Abstract
In this talk, I will explore the ways in which cattle and poultry metabolisms are being used to narrate claims about sustainable farming. As part of a growing scholarly interest in metabolism’s use as a governmental logic and means of accumulation, I develop the notion ‘metabolic bounding.’ The concept draws attention to the way that the ability to selectively render a body’s metabolic relations is crucial to metabolism’s utility as a vehicle of social, governmental, or commercial promise. Through study of intensive poultry and regenerative cattle systems, I show how feed conversion ratio and soil carbon metrics do not describe pre-existing metabolic relations but enact and stabilise particular metabolic worlds. In the poultry sector, the feed conversion ratio bounds metabolism to the hyper-efficient feed-to-flesh transformations that take place within the body. This underpins claims about poultry farming’s low-carbon credentials. In regenerative grazing, soil carbon metrics extend cattle metabolism into landscapes and atmospheres, sustaining claims about ‘net zero’ beef.
As part of an attempt to understand how livestock metabolism is being used by the sector for strategic purposes, the talk will move to weave together new materialist and new metabolic literatures to argue that metabolic relations lack determinate boundaries and to claim that epistemic apparatuses and farm infrastructures performatively bring specific metabolic relations into being. The coupling of industrial intervention and livestock metabolism, and the entanglement of metabolism’s ontology, ethics, and epistemology, reveal that the biological and the historical are not consecutive to one another. They take form together. The talk concludes by suggesting that critical inquiry should ask which metabolic worlds ought to be performed rather than scrutinise which metabolic claims are true.
This will be a hybrid seminar, with in-person attendance at SAI, and digitally on Zoom. Zoom-link
Language
This seminar will be held in English.
About the LandUse
LandUse is a group of researchers and students associated with the Nordic Laboratory (NorLab) research group, who come together to discuss anthropological perspectives on land-use in the Nordics.