A new cigarette that can be smoked or eaten–with or without dressing–will be introduced on the Israeli market within three months, it was reported here today. It is made of dry lettuce leaves by a process developed over the past five years by Dr. Gregorio Rubinstein, an Argentinian Jew. The tentative brand name is “Long Life” and it could, in the long run, spell the end of the salad days of the tobacco industry.
Dr. Rubinstein says that any one of a variety of vegetables could be used to manufacture the cigarette but he selected lettuce because it can be dried in the field. Moreover, Israel’s climate yields three lettuce crops a year. Dr. Rubinstein’s 10-stage bio-mechanical process neutralizes the lettuce taste and a negligible quantity of tobacco is added to give the smoke a familiar flavor.
Lettuce cigarettes can be manufactured by the same process as the conventional kind and requires no retooling by factories. It contains no nicotine and at least 50 percent less tar than any other cigarette on the market. Presumably, as one wag commented Jokingly, it can be had with a mayonnaise filter.
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