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Beginning in the early 1960s and through to the end of the Soviet Union, Western oil companies and Soviet ministries competed in the science, technology, and industrial production of “single-cell protein.” This powered supplement for animal feed—and, perhaps, human food—was produced by growing strains of yeast on hydrocarbon feedstocks in industrial-scale fermenters. For different reasons on different sides of the iron curtain, single-cell protein was viewed as vital to the future of food, and even to “the economy” writ large—until, again for very different reasons in the West and East, the industry came to a crashing halt. This paper explores the significance of a time when the world’s oil firms and enterprises were also aiming to become the world’s largest food companies.Douglas Rogers is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. His research and teaching interests are in political, economic, and historical anthropology; natural resources (especially oil) and energy; corporations; science and technology studies; the anthropology of religion and ethics; and socialist societies and their postsocialist trajectories.
He is currently working on Eating Oil: An Earthly History, a book about microbes that metabolize hydrocarbons and the humans, states, and corporations who have discovered, researched, cared for, grown, sold, killed, and otherwise related to them. Ranging across Soviet, European, and North American sites, the book deepens our knowledge of the natural and cultural history of hydrocarbons and life on Earth and suggest new possibilities for reckoning with that history in the present.
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