Alcohol can be made from anything of a starchy, sugary or woody nature,
that is, from the main substance of all vegetation. If we start with
wood (cellulose) we convert it first into sugar (glucose) and, of
course, we could stop here and use it for food instead of carrying it
on into alcohol. This provides one factor of our food, the carbohydrate,
but by growing the yeast plants on glucose and feeding them with
nitrates made from the air we can get the protein and fat. So it is
quite possible to live on sawdust, although it would be too expensive a
diet for anybody but a millionaire, and he would not enjoy it. Glucose
has been made from formaldehyde and this in turn made from carbon,
hydrogen and oxygen, so the synthetic production of food from the
elements is not such an absurdity as it was thought when Berthelot
suggested it half a century ago.

The first step in the making of alcohol is to change the starch over
into sugar. This transformation is effected in the natural course of
sprouting by which the insoluble starch stored up in the seed is
converted into the soluble glucose for the sap of the growing plant.
This malting process is that mainly made use of in the production of
alcohol from grain. But there are other ways of effecting the change. It
may be done by heating with acid as we have seen, or according to a
method now being developed the final conversion may be accomplished by
mold instead of malt. In applying this method, known as the amylo
process, to corn, the meal is mixed with twice its weight of water,
acidified with hydrochloric acid and steamed. The mash is then cooled
down somewhat, diluted with sterilized water and innoculated with the
mucor filaments. As the mash molds the starch is gradually changed over
to glucose and if this is the product desired the process may be stopped
at this point. But if alcohol is wanted yeast is added to ferment the