Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Doug Rogers "Petroprotein: How British Petroleum and the Soviet Union Created an Oil-into-Food Industry in the 1960s"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?
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Abstract: In early 1960s, British Petroleum announced that one of its laboratories in France had discovered a way to grow yeast on refined oil, producing a cheap protein supplement that, in the company’s view, had the potential to transform the global production of livestock feed and, perhaps, human food. This paper traces the early history of this “petroprotein” as it was developed in France and then as the Soviet Union launched a major effort to replicate British Petroleum’s new product. The paper charts how specific conjunctures of 1950s and 1960s oil, science (especially the new-ish field of petroleum microbiology), and agriculture created the global race for petroprotein, and pays particular attention to the ways in which hydrocarbon-metabolizing microbes were drawn into new and powerful visions and mobilizations—driven by both states and corporations -- of the future of human food and nutrition.