How food and cloth fibers are connected

Earlier this November in New York, a hat was auctioned for $14,000. This high price was because it was made from the world’s perhaps most unusual fabric — sea silk or byssus, made from the threads that giant mussels generate to anchor themselves to rocks. The practice of harvesting and weaving byssus is ancient, yet so rare that the last time such an item came up for public sale may have been in 1767.
We are more used to thinking of mussels as food than as a source of fabric, yet this kind of connection is not as unusual as it seems. Food and clothing are human essentials and in the many centuries of creating both we have overlapped their use quite often. Most obviously, sheep give us wool and mutton, but with almost any animal that can be used for meat, its skin can be made into leather.

Chicken leather, sometimes called poulard, has been suggested as an ethical choice since it is made from the considerable amounts of skin discarded from processing chickens for meat. Fish skins might seem delicate, but have an overlapping structure that is said to make them stronger than equal weights of cattle leather, where skin fibres lie lengthwise. Fish like eels and sharks are both highly edible and give exceptionally durable leather.

But the really important overlaps lie with plant-based fabrics, where the cultivation of source plants usually comes at the expense of food crops. Being able to eat parts of such plants reduces the trade-off. One example is jute whose stems give the fibre, but whose leaves can also be eaten if one can appreciate their slightly slimy texture when cooked. In Bengal jute leaves are fried into fritters called pat patar bora where the crisp coating must provide some balance.

The place where jute leaves are really valued is Africa. Claudia Roden — Cairo-born, London based chronicler of Middle Eastern food — writes with an exile’s longing of molokhia, the glutinous soup of jute leaves which is Egypt’s national dish.

Just before serving, coriander and garlic are fried to stir in and that, she says, “is the smell of Egypt”. In Yemisi Aribisala’s entertaining book on Nigerian food, Longthroat Memoirs, she writes of how “the Ibadan must have their amala (yam flour) every single day, served with ewedu, boiled jute mallow leaves beaten with an ijabe (whisk) until you have a thick dark-green, mucilaginous soup….”

The fibres of flax give fine linen, but the plant’s seeds are valued for the edible oil pressed from them. It was much valued in the former Soviet Union and has nostalgic status in Russia today. Because the seeds are high in omega-3 oils, they are eaten in health foods and as a nutritional supplement. In the Philippines, a fabric called pina made from pineapple leaves is so highly valued that a formal shirt made from the stiff, translucent fabric is worn on occasions like when a new president is sworn in.

Making silk involves killing the caterpillars that spin cocoons, but many silk-producing areas thriftily extract the pupae and eat them as a high-protein snack. An article in the Times of India in 2009 explained how they had become a craze in Meghalaya, eaten deep-fried or boiled. They were particularly popular in drinking joints as a bar snack. Chinese scientists working on the country’s space programme have suggested silkworms as a species that could be bred in the closed confines of spacecraft to produce a source of fresh protein.

Cottoning On
But the real opportunity lies with cotton, the fabric plant which takes up 2.5% of the world’s arable land. Cotton seeds could be as edible as flaxseed if it wasn’t for a toxin called gossypol that cotton plants produce to deter pests. Among its effects, gossypol may cause low fertility in males and it has been investigated as a potential male contraceptive.

This limited cotton seed use to cattle feed since the multiple stomachs of ruminants seem able to limit glossypol toxicity. The seeds can be pressed for oil, from which gossypol can be removed. In the 19th century, in Cincinnati, Ohio, a company formed by two brothers-in-law, William Procter and James Gamble, pioneered uses for this refined cotton seed oil. Hydrogenating it produced a solid fat which became one of Procter & Gamble’s top brands under the name Crisco. In 2013 ET reported that cotton seed or “kapasiya” oil had become particularly popular in Gujarat as a cheap oil in which to fry snacks.

Cotton seed oil doesn’t use the high protein content in the seeds. There are, however, low gossypol varieties whose seeds can be eaten. In parts of South India, like Karaikal, a cotton seed halva is made which may involve such seeds.

The problem is low gossypol cotton is not practical for widespread cultivation because it is easily attacked by pests. So when Dr Keerti Rathore, a plant scientist who did his MS at Gujarat University and PhD at Imperial College, London, before going to work at Texas A&M University, started looking at the issue, he realised he had to find a way to switch off gossypol creation in cotton plants, but only in the seeds.

It has taken over 24 years, but finally Rathore and his team have achieved this. In October, the USA’s Food and Drug Administration gave clearance for a variety of cotton in which seeds have been genetically modified to switch off gossypol production. It was deregulated last year by the US Department for Agriculture, so now largescale cultivation can begin for both cotton fibre and edible cotton seed.

In interviews, Rathore has admitted that there might be resistance to eating something just seen for so long as a waste product from fabric production. But he points out that its main use might be as a high-protein poultry feed: “So if you want to produce eggs, that’s almost, I would say, seven times more efficient then feeding it to the cows to make beef. So one way or the other, it will be used.” Finally, a really large scale way to combine the need for both fabric and food production might be here.