Japanese turn trees into noodles as agriculture industry learns to adapt

Tokyo

FACED with tightening competition for the textiles it's been making for almost 100 years, Omikenshi Co is trying to get into the health-food business, using its cloth-making technology to turn trees into noodles.

The Osaka-based company's best-selling product is rayon, a fibre made from tree pulp. Using a similar process, Omikenshi is turning the indigestible cellulose into a pulp that's mixed with konjac, a yam-like plant grown in Japan. The resulting fibre-rich flour, which the company calls "cell-eat," contains no gluten, fat and almost no carbohydrate. It has just 60 calories a kilogramme, compared with 3,680 for wheat.