Ex Oriente Lux

Egyptians call it samna, Turks call it Hindistanda kaynatilmis tereyagi, Americans call it rancid butter. Indians call it ghee (as in Fibber McGee), and they love it. They make it by boiling the milk of water buffalo, letting it cool, adding sour milk to make it curdle faster, then straining off the butter oil, which is the ghee. They eat it. spread it on sores, and anoint holy images with it.

This week Louis H. Burgwald of the U.S. Department of Agriculture was touring India with samples of U.S. ghee made from surplus butter. If Indian dairymen like it, William G. Lodwick. an Iowa farmer, now Administrator of the U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service, may have solved the U.S. surplus-butter problem. (Size of the problem: a Government-owned hoard of 260 million Ibs., worth $168 million.)

Two years ago Lodwick, on a mission to Pakistan, saw ghee being made, heard that there was a great shortage of it. Since then U.S. dairies have worked on the problem, samples have been sent to Pakistan, endless embassy discussions have been held. Pakistan is willing to pay 42-c- a delivered pound, a loss to the U.S. of about 28-c- a pound. Although the U.S.-owned butter is now in cold storage, it may eventually spoil, and the Government will lose the 64-c- it paid for the average pound. There is no problem in storing ghee. In fact, some tasty Indian ghee has been kept 100 years.

The Department of Agriculture, desperately trying to get rid of its butter without disrupting the markets of friendly nations, is cautiously excited about the great ghee plan. It might be the greatest idea in international farm trade since Mark Twain's Colonel Mulberry Sellers dreamed of a great sales organization--with its headquarters in Constantinople and its hindquarters in Further India--to sell patented eyewash to ophthalmia-ridden Orientals.

One obstacle looms. The Indians and Pakistanis may spurn ghee produced by American Holsteins and insist on good old water-buffalo ghee. But this need not daunt the Department of Agriculture. It can import water buffalo, fill the Wisconsin and Minnesota lake regions with them, get the 4-H Clubs leaping with water-buffalo milk-yield contests, buy the surplus milk, and turn out ghee just like Mother India used to make.

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