Historicizing Farm Animals: Keynote Lecture by Hannah Landecker on 11th of June
As part of the closed pre-circulated paper workshop Historicizing Farm Animals: Cowsheds, Battery Cages, and Pigsties as Laboratories for One Health, the Hannah Landecker, UCLA, will hold an open keynote lecture. Hannah Landecker talks about Eat, Grow, Oxidize, Phosphorylate: Antioxidants and Enzymes in the Remaking of Animal Metabolism in the 20th Century.
The team of the SNSF funded project Farm Animals in the Anthropocene and the Chair for the History of Medicine warmly invite everyone to the keynote lecture and the subsequent aperitif.
Venue: UZH Main Building, KO2-F-150
Date, Time: 11th of June 2025, 6:30 pm
The historical analysis of animal husbandry and feeding practices provides a window onto the larger remaking of metabolic relations between microbes, plants, animals, and fossil fuels intrinsic to changes in the scale of agricultural operations after 1920. Rather than focusing on any one kind of animal, this talk assesses how the biochemistry of metabolism opened out the cells of various organisms for the large-scale harvesting of metabolically powerful substances such as antioxidants and enzymes, and their subsequent redeployment in the making of of feed and food. While metabolic analysis is often deployed for its heuristic value in estimating inputs, outputs and waste flows in cities or regions, here I focus on the historicity of animal metabolism as it was remade in the twentieth century.