“The Early Bird Gets the Profit” Comes Home to Roost

Carl Gierstorfer: There is an anecdote you like to tell which captures a lot of your work as a historian, as a scientist, and as a sociologist. It’s about sea gulls and junk food.

Hannah Landecker: Yes, it’s a news story that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 2019. It was about naturalists who were studying Western gulls off the coast of California. The Channel Islands is their nesting ground and so the islands are really thick with guano, bird poop. Guano has been very important as a source for fertilizer for agriculture, but also in ecology, as an important way nitrogen circulates between the land and the sea. The scientists were tagging these gulls to see where they were going during the day and noticed that they were flying inland to Southern California. They were eating from the dumpsters behind fast-food establishments.

CG: They were feeding on the junk of junk food.

HL: Correct. And so the gulls would return and they would cough up things like ketchup packages or corn dog sticks, whereas a gull that was eating squid or fish would cough up the indigestible parts, a squid beak for example. What goes in has to come out. It made the naturalists ask whether this consumption of fast food was changing the very chemical constitution of the Channel Islands.

CG: But you also found another aspect interesting.

HL: For me, it’s a story that is meaningful at lots of different levels. One of them is simply that the industrialization of the food system and the massive expansion of food processing to make fast food is something that we usually think about only in terms of what humans eat. But having a peek into the way that it’s circulating around the world and maybe changing the very geological surface of islands – it gives you a much more overt sense of how systemic these changes are for all kinds of bodies, not just human bodies.

CG: Hence our idea of nature versus the man-made world with all its waste is an oversimplification. In reality it’s all connected.

HL: This is the second thing that really interests me: the thinking about the mining of guano from the global South and the bringing to the global North has been a very classical part of political thought. It was central to Karl Marx’ idea of the extraction of goods from one part of the world and taking to another part of the world, creating a kind of rift in natural cycles of use and return. But I’m not sure our theories have kept up to allow us to think through the rather perverse image of the return of industrialized agriculture, in the form of guano, to the islands. Coming home to roost, so to speak. This is more than a rift – it is a completely deranged cycle! It makes you ask what natural science and political theory have to say to each other, today, about these circulations.

CG: This derangement of natural cycles of use and return is very central to your work. You study the industrialization of metabolism and how whole industries have grown out of our increasingly sophisticated understanding of the ways in which organic compounds are utilized by organisms.

HL: Metabolism is a word and a concept that we use to describe biochemical interconversions of matter and energy. But I like to say that there was no metabolism before 1839. That was when Theodor Schwann, a German anatomist of the 19th century, in an effort to systematize understanding of the relationships between plants and animals, wrote a book about cell theory, the idea that organisms are made of nothing but cells. But what was less noticed about the systematizing nature of cell theory was that it was also a claim for the cell as the seat of metabolic power. He coined the word metabolic from the Greek metabolē, which is to transpose, in order to describe the power of the cell to chemically convert things from one form to another. Humans have increasingly taken this metabolic power in hand, at scale, using biochemical sequences of transformation for the mass production not just of nutrients, but of all manner of pharmaceuticals and chemicals.

CG: This industrialization of metabolism was the beginning of a revolution in the animal feed industry that reverberates in manifold forms to the present day.

HL: In the 1910s and 1920s, bacterial metabolism became one site for taking bits of metabolic processes in hand and building them up and reconnecting them in different ways. Industrialization means taking something small-scale or occasional and bringing it into industrial mass production. And I mean it really literally, like enzymes and amino acids and such metabolic components are turned into things that can be mass produced. And then you can take things that bacteria make and feed them into, let’s say, cattle. Of course there have for millennia been connections between bacteria and cattle. But not like this.

CG: Simply speaking, there was an understanding that there is no such thing as waste. Pulp, mashes, skins, and bones from slaughterhouses – it all had a metabolic value, because these waste products still contained compounds that could be utilized.

HL: The story of the remobilization of waste as animal feed is one that I study as part of the industrialization of metabolism. You feed crops to chickens and then you have a lot of chicken waste. And I don’t just mean chicken excrement. I mean the feathers and everything that’s left over from slaughter. Or you fish the seas and you come up with this great technique of canning fish to distribute it further through the country. But then you’re left with massive amounts of fish heads and fish tails and things like that. And of course, there are a natural set of cycles that those things would decay through. But at the turn of the 20th century, agricultural scientists, but also agricultural managers and people working in the growing manufacturing corporations were troubled by these discarded piles of waste, basically because they smelled bad. They were bothering people in the cities and fouling rivers. And this need to do something with waste crossed with a growing worry that the United States in particular would not succeed in growing enough meat to feed its people or enough food because of a shortage of protein. Nutrition science merged with these practical problems of waste. And the idea was to take these things from the process of decay that they would normally go through and channel them in a new way into another organism.

CG: How did they do that?

HL: Well, they had to make it palatable. So techniques of drying, for example, were very important. And also by having a commercial infrastructure by which you could convince farmers that it was better and cheaper for them to feed their animals from feed that they had bought in a bag versus things that they could get off their own farms. The agricultural research stations established in the United States in the late 19th century – on the model of German ones – played a big part in promoting “scientific feeding.” And so it’s a mixture of technology, science, and a kind of instruction to think in terms of protein content or other nutrients.

CG: Concepts that really didn’t exist in the 19th century were becoming the dominant way of feeding animals in the 20th century.

HL: These ideas grew out of a sense that one should have a way of doing chemical dissection of living matter. If you put this food into an animal, how did it turn into the animal and its work and its excrement? For example, work like this looked at the seeds left over from cotton processing and said, well, how much protein do they have in them and are they good for feeding animals? A little bit later scientists realized that all vegetable proteins have slightly different amino acid constituents, for example corn and wheat are quite different. We have this massive universe of vegetable proteins – how does it get turned into animal protein? What’s the most efficient way to do that? It is this kind of chemical gaze that is key.

CG: And this chemical gaze, by which scientists dissected the living world, became economically important?

HL: Yes. In the United States by 1929 there were at least 750 prepared feed manufacturers, with a market size of $ 400 million. Economic historians have compared this to the market for agricultural machinery at that time, which was at about $ 278 million that year. While you might think of tractors when you think about the industrialization of agriculture, obviously this industrialization of feed streams was just as, or more, important. You can also see it in the historical materials – so many Farmers’ Almanac articles about whether to choose this kind of ratio or that kind of ratio of protein and fat for which life stage of what animal. All of the advertising too is being pointed at farmers – my favorite from this period is an advertisement for Quaker’s “Ful-O-Pep” growing mash for chickens that says “The early bird gets the profit.”

CG: Isn’t it a very American, a very profit-orientated logic, where the animal as a living being becomes just another variable?

HL: Sure, but that for me is the beginning of the question of whether there’s a particularly American metabolism, not the answer to it. What did this logic do, what world did it make? One of the things that really stands out to me from this period of history is that I see it as making a new circulatory system for a matter. I see the landscape of the United States as having these new conduits for the flow of nutritive matter opened across it, by the building of feed manufacturing hubs, out of which churn these feed bags that reach billions of animals. And it’s a circulatory system into which, whenever the next nutritional finding comes along, the feed manufacturers could just drop that supplement or chemical in, often just on top of all the other ones. You see vitamin D added to manufactured feed, to give to chickens so that they can grow inside all year round and not depend on sunlight. A little bit later the growth promoters come along and within three or four years, we go from laboratory-scale findings about something like arsenic-based medications being a growth promoter to it being fed to 80% of chickens in the United States. The same for antibiotics – it takes only a handful of years to go from initial discovery as a growth promoter to being fed to the majority of domestic animals in the entire country. How can that happen so quickly? It’s because the flow of feed and the premise of scientific feeding has already been established at scale.

CG: Were there any moral concerns about using animals in such a way?

HL: I’ve looked for the critiques from the people at the time, because surely not everybody thought it was a good idea. But the dominance of the question of growth is so pervasive that I really think that from the perspective of the historical actors it was not something cruel and cold. It was the magic of growth and the idea that you could completely prevent disease, this kind of utopic idea of a land of plenty, a land of excess, untroubled by disease. Of course, as soon as you start to do something like using vitamin D supplements to enable growing chickens in a shed all year round, you create the conditions for outbreaks of new kinds of diseases, which necessitates layering yet more medications and supplements into the feed. There was some awareness that this system was creating its own problems, but it generally came with a lot of optimism about finding fixes.

CG: So the “chemical gaze” has come up with a solution for that as well. The concept of “selective toxicity” states that apparently one can kill parasites without harming the organism. So highly toxic waste products found their ways into animal feed to further promote growth.

HL: This is when arsenical medications as growth promoters came along. Arsenic is a transitional element. It means that it can bond either to carbon or it can bond to metals. Arsenic is the 20th most common element in the Earth’s crust. When you mine things like copper, you often pull out arsenic bonded to it. Arsenic was a waste product, therefore, of the mining industry, especially in the early 20th century. Again, let’s take the United States as the example. Once the railroads had opened out the American West and connected the mines with the smelters, copper smelting was sending off a lot of arsenic trioxide in the air, which killed plants and animals. So the smelters developed techniques for trapping the substance, before it went off in the smoke. But then they were left with a whole lot of arsenic trioxide, which is very poisonous. But what on earth to do with it? First, it was used in pesticides before DDT came along. Arsenicals really come into the story of animal feed in the 1940s.The search for an anti-parasitic for birds being grown in chicken sheds led investigators back to arsenic. Experimentation with organic arsenic medications showed that not only is it good for fighting off intestinal parasites. It also has this unexpected and desirable effect that it promotes growth, it gives you faster growth on less feed. So it actually changes the feed efficiency ratio. And this was like a magic bullet, but for chickens. When one sees the newspaper accounts of it at the time, they describe the people developing these things as “feed wizards.”

CG: Again, there is a bigger, historical, context. The United States had entered the Second World War and food shortages became a real concern.

HL: Yes. And again, this was absolutely perceived as progress. This was the context of World War II and post-war shortages. Growth promoters could change the equation with more product for less input. Also, you could apply these arsenic medications without a vet. You see, a vet is way too expensive to treat a chicken, because a single chicken is not valuable. Arsenicals were put in trace amounts in drinking water to treat the whole flock. Regulators raised some concerns about arsenicals in the water or feed, but these were waved away by claims about the relative non-toxicity of organic arsenical medications versus inorganic poisonous arsenic. And it was thought that it was being used at such trace amounts that it was well below the threshold of any hazard to humans.

CG: Were they right? Today, we know that naturally occurring arsenic in drinking water is a cancer risk for people in Bangladesh, for example. Why would it have no consequences if you put vast amounts into the food chains?

HL: Even trace amounts add up to a huge amount if you use it for a long time at the scale of the modern feed industry, so from our contemporary perspective these assumptions about harmlessness certainly look crazy. The way we think about arsenic has changed a lot, in part because of the events in Bangladesh. That public health work has made it very clear that high-dose exposure to arsenic is terrible and low-dose exposure to arsenic is also bad, the first for cancer and the second for metabolic disorders like diabetes. At the same time, most countries’ regulatory efforts have been directed towards arsenic in drinking water. However, the history that I’ve just told you shows that arsenic in food really should be monitored more than it is, because of the flow of arsenic from these agricultural resources into the soil and its subsequent uptake by rice and fruit crops.

CG: What do you think we can learn from this history, other than being even more suspicious of our food systems than we were before?

HL: I like to say that understanding the history of biology also gives us the opportunity to see into the biology of history – how human social history has become the biological condition for life today. Along the way, we see interesting changes in the question of what science is for, in society. In the 19th century, scientists were asking how life works: what is metabolism? How does dead matter become living flesh? Then in the 20th century, metabolism becomes this operationalized way of understanding mechanisms of growth, pushing some parts of the living world to expand while others are suppressed; suppress the parasites, grow the animal. Now in the 21st century, we have inherited this circulatory system that I’ve described, which means the substances that were put into action in the 20th century are environmentally pervasive. The object of scientific inquiry then becomes the impact of these industrial legacies on biology, for example how does long-term low-dose arsenic exposure affect the pancreas. These studies aren’t after understanding life in some pure sense, rather they are trying to fathom life after or within industrialization. Then is science about nature anymore? Is it about fundamental laws of biology? Or is it recentered around thinking what biological life – human health – is in this anthropogenic landscape? I’m super interested in the historical shifts by which yesterday’s forms of scientific and technical knowledge shape the materials that then become the center of the science we are doing today.

CG: Do you see yourself as a historian or more as a philosopher of science?

HL: I see myself as a bit of a historian. A bit of an anthropologist and a sociologist. A bit of a philosopher. A bit of a biologist. Maybe it’s because I see biology as a beautiful narrative and literary and artistic way of engaging with the world. And vice versa, in literature and social science, the description of human life and human activity feels impoverished to me without the vision of understanding it and narrating it biologically as well.

CG: Biology also is a historical science, because biological phenomena only make sense in the light of their evolutionary history.

HL: Yes, that is true. Social history can also be thought of as evolutionary history when you look at all the ways in which human activity generates selective pressures that drive evolution. The mass production of antibiotics, in part due to their use in agriculture, is a good example of social drivers of the evolution of antibiotic resistance. This is why it is important to think systemically about nutrition science and its material effects at global scale, as it changes the flow of matter moving through organisms in different ways. The role of telling that story is to enable asking questions of, to put it bluntly, what have we done? What is this anthropogenic biology that we have made? You can understand antibiotics through their chemical character. You can understand them economically or medically. But it is quite important to think about antibiotics as a social history of war and corporate forms that drive microbial biology – it’s true today and it was just after World War II when antibiotics became available for civilian use. For example, we wouldn’t have Pfizer in its current form without the engagement of Pfizer and other pharmaceutical operations by the US War Resources Board in World War II to build factories, to grow enough organisms, to make enough penicillin to treat the army. And without this form, the evolutionary history of today’s microbes would not look the way it does.

CG: You have studied the history of Pfizer, which partnered with BioNTech to mass-produce a novel mRNA vaccine against SARS-Cov2. Pfizer invested $ 2 billion of its own cash in the endeavor. A huge gamble, that paid off, because Pfizer had the expertise to manufacture 2,5 billion doses in less than two years.

HL: Well, Pfizer began in the 19th century as a smallish company whose products were basically plant extracts. One of them was vitamin C from lemons, ascorbic acid. During World War I, there were great difficulties getting lemons due to blockades. Partly because of necessity, this was a period of realizing that microbes were these amazing chemists in their own right; that you could feed them on things like sugar or corn liquor. And they would make molecules such as citric acid as part of their normal metabolic activity. So Pfizer began growing Aspergillus, which is a kind of mold, to harvest citric acid from it. The key part of this story is that Pfizer became experts in the art of fermentation.

CG: …which stimulates micro-organisms in bioreactors to produce biologically active compounds.

HL: Yeah. They used high-volume tanks. Basically, you put a nutrient medium in, you sterilize it, so it’s not contaminated. And then you seed the medium with the organism that you want to grow – like Aspergillus. You let it eat and grow and multiply, and then you harvest the molecule that you want. By developing these techniques, industrial-scale technologies were developed for harvesting molecules from microbes. When World War II came along and Fleming’s earlier penicillin discovery was revived, the main problem was that the organism that made it couldn’t be grown at scale. This work was being done in England by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain. Quite famously, the largest vehicles that they could find for growing the mold on the surface of nutrient medium were bedpans. Obviously this wasn’t a great solution for trying to produce large amounts. So the US government agreed to help in the industrial production of penicillin and the War Resources Board mobilized a number of companies to help, including Pfizer, providing the capital to build the production facilities because their expertise in fermentation was needed to run these things. It was a huge federal investment in the infrastructure to take penicillin to scale.

CG: A sort of public-private partnership.

HL: It’s not that Pfizer back then didn’t have anything at all. They had built their own facilities and their own expertise and their own workforce in understanding fermentation as an industrial source of valuable chemicals. Nonetheless, they did not become the company we recognize today until this scaling-up occurred in the context of war. And even in the story of the Covid vaccines, obviously you can’t discount the role of governments in guaranteeing contracts for purchasing the vaccines, even before being sure they would work. I have no doubt that the sudden acceleration in mRNA vaccine technology we’ve just seen will be a factor in microbial evolution in the future, just as antibiotics and disinfectants became the selective agents shaping bacterial evolution in the twentieth century.

CG: When you transcend the different disciplines and thus gain new insights, new connections, new narratives – does that give you pleasure?

HL: Absolutely! It’s amazingly exciting to be able to build a new story. I enjoy articulating questions that have gone unthought or unasked. When you expose a blind spot or really hit on a question that hasn’t been asked before, you can literally feel the shift in people’s way of thinking or their ability to notice things, it’s almost like a lever shifts and opens out a different configuration or space for noticing the world. We live in a time in which there are already a billion books, there’s more storytelling and narratives and data out there than you know what to do with, and yet still being able to say something in a way that it hasn’t been put before, that is a true pleasure.