals to produce protein, we shall save 
large areas of soil for the cultivation of 
wheat and other vegetables for food. In 
this way the soil can be made to supply far 
more nourishment for man than is other¬ 
wise possible. 
Chemistry, by discovering and actually 
defining the food elements of vegetable 
growth, and by revealing their sources and 
realizing the means of making them cheap¬ 
ly available to the farmer, has triumphant¬ 
ly overcome one of the previously insuper¬ 
able obstacles to the development of na¬ 
tional wealth. 
Italy, Germany, France, Britain and 
the United States have seen or are seeing 
the productiveness of their fields decline to 
a profitless minimum, until lands once 
beautiful with harvests are desolate and 
abandoned. But the artificial barrenness 
and exhaustion, like the natural barren¬ 
ness of the heath or sand-down, yield to 
the touch of science; and in all the older 
countries named the work of reclama¬ 
tion is in full progress, and, barring some 
great calamity of politics and nature, we 
are confident that the producing power 
of their soil will never again be less than 
now, but will increase manyfold in the 
future, until they become gardens in all 
their breadth and to the very hilltops. 
The doctrine of Malthus regarding the 
future food supply of the world and the 
ultimate starvation of a portion of the race 
has been greatly misrepresented, but even 
the most favorable interpretation is a 
gloomy one. Briefly stated, the theory is 
that population increases in a geometrical 
and food-supply in an arithmetical ratio ; 
and hence the time will come when there 
will not be food enough. 
But while there is a limit to the possi¬ 
ble production of food, it transcends all 
the ideas that ever occurred to Malthus or 
to the people of his time. It has always 
been assumed that the capacity of the soil 
to produce plants is measured by what is 
commonly called its fertility—that is to 
say, the amount of production possible 
under ordinary conditions of culture. The 
science of to day, however, shows this meas¬ 
ure to be incorrect, and the practice of ag¬ 
riculture is already beginning to add its 
testimony to the same effect. 
The fundamental mistake out of which 
grew the gloomy doctrines of the older 
theorists was in measuring the possibil¬ 
ities of production by what they knew of 
soil culture. Science had not revealed to 
them that, aside from proper temperature 
and moisture, the essential factor in vege¬ 
table production Is plant food; that this 
may be given to the plant without the aid 
of the soil; that what they understood by 
soil fertility is a comparatively unessential 
factor of agricultural production; that, in 
short, the possibilities of the food supply 
in the future are measureless. 
Modern research, in discovering the 
laws of nutrition and growth of plants, 
has shown that they can flourish on the 
most barren soil or even without any soil 
at all. Of the materials that make up the 
plant only a very small proportion—say 
two per cent or thereabouts, of the weight 
of grass when ready to be made into hay, 
and a still smaller proportion of the ripen¬ 
ed grain or wheat or corn, for instance— 
har come from the soil, the rest having 
been supplied by the air from its stores, 
which are inexhaustible. 
The only food which the soil supplies 
to plants from its original sources is the 
small quantity of mineral matter which 
we call ashes when the plant is burned. Of 
every hundred pounds of the flour we use 
for bread, or of the pasture grass from 
which cattle feed and our meats are made, 
only a little over a pound in the case of the 
flour, and about two pounds In the case of 
the grass, were furnished by the soil on 
which the wheat and the grass were grown. 
And that small quantity which the soil con¬ 
tributes from its own original stores is 
made up of a certain list of chemical ele¬ 
ments the majority of which are contained 
in ordinary soils In such abundance that 
the cropping of ages would not begin to 
exhaust them. 
It is hard to think of anything more 
barren, more destitute of fertility, than 
sea sand. In connection with some studies 
of the chemistry of vegetable production in 
the laboratory of Weslej an University they 
have been growing plants in just such 
sand, brought from the shore of Long Is¬ 
land Sound. To divest it of every possible 
trace of material which the plants might 
use for food except the sand itself, it was 
carefully washed with water and then heat¬ 
ed. Tne young man who prepared the sand 
for use, in his zeal to burn out the last 
vestiges of extraneous matter, heated the 
iron pots in which it was calcined, so hot 
that they almost melted. The sand was 
put into glass jars, water was added, and 
minute quantities of chemical salts, which 
plants take from the soil, were dissolved 
in it. In the sand thus watered and fer¬ 
tilized, dwarf peas were grown. Peas of 
(Continued on next page.) 
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