I begin the most difficult section of my story for me. Going back far, to my age of five. Once, walking around our garden - from the residential building towards the bathhouse and laundry building, I saw the janitor Matvey, whom I knew - a small, bow-legged peasant with a beautiful duck under his arm and a large knife in his hand. Curious, I followed him. Having reached the laundry room and stopping at a log stump standing upright, he put the duck on the log and quickly cut off her head. The duck desperately flapped its wings and, escaping, flew without a head and fell about 20 steps. Toddler, I took this with philosophical interest. There was no pity. It was just an interesting experiment. But in retrospect, all this was painted and still is painted in tones of deep indignation and own impotence.

When I was 65 years old, I learned from Igor Evgenievich Tamm (physicist, academician) that his grandson, Vereshchinsky, then a boy of 13, was a vegetarian by conviction. I asked Igor Evgenievich to introduce me to his grandson. They were with us - a charming grandfather and a charming grandson, and the boy told me about his "seduction" into vegetarianism: the cook turned the head of a chicken in front of the children. Vereshchinsky and his sister grabbed their knives and rushed at the cook. And I, a 65-year-old man, envied their reaction and recalled my behavior with shame.

Several years passed before I began to realize that I was living in a world of constant cold-blooded murder. At the age of 9-10, I categorically told my parents that I would not eat meat. Dad reacted calmly and respectfully to this, and mom, with extreme concern (probably for my health) and, being an imperious nature, used every exhortation and power to force me to eat "like all people." In discussions with me, she brought many arguments that were weighty in her eyes, and sometimes it was difficult for me to challenge them: where would the animals go if they were not eaten; a person cannot live and be healthy without meat food. My position was - "without me", "I do not want to participate in this, I cannot and will not." At first, however, palliatives were achieved: my mother persuaded me to eat meat soup (to which she attached some special nutritional value), fish (which is not a pity) and a shot bird. The latter was based on the fact that from our discussions, my mother knew that I was especially “pressed” by hopelessness, the inability to escape from my fate for the animal scheduled for slaughter. Hunting is a different matter. However, this part of the palliative was of purely theoretical significance, since no game was ever served with us. I quickly abandoned the soup palliative, and the fish palliative lasted quite a long time, and only from 1913 did I finally give up fish as well. There was such a typical case.

For some holiday, we had “brushwood” made and served with tea. I ate it like everyone else. One of the guests asked my mother for a recipe, my mother forgot about my presence and said that the dough was dipped in hot goose fat. Here she caught herself and bit her tongue. I got up from the table and left the room. I did not appear for a long time and thought about suicide. The next day, dad came to me and sincerely and well talked to me, said that my mother promised not to do such things, apologized for her. And although I began to thaw, but a significant proportion of children's love for my mother was killed forever. She surprisingly did not understand me. She never tried to treat me to “human” again, but in the kitchen I used to find duck heads, and even parts of the body of “my” calf.

My active "vegetarian feeling", reinforced by her resistance, forced the fact that I saw traces of blood and murder everywhere, if not the actual acts of murder. In the shelter, I constantly stumbled upon stumps with feathers stuck to the cut and a puddle of darkened blood, I heard the heart-rending squeal of killed pigs. In Kirzhach, I saw my grandmother buying chickens, feeling them in a cannibalistic way when buying. In Shuya, getting up early, I came across servants plucking a freshly slaughtered chicken. Returning from the gymnasium along the poetic 3rd clearing, I met a caravan of sledges or carts with skinned and decapitated corpses of cows and bulls piled on them, or corpses of pigs cut in half. All this was unbearable, stood before my eyes day and night.

If a person is robbed or killed, it is not only possible, but it is also necessary to intercede for him by any means. If an animal is killed before your eyes (or in absentia, it doesn't matter), no matter how intense your feelings, you have no right not only to save the animal, but you have no rights. Is this not a remnant of Stone Age jurisprudence? Later, I became convinced that a certain, probably small, percentage of people feel all this in the same way as I do, but then I was quite alone. Moreover, I began to see in my own mother an enemy, an intercessor and a participant in this bloody system, a rapist. Violence was (and is) all around. It was demonstrated on the streets by draft drivers who beat overloaded horses in mortal combat, knackers who destroyed horses unsuitable for work, a sanitary service that caught and killed dogs, hunters out of self-interest or much more often out of "love for nature" (!!) shot "game".

And the greatest cruelty is manifested in relation to domestic "edible" animals. It still hurts me to drive along the Kashirskoye Highway in the summer, because I meet herds of bulls and calves driven to Moscow to meet their fate. Probably, if it were not for my generally deeply optimistic nature, which is not at all prone to melancholy, I would have gone crazy. As a child, I was prone to fantasies and in my fantasies I dealt with all the butchers that came across on the way. Meeting a caravan of skinned corpses, or passing by a meat trade, or seeing a draft cab torturing a horse, I mentally shot all the participants in these bloody deeds. Although in terms of fantasy, it still reduced the nightmarish helplessness.

Later, in my old age, I learned from letters to me that I was not alone in the world with such feelings. It is clear how little these moods contributed to my rapprochement with classmates. As for the orphanage friends, I remember conversations with Generalov alone, who took a practical point of view: “How many cattle are driven to the slaughterhouse, so many will be killed, whether you eat meat or not. So nothing depends on it and it won't change anything.". All these conversations were difficult for me. I felt like I didn't have an answer for them. I then came to the conclusion that it is necessary to consider the feeling and conviction that guided me as the main, primary, and to derive everything else from them. It gave some ground under their feet. To the statement of my mother and her like-minded people like Uncle Volodya, a statement characteristic of natural scientists in general, that, they say, “ animal world it is arranged in such a way that some creatures feed on others and that this is the law of nature, ”I already knew the objection from childhood: “This is why a person masters science in order to establish his own orders and laws in nature, and not to follow the blind laws of nature. According to the law of nature, man does not fly through the air, but, using other laws of nature, he overthrew this law and flew. The goal of mankind is to overcome the bloody law of trampling some by others, primarily by man..

Much became clear to me later.

“But why breed so many animals in violation of natural evolution? They will die and they will not exist at all.”.

To a certain extent, this was justified later on the example of a horse, which is now less and less common.

Of course, in everything there is the result of gradualness and gradation, not eternal, but different in different epochs. Killing a person was once an everyday occurrence. Killing a person with a mercenary purpose in my eyes is an even more serious crime than killing an animal, and killing an animal is more serious than, say, fish. Obviously, we cannot do without the destruction of insects in our era, but the conclusion does not follow from this that it should be allowed to kill animals, and then humans. Here is an approximate outline of my discussions with relatives and with myself.

After 1910, throughout my whole life I did not eat meat at all, and after 1913 I did not eat fish either, which, by the way, was not easy in the famine years of 1919-1921, when roach and herring were an essential food product. If I say not easy, then this refers only to a hungry organism, and not to the will. I could not even imagine that I would eat something that was not supposed to me according to my convictions.

In 1919, on my way to the office of the fine arts department of the People's Commissariat of Education on Ostozhenka and back on Domnikovskaya, where I then lived in the family of Sergei Vinogradov, I indulged in hungry dreams of buckwheat porridge and other equally delicious dishes, but I could not even think about meat or fish. When I entered the apartment, I felt sick from the smell of horsemeat, which Anna Andreevna Vinogradova cooked for her family. I would certainly go to my death if I had to, just not to eat meat. This is how fanaticism arises. This is how sectarianism is born. I have always been aware of this danger and have tried to avoid it; I tried not to oppose myself to all people. Do not consider a symbol, a protest, which in essence is the rejection of meat, as the essence of the matter.

A.N. Nesmeyanov

For reference:

Article "Vegetarianism" from the book: A.N. NESMEYANOV. On the swings of the 20th century. M.: Nauka, 1999. 308 p.

Alexander Nikolaevich Nesmeyanov (1899-1980) - Soviet organic chemist, organizer of Soviet science. President of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1951-1961, rector of Moscow University, director of INEOS.

Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1943; corresponding member 1939). Twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1969, 1979). Laureate of the Lenin Prize (1966) and the Stalin Prize of the first degree (1943).

NESMEYANOV, Alexander Nikolaevich

Alexander Nikolaevich Nesmeyanov - Soviet organic chemist. Born in Moscow. Graduated from Moscow University (1922). He worked there (since 1935 professor, since 1944 head of the department organic chemistry, in 1944-1948 the dean of the Faculty of Chemistry, in 1948-1951 the rector of the university). At the same time he worked at the Research Institute of Fertilizers and Insectofungicides (1930-1934), at the Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (since 1934, in 1939-1954 director); director of the Institute of Organoelement Compounds (since 1954). Academician-Secretary of the Chemical Department (1946-1951); President of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1951-1961), Academician-Secretary of the Department of General and Organic Chemistry (since 1961). In 1947-1961. Chairman of the Committee on Lenin and State Prizes in the field of science and technology.

The main field of research is the chemistry of organometallic compounds. He discovered (1929) the reaction of obtaining organomercury compounds by decomposition of double diazonium salts and metal halides, later extended to the synthesis of organic derivatives of many heavy metals ( Nesmeyanov's diazomethod). Formulated (1945) regularities of the relationship between the position of the metal in the periodic table and its ability to form organic compounds. Proved (1940-1945) that the products of the addition of salts of heavy metals to unsaturated compounds are covalent organometallic (quasi-complex) compounds. Investigated (1945-1948) the geometric isomerism of ethylene organometallic compounds and at the same time discovered (1945) the rule of non-reversal of the stereochemical configuration in the processes of electrophilic and radical substitution at a carbon atom linked by a double carbon-carbon bond.

Together with M. I. Kabachnik, he developed (1955) fundamentally new ideas about the dual reactivity of organic compounds of a non-automeric nature. Together with R. Kh. Freidlina, he studied (1954-1960) radical telomerization and developed methods for the synthesis of α, ω-chloroalkanes, on the basis of which semi-products used in the production of fiber-forming polymers, plasticizers, and solvents were obtained. Carried out a number of studies in the field of chemistry of chlorovinyl ketones.

Under the leadership of A. N. Nesmeyanov, the field of "sandwich" compounds of transition metals, in particular derivatives of ferrocene, was developed in the USSR. Implemented big number works on organophosphorus, organofluorine and organomagnesium compounds, metal carbonyls. Discovered (1960) the phenomenon of metallotropy - the reversible transfer of an organomercury residue between oxy- and nitroso groups P-nitrosophenol. Laid (1962) the foundations of a new direction of research - the creation of synthetic food products. He established (1960-1970) ways of synthesis from the simplest and available substances (carbohydrates, nitro compounds, aldehydes) of amino acids and protein products, imitations of smells and taste of food products.

Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1943; corresponding member 1939), member of a number of foreign academies. Twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1969, 1979); awarded six orders of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. USSR State Prize (1943), Lenin Prize (1966), Golden medal them. M. V. Lomonosov (1962).

The name of A. N. Nesmeyanov was assigned (1980) to the Institute of Organoelement Chemistry of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The Russian Academy of Sciences established the A.N. Nesmeyanov Prize, which has been awarded since 1995 for outstanding work in the field of chemistry of organoelement compounds.

Do you hear how much talk about oil now? Cheaper, cheaper! So that's good. Look how much cheap and different food you can make from it! Indeed, back in the 1960s, the former president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Nesmeyanov, developed a method for obtaining yeast from oil. His first artificial product is the protein "black caviar". A staunch vegetarian himself, he proposed not to drive oil abroad, but to use it to feed the Soviet people.

Alexander Nesmeyanov was born in 1899. After February Revolution joined the Social Revolutionaries, after the October - to its left faction, by the end of the Civil - went over to the side of the Bolsheviks. A huge moral shock for him was the Great Famine of 1920-22. Nesmeyanov went with a food detachment to seize bread from the peasants. Starvation, cannibalism, the loss of human appearance by the peasants shocked him. He swore to himself to devote his life to solving the food problem not only in Russia, but throughout the world.

Nesmeyanov successfully climbed the career ladder of a chemist, survived the Stalinist purges, and in 1951 headed the Soviet Academy of Sciences. However, in 1961, he had a strong quarrel with the head of the country, Nikita Khrushchev, and was removed from his post.

One of the main disagreements with Khrushchev was Nesmeyanov's original vision of how to solve the food problem in the country. If the head of the Soviet state believed that the plowing of virgin lands, land reclamation, breeding of new varieties of plants and livestock breeds could feed the Soviet people, then the scientist - intensification chemical production. The chemist believed that even a poor, war-ravaged country would take decades to develop agriculture, while the Soviet people wanted to eat a lot and cheaply right now.

Since the second half of the 1950s, under the leadership of Nesmeyanov, chemical and biological institutes have been working on creating food from hydrocarbons.

The same scientific process was going on not only in the USSR, but also in other developed countries. Nesmeyanov and laureate Nobel Prize, Englishman Alexander Todd met in the summer of 1955 at a meeting of the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry, and in a conversation they found that both considered it desirable to train young chemists abroad. In the autumn of the same year, Alexei Kosygin, deputy chairman of the Soviet government, came to England, visited Cambridge and listened to Todd's proposal to accept two trainees from the USSR. As a result, in the fall of 1956, the first trainees from the USSR arrived in Cambridge - chemists N. Kochetkov and E. Mistryukov.

Nesmeyanov's interest in the synthesis of food had a second reason. Even before the Revolution, he became a staunch vegetarian. The problem he wanted to solve was to get food protein without killing animals. Tatyana Nikolaevna, his sister, recalls: “At the age of nine, Shura refused to eat meat, and at the age of twelve he became a complete vegetarian, refusing fish as well. It was based on the firm belief that animals should not be killed. This was not inspired by anyone, and all his life he did not change the word given to himself once in childhood.

By 1964, Nesmeyanov had developed and mastered by industry a method for preparing protein granular caviar, similar to sturgeon caviar, based on milk proteins (more precisely, milk production waste - skim milk).

Another direction is the cultivation of yeast on oil hydrocarbons and the production of food protein from them. And another way, purely chemical, is the synthesis of amino acids that form the basis of proteins. This work was carried out at INEOS (Institute of Organoelement Compounds) and at some institutes in Leningrad. A special building for food synthesis laboratories was even attached to INEOS.

Doctor of Chemical Sciences G.L. Slonimsky recalled how this process went:

“For the first time I heard about this problem at a meeting of the scientific council of our institute, at which Nesmeyanov outlined all its aspects in detail. To my question why A.N. did not say anything about the taste of food, he replied that the taste is of no interest, since it is easily created by a mixture of four components - sweet, salty, sour and bitter, such as sugar, table salt, any food acid and caffeine or quinine. I immediately objected, noting that taste is determined not only by the chemical action of food components on taste buds, but also by the mechanical properties of food, its coarse and fine structure. The same puff cake - in its usual form and passed through a meat grinder - will taste different. A.N. immediately agreed and asked who would be able to work on this? I answered that since the main problem of our laboratory is the study of the physical structure and mechanical properties of polymers and their solutions, and proteins and polysaccharides are also polymers, I am ready to start these studies.

(Academician Nesmeyanov (right) tasting artificial black caviar)

A few days after a detailed discussion with A.N. in our laboratory, we set up the first experiments on the formation of pasta from food protein. When I showed them to A.N., he immediately tried it, said “Nothing” and was obviously pleased with the result.

A few days later, in a conversation with me, he dropped: “You know, if you are already seriously engaged in this, then I think you should start with something that would stun people and break through the wall of distrust in artificial food!” When I asked what he meant, A.N. dreamily said: “Well, for example, granular caviar!”

I immediately had an idea how to mold the eggs, so I replied that I would try to do it. Already in 1964, we made the first samples of artificial granular caviar from skimmed milk in the laboratory. And then the Institute developed the technology of its production. Since then, this cheap and tasty product called “Protein Grained Caviar” (based on casein, protein from broken eggs and other food waste) has been made in Moscow and other cities. A.N. was very pleased, but scolded me for the fact that caviar contains gelatin - he was a staunch vegetarian.

Nesmeyanov also tried to fundamentally, ideologically justify the production of artificial food. In one of his articles he wrote:

“Nature did not set itself the goal of feeding man. Once upon a time, the sun lit up on its own. But unlike the sun, alfalfa, and calves, we have intelligence. We can make a calculation of the food chain and come to the conclusion that it is difficult to feed properly with such a chain. We need to fix it, improve it!

Under the former agriculture only one boy in ten can be fed veal chops. For the share of the rest - rice porridge or soybeans.

What will we win?

Reliability first. There are no crop failures. We have won hygiene. Synthetic food is fresher: it does not need to be stored for a long time.

Synthetic food can be accurately dosed, adapted to the needs of the average person in general and this individual in particular. The product contains a medically established proportion of fats, proteins and carbohydrates, and there are no more fat people with obesity of the heart, no more diseases of the stomach and liver. And for the patient, you can choose special diets.

The third benefit, but not the last one, is the moral one.

Eating meat, we are forced to kill millions of bulls, rams, pigs, geese, ducks, chickens, accustoming thousands and thousands of people to cold-blooded bloodshed, to bloody and dirty work. And this does not really fit with the upbringing of love for nature, kindness, cordiality. There will be meat, but without bloodshed - artificial, made of polymers. There will be animals, but in parks, in the wild.”

In another of his works, “Artificial and Synthetic Food” (1969), he described how such food is created:

“First of all, it is necessary to synthesize the most expensive products - protein products, first of all, the replacement of meat and dairy products.

In the microcosm, among algae, yeast and non-pathogenic microorganisms, there are cultures that are rich sources of complete proteins. Thus, yeast cultures are known that are very rich in complete protein, but are still not used for cooking. They are grown on cheap raw materials. For example, crops such as Torula and Candida tropicalis, the basis for the growth of which are the waste of the alcohol industry and liquid paraffins of oil.

The cultivation of yeast on hydrocarbons is currently very well developed. The resulting biomass contains about 40% proteins. The action of proteolytic enzymes on this biomass leads to the hydrolysis of protein molecules. The amount of chromatographically pure amino acids can be isolated from the product thus obtained, for which the method of displacement ion-exchange chromatography is used.

In order to use such yeast in human nutrition, of course, it is necessary to completely remove from them all impurities that could get from the culture medium, and to isolate and then purify the most nutritionally valuable components. The most nutritionally valuable component of yeast is protein, or rather a mixture of proteins that can be isolated in the form of pure proteins or their constituent L-amino acids.

To use proteins isolated from microbiological raw materials directly for food purposes, it is necessary to eliminate the undesirable factors inherent in yeast (unpleasant color, smell, foreign taste). In terms of their biological value, such proteins can be brought to the level of the best proteins of animal origin. It was possible, for example, to show that the isolated total protein of Micrococcus glutamicus does not differ in amino acid composition from the protein of chicken eggs.

Academician Nesmeyanov in the late 1960s calculated that yeast "meat", literally grown on oil, could be brought up to 40-60 kopecks per kilogram at cost, "butter" and "cheese" from oil - about 80 kopecks. These prices were 3-4 times lower than in retail. He also paraphrased the famous phrase of his colleague, the chemist Mendeleev, “Stoking a furnace with oil is the same as heating with banknotes” - “Selling oil abroad is depriving the country of food.”

But the academician's idea had reverse side, more precisely, a few. In the case of the start of large-scale production of proteins from oil in Soviet agriculture, 70-80% of collective farmers would be unnecessary. Where to put them? Again, several tens of millions of people unprepared for this city?

Nesmeyanov himself wrote about this:

“About a third of our workers are employed in agriculture. Add to them drivers and railroad workers transporting products; add workers of tractor, combine, automobile factories; add the food and canning industry, warehouse workers. It turns out that at least half of the able-bodied people are employed in our food industry. And we still did not take into account the hands of a woman, busy for two hours a day peeling potatoes, vegetables, fussing with meat, boiled, fried, turned, baked.

What should these hands be applied to, where will tens of millions of liberated workers go? At least for service. It is more convenient to live, more pleasant to live, if there are many shops, and there are many sellers, if there are many cinemas and theaters, many laundries and hairdressers, many buses and trolleybuses, many hospitals and many nurseries, kindergartens and schools.

When free hands (and heads) appear, there will also be free time. It's interconnected. If a society spends half of its labor on food, then the average member of this society spends half of his working time (and earnings) on food. But when the labor of producing food is reduced to a minimum, the time required for this production is reduced to a minimum. Time is freed up.

For what? This is where it gets up, a difficult task has already arisen on a national scale: to teach people to use time wisely, to open their eyes to the world.”

The second problem is that the USSR, starting from the late 1960s, urgently needed a currency: for the purchase of machine tools, consumer goods and the same food - grain. By the way, Nesmeyanov did not propose to synthesize bread from oil (as well as carbohydrates in general, as well as fruits and vegetables) - their cost was lower when grown on the ground than in a test tube.

Finally, the top authorities believed (apparently, reasonably) that the Soviet people were not yet ethically ready to eat ersatz instead of real meat and dairy products, and, on the contrary, he would perceive the appearance of such “products” as a weakness of the state (“he cannot properly feed”) , not its scientific strength.

The projects of Academician Nesmeyanov remained at the level of laboratory developments. Although in the late 1970s, when the food problem worsened, he proposed a new idea - to get protein from algae (chlorella, etc.), but in January 1980 Nesmeyanov died, and apart from him there were no more scientific authorities whose administrative weight could push through even pilot production of ersatz

“Although in primitive life, especially in hunting and shepherding, much of the most necessary for people should have been directly obtained from animals, but today humanity has become so free from this sad necessity that the need to completely get rid of food, clothing and everything else from the need is conceivable. in any animals for the continuation of the whole development of people” (p. 3)

DI. Mendeleev

“Imagine that one boy lived a whole year of his life, from 12 to 13 years old, eating nothing but veal. The calves are grazing in a field sown with alfalfa, the field, of course, is illuminated by the sun.

Why, then, did 20 million plants grow only 8 tons of beans in a field of 4 hectares and feed less than five calves with a total weight of about 1 ton? Why did 1 ton of live weight provide only one boy weighing 48 kg, and even he gained only 2-3 kg in weight per year?

Yes, because the sun warms the field not at all in order to grow alfalfa, and alfalfa does not grow in order to be chewed by calves, and they do not run around the field in order to become chops. They grow in order to preserve their biological species, and in order to preserve the species, they need to defend themselves, their own life. This requires hoofed legs, horns, skin, teeth capable of chewing alfalfa, but in themselves inedible. Calves need, among other things, energy to run around the field, walk from plant to plant, and escape from predators. The energy for movement is also provided by the eaten alfalfa, which, in turn, grows to preserve its alfalfa genus. And for this, she needs not only beans, but also leaves that capture solar energy and carbon dioxide, you need stems that support the leaves, and even roots that are completely tasteless, but without them you will not get food and moisture. In addition, the plant spends an abyss of energy to evaporate water - about a thousand liters per kilogram of dry weight. This wastefulness is necessary in order to supply moisture up the stem to the leaves, it is also necessary in order to create a microclimate inside each bush. The plant, as it were, sweats, protecting itself from heat and dryness by evaporation. Evaporated and spent Sun rays. Everywhere loss, loss, loss...

Of all the solar energy falling on the field, alfalfa uses only 0.24% for its growth. From the energy accumulated by alfalfa, calves use 8% for their growth. From the energy accumulated by the calves, the boy uses 0.7% for his growth. (pp. 12-14)

Nature did not set itself the goal of feeding man. Once upon a time, the sun lit up on its own. Its light falls on nearby planets (also not all, a billionth fraction); the alfalfa absorbs it to maintain its species, the calves maintain their species. We - people - are the final link in this ecological chain. But unlike the sun, alfalfa, and calves, we have intelligence. We can make a calculation of the food chain and come to the conclusion that it is difficult to feed properly with such a chain. We need to fix it, improve it!

We need to improve, among other things, and because the globe there is not enough land to allocate four hectares per consumer. The calculation is simple: 4 billion inhabitants, land area - 15 billion hectares. But 90% of the land is ice, swamps, rocky mountains, sandy deserts. Approximately 1.6 billion hectares are suitable for processing, i.e. 0.4 hectares per person.

So only one boy in ten is supposed to be fed veal chops. For the share of the rest - rice porridge or soybeans. (p. 81)

What are the options for chemical rationalization, simplification of the path, elimination of links?

Four can be identified:

1. Plant food from non-edible plants

2. Animal food without an animal link

3. Food from cells, no animals and no plants.

4. Food from molecules, without cells, without plants and without animals.

There are reliable, proven ways to obtain food - from plants and from animals. Chemistry adds four more to these two:

1. Obtaining plant food from inedible plants (sugar from firewood)

2. Animal food without an animal link (wheat and soy steaks)

3. Food without animals and without plants - from yeast cells

4. Synthetic food without cells, without plants and without animals - with the help of energy from molecules (pp. 89-91).

Reducing each link increases the output ten times, if not more.

Remember that calves use only 8% of the alfalfa they eat for their weight gain? Balancing plant foods allows you to do without the animal link.

Veal without calves, lamb without rams!

You can balance any vegetable food. But soy protein is closest to meat, usually it is taken as a basis, balancing with methionine. Along the way, soybean oil is obtained. Tofu is a traditional Japanese food. The annual production of such products in Japan is 1 million tons, in the USA - about 500 thousand tons. Soy protein is added to sausages, sausages, minced meat, increasing their weight and not deteriorating quality.

Sufficiently pure soy or wheat protein can be spun as rayon is spun to form fibers. If you stick them together, give the necessary smell, taste, color, you get the most diverse food. So, in the catalog of one of the American firms it appears:

• Wheat cutlets.
• Fried wheat meat.
• Vegetarian meatballs made from wheat and soy.
• Sausage made from soy and corn.
• Soy beef.
• Soy ham.
• Wheat and soy sausages.
• Soy chicken.
• Turkey is a Sunday roast made from soy and wheat.
• Soy, wheat and yeast bacon.
• And another two dozen meat and vegetarian dishes.

By taste, these products are indistinguishable from natural food, at a price they are cheaper and are readily bought.

Absolutely new way for the production of dietary fiber from vegetable proteins was also developed at our Institute of Organoelement Compounds by V. B. Tolstoguzov (pp. 96-97).

	Biomass doubling time	Average relative accumulation rate
cows	2 months-5 years	1
Pigs	2-4 months	10
chickens	1 month	25
Cereals, legumes	7-30 days	30
Yeast, bacteria, unicellular algae	1-6 hours	18000

Legends of Moscow State University. Academician Nesmeyanov and cranberries.

Attention, warning: The information contained in the Legend is based on university folklore and may not be true!

It is impossible to imagine Russian Science without the old traditions of the feast.

Informal communication and learning in laboratories, seminars and conferences is no less important than formal communication and formal learning. And it's not so important - you speak for science at a chic banquet in a restaurant with cognac, champagne and salmon, or over a tin mug of denatured alcohol for three, sniffing the last "Belomor". The main thing in such things is a wise and worthy interlocutor and the Metaphysical Depth and Breadth of the Coverage of the discussed problems.

The so-called "pub science" conversation exists, of course, in the West, but in Russian scientific schools the alcohol-esoteric approach to comprehending scientific, philosophical and metaphysical problems reaches its peak!

The interlocutor, Breadth and Depth of coverage of the problem, of course, is most important, but the drink consumed, after all, plays a certain role. The most iconic drink of Russian people in general and Russian scientists in particular is, of course, 40-degree Russian Vodka, it's hard to argue with that.

And everyone, of course, knows the Legend about the invention of this iconic 40-degree drink - it was invented, according to the Legend, by the great Russian scientist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev during his PhD thesis. According to the Legend, his dissertation was devoted to the physical chemistry of alcohol hydration, he prepared mixtures of water and alcohol of different concentrations, measured the energy output, but the rest of scientific work don’t throw away mixtures of water and alcohol, right? .... Well, and thus, according to the Legend, he came to the conclusion that of all possible combinations, it is 40% alcohol that is most beneficial to health and has various amazing properties. However, I also heard a slightly different version - that it was not only the gastronomic preferences of the graduate student Mendeleev, but, it seems, there is some other scientific physico-chemical background under this, energy optimization, or what?

All this is already a classic of Russian Mythology, I have not heard any alternative versions about Moscow University, so it looks like we will have to admit defeat from the Petersburgers on the field of Legends about the invention of the Greatest Russian Drink, alas... ...

But there is another drink that, at least in academic circles, boldly takes 2-3 places and is not much inferior to vodka in popularity. So we're still fighting for second place!

The recipe for this drink is as follows: 1 kilogram of cranberries is homogenized using a homogenizer or ground in a mortar, then the cranberry homogenate is placed in a five-liter conical glass flask, mixed with 1 kg of sugar, 1 liter of pure medical alcohol is added to this, mixed and gently heated on a magnetic stirrer with heating (do not heat on an open fire, it is dangerous!)

Then the mixture is poured into centrifuge glasses, centrifuged in a centrifuge. The supernatant is collected in conical flasks, cooled. They drink the drink chilled from measuring cylinders.

The thoughtful reader, of course, has already guessed that we are talking about cranberries - the favorite drink of natural scientists. Cranberry is drunk amazingly, and it hits the balls even better!

For modern biologists, chemists, biochemists, physicists, soil scientists, geologists, this drink has already become such a familiar part of laboratory life that few people think about the question, where did it actually come from?

So, one of the Legends of Moscow University says that this drink is relatively young, and it was invented in the laboratory of the Legendary Russian Chemist Academician Nesmeyanov, and, it seems, Academician Nesmeyanov himself was directly involved in trying out various recipes for alcohol-berry mixtures, and came to As a result, to the conclusion that cranberries are still the best shader of the amazing qualities of medical alcohol.

And Alexander Nikolayevich Nesmeyanov himself, like Mendeleev, was not only a chemist, but also a diversified person in general, apparently with great enthusiasm and a sense of humor, and, in addition to the Legend of Cranberries, he left other Legendary stories about himself in university folklore. At one time he was even the rector of our University, and then for a long time he headed the Institute of Organoelement Compounds of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Additional Information:

1) And here - Legends about another very extraordinary rector of Moscow State University, Academician Petrovsky