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Looking back from an age when "natural" and "traditional" are far more appetizing food adjectives than "synthetic" and "artificial," it is hard to understand how anyone could ever have been intrigued by a future where air-conditioned, fully automated "skyscraper farms" would raise algae on raw sewage in enclosed ponds and then pipe the protein-rich green "scum" to factories synthesizing cheap hamburgers and pasta.l Barely imaginable today, such a prospect seemed quite plausible a few decades ago-and not just 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 believed 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
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 periodicals such as Scientific American, Scientific Monthly, and Science reported preliminary results, while Nobel laureates and highly regarded leaders of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin, the Food and Agriculture 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.3
Enthusiasm flagged in the late 1950s, however, when analysts raised doubts about the economic viability of a mass-marketed chlorella 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...