W. R. Thomas’s scientific contributions

There is a 1000-year written history of konjac tubers being consumed as a high-grade food, offered as presents to the Samurai and noble classes and used as a cure for certain diseases in China and Japan. It did not become an industrialized food product in Japan until the Mito clan cultivated konjac and developed a way of drying and separating the glucomannan from the starch and cellulose in the tuber. This allowed the konjac flour, also known as konjac gum, to be stored and distributed. Processing the tuber from the Amorphophallus konjac plant by this method made konjac flour available to the common people in Japan.