Completed Projects
Project
What does your meat eat? A global environmental history of Dutch livestock feed (1954-2020)
01.07.2021
to 30.06.2025
General project description
Pigs, chickens and cattle in factory farms have to eat. A lot. Millions of tons of feed are shipped across oceans to make intensive livestock production possible. This creates global and local problems. Animal feed production competes with human food production. Soy for feed connects the destruction of the South American rain forest to the Dutch nitrogen crisis. Problems like these will multiply, as the global demand for meat and dairy is burgeoning. Currently, we fail to address these issues properly, because of vested economic interests, scientific reductionism, and ad hoc measures. This project offers innovative historical research of the long-distance and long-term impact of feeding livestock. It provides this broad perspective by focusing on global feed trade flows to intensifying Dutch livestock farms between 1954 and 2020. The research project took place between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2025, at the Medical Ethics, Philosophy and History program, part of the Public Health department of the Erasmus University Rotterdam Medical Center.
Role
Project Leader
Funding
NWO grant Dutch Research Council, VENI grant (VI.Veni.201H.017)
Contested Industrialization of Food Systems in the Unequal Anthropocene: Critical Histories of Agriculture- and Food-Affiliated Industries from a Global Perspective (1945-present)
International Workshop Program
May 15-16, 2025, Utrecht University
Organizers: dr. Floor Haalboom, Amber Striekwold MA, Anna Teijeiro MA
Thursday, May 15 (Central European Time)
9.30 – 10.00 Welcome
10.00 – 10.30 Introduction
10.30 – 12.00 Session 1: Global Corporations and Industrialized Food Systems I
Chair: Floor Haalboom
- Signe Brieghel & Sebastian Lundsteen Nielsen - Toxic exposures from afar. (Re)making global structures of discrimination and displacement through Danish industrial chemicals
- Omri Polatsek - Merchants of certainty. Global corporations and the agrochemical transformation of Egypt, 1940s-1950s
- Anna Teijeiro - Depoliticising and normalising the pesticide industry. Dutch discourses of necessity, security and doubt (1973-2000)
12.00- 13.00 Lunch
13.00–14.30 Session 2: Global Corporations and Industrialized Food Systems II
Chair: Amber Striekwold
- Josué García Veiga - Entangled histories previous the transgenic crops era. German companies and Latin America in the origins of biotechnology
- Floor Haalboom – Food industrial strategies of scientific doubt. The case of the livestock feed industry in northwestern Europe
- Jules Calage & Christophe Bonneuil - Petroculture and the making of the “modern farmer”’s identity in France. A history of agricultural championships organized by the oil & gas industry (1952-1970)
14.30-15.00 Break
15.00-16.30 Session 3: Invisible Connections of Industrialized Food Systems
Chair: Anna Teijeiro
- Maliene Kip - Entangled oils. Transnational and interwoven histories of Indonesian coconut and palm oil
- Ernst Langthaler - ‘Ghost acres’. Global soy trade as uneven ecological exchange since the 1950s
- Dirk-Jan Verdonk - Peeing for pork. The ‘Fata Morgana’ as tool for enabling industrial meat production
16.30 - 17.00 Discussion and concluding remarks of the day
19.00 - 21.30 Workshop dinner
Friday, May 16 (Central European Time)
8.45 - 9.00 Arrival & Coffee
9.00 - 10.30 Session 4: Food System Contestations I
Chair: Anna Teijeiro
- Jim Sion - A breach in competing industrial agricultural models in the early 1970s. How industrial beef almost replaced industrial sugar in La Reunion
- Amber Striekwold - From tofu to beyond. The evolution of production and consumption of processed plant-based protein in the Netherlands (1950-1990)
- Anna Sokolova - Soviet food security policies. Wild crop edibles in the era of industrialized food production
10.30 – 11.00 Break
11.00 - 12.30 Session 5: Food System Contestations II
Chair: Floor Haalboom
- Tutku Gizem Yazıcı - Cooperatives in Search of Alternative Food Systems: A Historical Discursive Challenge, The Case of Türkiye, 1945–1982
- Emiel Geurts - Animal welfare in the European Union. Between ‘European ethics’ and international trade interests, 1990s-2000
- Peter van Dam, Max Hell, Mari Janssen & Steven de Rave - A well-planned revolution. The transformation of the Amsterdam food system since 1945
12.30 – 13.30 Lunch
13.30 – 15.00 Session 6: The Politics of Industrialized Food Systems I
Chair: Amber Striekwold
- Bryan U. Kauma - “Farming the god’s way”. African agriculture and the development of agro-technologies in colonial Zimbabwe, the 1950s to 1970s
- Larissa Schulte Nordholt & Harro Maat - Reviving the ruins of a plantation industry. Mechanised rice production in Suriname, 1950-2000
- Stathis Arapostathis - Breeding Animals as Machines. Imaginaries, technopolitics and industrial meat production in Greece 1950 to the present
15.00-15.30 Break
15.30 – 16.30 Session 7: The Politics of Industrialized Food Systems II
Chair: Anna Teijeiro
- Sam Hege - “The most non-union place I’ve been”. Race, work, and the transformation of meatpacking in the 1960s
- Diana Mincyte - Soviet-style industrialization. Labor, gender, and material politics in Soviet Lithuania’s milk production
16.30-17.00 Conclusion
Organization made possible by:
