STS Speaker: The "Butcher’s Philosophy": Situating Human Health in a Metabolic Landscape

In 1934 nutrition scientist Clive McCay warned that children were being raised with an attitude to growth that he called “the butcher’s philosophy”: the desire to bring animals to market weight quickly and efficiently. This talk excavates the butcher’s philosophy of the twentieth century and its consequences for the chemical landscapes of life in the twenty-first century. The history of medicated feed for animals in the twentieth century has traditionally been seen as a rather specialized corner of agricultural history: the story of how antibiotics, arsenicals, hormones, and vitamins were used to grow animals to market size earlier with less feed is an important part of the industrialization of American food systems. Yet it is also the history of a major re-articulation of the metabolic interrelations of bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, and humans, in which flows of enzymes, amino acids, and secondary metabolites between organisms changed profoundly. This talk uses insights from this history to rethink frameworks for investigating the relationship between diet and health, arguing for experimental and epidemiological approaches that are better equipped to take account of the historically-specific metabolic landscapes of human development and health.