The story goes that during the Great Depression, farmers were not getting the prices for their crops that they needed. Henry Ford, concerned that his farmer customers could no longer afford to buy his cars, became interested in using crops as ingredients for fuels, plastics and textiles in a “cars growing from the ground” project. He quickly became enamored of hemp and soybeans for this purpose.

Ford took to wearing a suit made of soybean protein fiber that he invented himself and called “soybean wool.” His Model “T” could run on ethanol, and he even built a car with plastic parts and upholstery of vegetable origin. As always, he was a great promoter of his inventions.

On several occasions, between 1934 and 1943, he entertained reporters at luncheons, in which every course contained soybeans, from tomato juice with soybean sauce to soybean cookies and soybean candy for dessert.

As WWII dragged on the armies experienced shortages of warm clothing. Soybeans, peanuts, even milk made up just some of the agriculturally-derived fibers, called azlons, that were tried as wool substitutes. However, it wasn’t long before cheap petroleum-based synthetics took over the markets. Read the rest of this entry