Landfills, Farms, Diapers:

How We Could Take Gluten to the Next Level

A team of Swiss and Japanese researchers discovered that lab-doctored wheat gluten absorbs liquid until it reaches 40x its size.

The picturesque farm family is a mom, a dad, and a cute baby, or maybe a toddler or two.

Farming and children go hand-in-hand. Usually literally, as the parents teach the children the ways and rhythms of the farm, and also figuratively, as the children feature prominently into the next generation of farmers.

That’s one way that farming is linked to children.

Another was just discovered in October and could have effects on not only the children of the farm but also on all the children that wear diapers.

Wheat gluten was the starting point of a natural disposable diaper, because of its absorbent properties. ADM talks about gluten’s absorbency as it relates to baking breads, but another place that could be found is in the lining of a diaper for a biodegradable solution to a landfill problem.

The team, composed of Antonio Jose Capezza, Yuxiao Cui, Keiji Numata, Malin Lundman, William Roy Newson, Richard Tobias Olsson, Eva Johansson, and Mikael Stefan Hedenqvist, published their study last July in the journal Advanced Sustainable Systems.

The study was cleverly called ‘High Capacity Functionalized Protein Superabsorbents from an Agricultural Co Product: A Cradle

to Cradle Approach.’

The title (while a mouthful) is a mention of the product they found the protein in and what they use it for. A ‘cradle to cradle approach’ is one that takes a by-product and upcycles it, so it can be used in a different process. It usually is meant to refer (tongue-in-cheek) to the cycles of nature: From the cradle of one product to the cradle of another, except in this case, the second cradle is also a literal cradle, for a baby! Pretty neat

use of English by the Swedish and Japanese researchers working on the project.

What my college stats professor would not approve of, though, is their use of numbers. The team found that the absorbency of their doctored protein would increase up to 4000%. However, 4000% is really hard to visualize. It’s impossible, really, because we all were taught that percentages can only get up to 100%. That’s the nature of the mathematical beast.

Speaking figuratively, though, this material they created (starting

with wheat gluten) is very absorbent. The way they use the number ‘4000%’ seems to indicate the size of the material after it absorbed water, so we can picture a superabsorbent paper towel soaking up water and growing forty times its original size.

To get the wheat gluten out of the wheat is a long process. Picture a bulk dry-goods store the size of our Leevers. Walking down the aisle for whole wheat flour would show you the gluten: Whole wheat flour still has its gluten. Actually, just about all

wheat flours have some gluten in them, even white flour and all-purpose flour. Gluten is a protein, so higher-protein flours usually have higher gluten content.

What doesn’t have gluten is an item found on the highly processed side of the grocery store, next to the shelfstable nut milks. Wheat starch!

Wheat starch, and starches like it (such as corn starch), are used commercially to thicken foods, including but not limited to: Pudding, soups, sauces, pie fillings, salad dressings, and dumpling wrappers.

That wheat starch has had the gluten removed, and the gluten has to go somewhere. Occasionally, the US has had a surplus of wheat gluten, and some of that has been imported according to the rise in consumer demand for it: Vital wheat gluten can be added to low-protein flours to improve the bread’s texture and crust. It has also been used to improve the protein content of foods like smoothies or granola bars.

OSU released a publication in the early 2000s that showed the

countries from which we imported the most wheat gluten, and the EU was at the very top of that list.

If our imports of EU wheat gluten create a surplus of US wheat gluten, then the use of it in disposable diapers would be a boon for the US- and we certainly wouldn’t have a surplus for long. Very small children go through many diapers in a day, so the industry (if it takes off) would be booming.

Good for landfills, good for the US farmersand good for the farm babies.