STIS Seminar with Hannah Landecker

Please join us for a very special STIS Seminar with Hannah Landecker (UCLA) at the Usha Kasera Lecture Theatre, Old College, University of Edinubrgh. The Seminar will also be livestreamed on Zoom. Please see below for the abstract, for more information about Professor Landecker and for details of how to join online.

Enzymes and Emulsifiers in the Metabolism of Mass Production

Much concern has been expressed lately in the medical and popular press about the ultra-processing of foods as a health risk. That is, it is the process (high heat, molecular-level alteration) that matters, as much as the substance itself. Where calories or salt content or pesticide residues might have been of concern before, now there is process itself to worry about as well. Yet debates about the health implications of processing are mired in frames of toxicity and dietary risk ill-suited to grasping how and why such conditions have become pervasive environments for contemporary life. Here I will argue that it is impossible to comprehend the transformation of food without understanding a more general remaking of emollience, smoothness, and miscibility in industrialized societies between 1950 and 2000. Moreover, any actionable concept of metabolic disorder in the present must include consideration of the metabolic reordering of the immediate past, as enzymes, fats and other pieces of living things were pulled apart, reconstituted, and re-articulated with synthetic chemistry in new sequences of material transformation. Part of a larger project to document the industrialization of metabolism and its planetary and bodily aftermath, this talk works through an empirical archive of mid-to-late twentieth century industrial trade magazines to demonstrate how enzymes and emulsifiers became processing agents, simultaneously mass-produced commodities in their own right, and enablers of the augmented volumes and velocities of continuous process manufacturing.

Hannah L. Landecker is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. For a selected list of Professor Landecker's many publications, including 2007's Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies, see https://socgen.ucla.edu/people/hannah-landecker/.

Livestream

https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/85212459817

Meeting ID: 852 1245 9817

Passcode: L3viathan

Host or Publisher STIS, University of Edinburgh