Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/61



Who has not pitied John the Baptist because he had to eat insects (locusts) in the wilderness, and the Prodigal Son because he was brought so low that he was forced to feed upon the "husks that the swine did eat?

But the locusts that John the Baptist ate were not insects; they were the beans of the carob tree, sometimes still spoken of in the Near East as "locust." The husks eaten by the Prodigal Son were not the dried husks of corn, as the American farmer naturally believes. They too were the pods of the carob bean.

Like our own maize, the carob bean is food for animals. It has been used for that purpose throughout the Mediterranean region for several thousands of years. Like maize it is also used for human food. My son, when three years of age, ate, without invitation, the samples of carob that I had brought home. Carob beans are regularly sold for human food by little shop keepers and pushcart vendors on the strects in some parts of New York and other American cities occupied by Mediterranean peoples. They have long been used in American factories to add both flavor and nutriment to certain patent calf foods, live-stock conditioners, and dog biscuit. Four hundred tons per year are used in the United States to flavor chewing tobacco.

The trees and the beans have been introduced into California, and it is an astonishing fact that promoters of Los