THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Saturday, December 17, 1994            TAG: 9412170207
SECTION: LOCAL                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Column 
SOURCE: Guy Friddell 
                                             LENGTH: Medium:   63 lines

IT'S AMAZING WHAT SCIENTISTS CAN DO WITH A SWEET POTATO

In a laboratory in Raleigh, scientists are preparing to reshape a sweet potato to look like a hot dog.

I refer to this remarkable transmogrification more in wonderment than in a narrow-gauged judgmental way.

So let them do it.

If there is one thing in which this country excels beyond question, it is agricultural research.

My heroes, from the third grade, were George Washington Carver, who found 100 uses for the peanut, and Luther Burbank, who crossed a peach and a plum and came up with a nectarine.

That I have not yet done anything with a peanut beyond eating it nor met a nectarine that I would prefer to any peach or plum does not lessen my awe of scientists.

What alarms them - and me, too - is that since the 1930s, when the average American ate 23 pounds of sweet potatoes yearly, consumption has fallen to 3.9 pounds per person.

At the Food Science Research Unit in Raleigh, chemist William Walter and North Carolina State scientists ground up a sweet potato, added a small amount of sugar and mixed it with two types of cellulose texturizing agents.

(You know what scientists remind me of, mucking about that way - children playing in a sand pile. All those long words don't fool me.)

Then they stuffed the mixture in sausage casings and froze the so-called hot dogs. ``Hot dog!'' they said.

One additive - take a big breath - methydroxypropylcellulose, widely used to texturize, stabilize, thicken and bind foods, has been found to lower blood cholesterol levels.

A 30-member panel judged the baked product equal in taste, texture, color and overall quality to baked fresh sweet potatoes.

With a baking time of just 15 minutes, Walter's creation is done in a quarter of the time required to bake a fresh sweet potato in a conventional oven.

Walter and his colleagues also added an alkaline-neutralization treatment for french fried sweet potatoes, increasing their firmness 100-fold.

The Agriculture Department in Washington hopes that the processes will open up markets for growers - and so do I.

But, as is the case with so many innovations, I shall jog along with the plain, irregular old sweet potatoes, no two of which look alike.

Even I can cook them. All you do is pop one in an oven, give it a hot baking for a while, open the oven door and prod it, in passing, to see if it's softening, and, when it yields to the touch, cut off the oven and let it meditate a while.

One potato, mixed with butter, and taken with a glass of cold milk on the side to wash it down, is a meal unto itself.

Cook two, and carry one to work for a sweet and nourishing lunch.

I don't want to eat a sweet potato that looks like a sausage. ILLUSTRATION: JANET SHAUGHNESSY

Staff

by CNB