Abstract
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. In this talk about processing agents, I will bring forward the very idea of emulsification - or thickening, or clouding - for social and historical consideration. Understanding control of viscosity and the conquering of immiscibility with emulsifiers allows us to access a sense of the paradoxical historical specificity of the generic. Working through an empirical archive of mid-to-late twentieth century industrial trade magazines, I show that the emulsifier as a class of mass-produced chemical commodities extends well beyond foodstuffs and argue that it is impossible to understand the transformation of food without grasping the more general and pervasive remaking of emollience, smoothness, and miscibility in industrialized societies between 1950 and 2000. An emulsifier is a substance that keeps one liquid dispersed within another otherwise immiscible liquid, such as oil and water: one end of the emulsifier molecule is polar and attracts water, the other is non-polar and attracts oil. This talk goes both very high and very low with this concept, using the emulsifier to tether otherwise immiscible disciplines to one another, seeing if we can't keep our philosophy and our health policy in mixed suspension for a while; talk salad dressing and the Anthropocene in the same breath; understand that there is a historical biology of aesthetics in operation within and around us - an anthropogenic biology that has in time become the contemporary object of the health sciences.
Hannah Landecker
Landecker is a historian and sociologist of the life sciences and biotechnology. She holds a joint appointment in the Life and Social Sciences at UCLA, where she is a Professor in the Sociology Department and the Institute for Society and Genetics, an interdisciplinary unit at UCLA committed to cultivating research and pedagogy at the interface of biology and society. Currently serving as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in the Life Sciences, Landecker also co-directs the UCLA Center for Reproductive Science, Health and Education at UCLA, and is a Senior Editor at BioSocieties.