LET US HAVE "NOTHING" TO EAT

Question: How can you eat without eating?

Answer: When you consume food that is not food. This sounds like a nonsense riddle, on the order of "What eats people, is purple, and can fly?" For anyone who has missed that one, the answer is "a flying purple people-eater." Unlike the flying purple people-eater, however, this answer happens to make a great deal of sense. You have read how synthetic flavors and smells have made it impossible for you to trust your tongue or your nose. Now science is making it impossible for you to trust your eyes and your stomach.

A synthetic food has been produced that is not food at all. It has no taste, no smell, no vitamins or minerals. It has no energy-producing calories. To sum up, it provides you with no nourishment at all. What does it do? It fools you into thinking that you have eaten a full-course dinner. Your appetite is satisfied; your stomach feels full. You may wonder why anyone would want to play such tricks on himself. After all, artificial food will not give you the energy to play football or go swimming. Millions of Americans, however, are watching their waistlines. Nobody from the five-year-old in kindergarten to the eighty-year-old grandmother likes to be called "Hey, Fatty." Everyone wants to have the beautiful figure of a television star or a crack athlete. Vanity is not the only reason why people try to be slim. Doctors have some harsh words to say about fatness. Stout people are likely to develop heart conditions and other physical ailments.

As a result, plump members of society are continually going on - and off - diets. One month they expect great things from a steak diet in which only red meat is eaten three times a day; the next month they switch to a liquid diet and drink their meals; then a "crash" diet of bananas and skim milk is tried. Few men and women have the will power to stick to these diets for very long; they are too hungry for food that will stick to their ribs instead. The fact is that most people who are stout get that way because they like to eat - early, often and too much. They follow the doctors' wise suggestion to eat less of everything in much the same way that students observe their teachers' urging that they start the book report a week, instead of an hour, before it is due.

Scientists have been worrying about the problems of their overweight brothers and sisters. For many years they have been hunting for something that will give the same effect as food without containing its nourishment.

Some researchers set themselves the tasks of eating objects that could not, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, be called food. One intrepid experimenter downed powdered coal, rubber, sand, glass beads, steel balls and feathers. You can see that the man must have been unusually healthy to survive these trials. None of the solids he tried, however, turned out to be really successful substitutes for steak, ice cream, or cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches. People who watched him shuddered, and wondered if he was on the wrong track. Perhaps what was needed was a test-tube product -something completely new, still to be discovered.

As it turned out, the product that eventually proved suitable is anything but rare. It is one of the most plentiful substances on earth - as plentiful as trees or grass or cotton or jute or linen. In fact, it is a part of trees and grass and cotton and jute and linen and many other plants. All of these are made up of a substance called cellulose. Cows eat it; termites eat it; but until recently man used it to make such things as rayon and cellophane.

People have been trying to eat cellulose for years, but for a long time no suitable way of handling it could be found. One man, for example, took some surgical cotton, chopped it up very fine, and flavored it with fruit juice. He reported that after eating this he felt completely satisfied for many hours. As you can imagine, not many people were eager to copy his recipe.

A more tempting form of cellulose was discovered only recently, almost by accident, in the laboratories of the American Viscose Corporation by a scientist named Dr. O. A. Battista. The company makes rayon and cellophane, and cellulose is the raw material for both.

Dr. Battista was at work trying to develop a particularly strong rayon tire cord. He believed that this could be done by breaking down the cellulose into tiny fragments. In one such trial he placed some cellulose in water in an ordinary electric blender of the type that you may have in your own kitchen. The smallest bits of cellulose were expected to fall to the bottom where they could be separated from the water and then used to form a cord.

A quarter of an hour later the scientist discovered that the blender was completely filled with something that resembled a thick white custard. It did not look like the raw material for a tire cord; it looked like something to eat. The laboratory was equipped with an oven. Dr. Battista spooned the custard out of the blender and made cookies and sauces with it. These were the first examples of the food that can be eaten, but that is not food.

The company soon began to make this product, which was named Avicel, in larger quantities. This was not difficult to do, as the rayon you wear, the cellophane you wrap packages with, and the new nonfood are made of the same raw material - wood. Even the early stages of preparation are the same: The logs are chopped up and treated with chemicals to make wood pulp from which the cellulose is obtained. The only difference is that the cellulose planned for the dinner table is carefully purified.

To make Avicel in bulk, Dr. Battista's method is used, only on a bigger scale. The raw cellulose and water are put into a huge blender. The cellulose is broken down into the tiniest particles you can imagine. They range in size between a miniscule 0.000039 and 0.0001560 of an inch.

If you looked at the finished product you would never guess that it came from a tree. The Avicel is made in two forms. One is called a "gel," which is the technical way of describing the custardlike substance Dr. Battista saw that first day. To be exact, this nonfood looks much more like a fluffy white cold cream than a custard. The other form of Avicel is as a very fine flour with the consistency of face powder.

Before presenting Avicel to weight-watching Americans the scientists had to make sure that eating this cellulose would not harm anyone. After all, humans do not have the same digestive systems as termites or cows. The first tests were made with rabbits, mice and monkeys. These creatures were put on diets of half Avicel and half ordinary food. They emerged from the test in perfect health. They were also, incidentally, slim and trim, lithe and limber. A number of stouthearted men and women then agreed to act as guinea pigs. About one-sixth of their daily food intake was limited to Avicel. No ill effects were reported.

How did they eat the artificial food? They had Avicel cookies made with scarcely any flour, fat or sugar. They spread butter-flavored Avicel on bread. Sweetened and whipped, it masqueraded as whipped cream.

"It would be theoretically possible for a person on a cellulose diet to starve to death, without ever knowing that he was hungry!" exclaims a home economist dramatically.

That would be carrying the dieting principle a bit too far. In most cases Avicel is mixed with foods that are normally very fattening. The principle is simple and logical. You take away some of the real food and replace it with the artificial food. The hearty eater, working his way through a second helping of banana cream pie, is really eating less than half of what is on his plate - in terms of nourishment, that is.

In its powdered state Avicel can be substituted for nearly half of the flour needed to bake a cake or a loaf of bread. As a gel it can replace much of the butterfat in ice cream or the oil in salad dressing. A hot fudge sundae with whipped cream on top can be almost as kind to the waistline as grapefruit. Candy bars, cheese cake, spaghetti, potato pancakes, mayonnaise, hollandaise sauce and cheese dips can be served to the most determined dieter.

Could he tell the difference? If one person is eating food and another is dipping his spoon into nonfood, would anyone know which was which? In an effort to find out, the "blindfold" game was played by the makers of

Avicel. Testers equipped with a sweet tooth were asked to judge a chocolate layer cake. Although it was called a blindfold test, the people were not really blindfolded and fed; it was rather that the cakes were unmarked. None of the testers was able to detect the doctored cake. The artificial food has no flavor or smell of its own, and it does not change these qualities in the real foods to which it is added.

The new nonfood can perform a number of interesting feats, too. What would you think of sprinkling peanut butter out of a shaker onto your bread? There may come a time when scooping the sticky paste out a jar with a knife will appear old fashioned. Avicel can absorb fats and oils, and give butter and peanut butter the consistency of grated cheese. Cellulose can work the same magic on syrups, providing molasses, honey or maple syrup to be sprinkled, not poured, onto your pancakes. That is quite an accomplishment for a product that is made from a stick of wood.

It is hard to believe that people can eat cakes and candies which contain the same ingredient that is found in sawdust, rayon and cellophane. One day a little boy, caught with his hand in the cookie jar, may tell his mother: "But I wasn't going to eat any food." And that would be the truth.

(From The artificial world around us, by Lucy Kavaler)