Meat From the Laboratory? Back to the Future With a Bit of History

“The epicure of the future [will] dine upon artificial meat, artificial flour, and artificial vegetables,” and enjoy the delights of “artificial” wines, liquors, and tobacco. (*1)

So concluded a reporter in 1894 after he visited Professor Pierre-Eugène-Marcellin Berthelot at his Parisian apartment. Berthelot was one of the most famous chemists in the world thanks in part to his belief that all organic materials could be synthesized, and thus manufactured and manipulated in a laboratory. Thanks to “synthetic chemistry,” the professor predicted, by the year 2000 human beings would no longer need farm, field, and range because they would manufacture their food rather than rely on “natural growth.”

“Do you mean,” asked the reporter, “that all our milk, eggs, meat, and flour . . . will be made in factories?” “Why not,” Berthelot replied, “if it proves cheaper and better to make the same materials than to grow them?”

“Strange though it may seem,” he added, “the day will come when man will sit down to dine from his toothsome tablet of nitrogenous matter, . . . portions of savory fat, . . . balls of starchy compounds,” and jars of spices and wines, all of them “economically manufactured in his own factories, . . . unaffected by frost, and free from the microbes with which over-generous nature sometimes modifies the value of her gifts.”

Berthelot conceded that the manufacture of steaks and bacon would not be easy, but dismissed the obstacles as nothing more than “chemical problems.” He predicted that artificial meat would be delivered in the form of easy-to-swallow tablets in “any color and shape” that a gourmand desired (tablets, in his view, being an improvement over the original: “the beefsteak of to-day is not the most perfect of pictures in either color or composition.”).

To naysayers, Berthelot pointed out that making steak in a lab was simply an extension of the progress humans had devised for centuries on end. Electricity, for example, had replaced open flame. “Chemistry has furnished the utensils, it has prepared the foods, and now it only remains for chemistry to make the foods themselves,” he argued.

Berthelot dared to dream that the laboratory could improve even human nature itself. Once people no longer needed to wage war over limited resources or engage in the soul-crushing “slaughter of beasts,” their character would increased in “sweetness and nobility.” “Perhaps,” he added, one fine day, synthetic or “spiritual” chemistry would even allow humans to alter their own “moral nature,” just as “material chemistry” altered “the conditions of [their] environment.”

 ________

 Marcellin Berthelot fashioned his vision of science and sweetness at a moment that many at the time regarded as a watershed in human history. In the 890s, the world’s nations battled for control of dwindling global resources. Famines raged in India, Russia, and other parts of the world. Global population surged to new heights but so, too, did the number of humans living in cities, and as everyone knew, city folks relied on others to grow food on their behalf, and farmers worldwide struggled to keep up with demand.

In the U.S., then as now the world’s foodbasket, politicians, economists, and do-gooders bemoaned the crude state of American agriculture. Many people favored reorganizing farming so that it mimicked the factory, the better to supply the world’s foods.

So it's not surprising that as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, food was viewed universally as a crucial component of nation building, as important as navies, guns, and bullets.

Common theory linked food to national power and racial superiority: the quality and quantity of a nation’s diet predicted whether it would dominate or be dominated. In Europe, Great Britain, and the U. S., scientists like Berthelot raced to unravel the components of foodstuffs, obsessed with extracting every ounce of nutriment from every inch of soil or, better yet, from every test tube and microscope.

Of all the foods, meat reigned supreme. According to long-standing and widely shared theory, meat both denoted and endowed national power. Meat-rich diets had made Europeans and Americans masters of the planet, while “rice-eating” Japanese, Chinese, and “Hindoos,” as one typical essay phrased it, were an “inoffensive” collection of people from whom not much could be expected. (*2)

So meat there must be, if not from the farm then from the lab. “A lump of coal, a glass of water, and a whiff of atmosphere contained all the nutritive elements” of both bread and beefsteak, one writer observed in 1907. (*3) Science only needed to unravel the equation that would turn matter into meat.

Many applauded in 1912, when Jean Effront, a Belgian chemist, announced that he’d manufactured “artificial meat” from brewery and distillery wastes. (*4) Effront washed and compressed the wastes and doused them with sulfuric acid, rested the mixture a few days, and then added lime to neutralize the acid. Once the liquids evaporated: Voila! A product that contained the same “albuminous elements” as were produced in the human body by digested meat, but with three times the nutrional value of beef. Physicians who tested Effront’s Viandine, as he dubbed it, pronounced it “superior to beef.” Laboratory rats and an undernourished Belgian “workman” both gained weight and good health while eating it.

As to its taste, Effront was “silent” on that matter, but as one reporter noted, the point was moot. “It would be a hundred times better if foods were without odor or savor. For then we should eat exactly what we needed and would feel a great deal better. What seems certain is that such synthetic foods [are] nourishing.”

 ______________

Two days ago, Professor Mark Post, a Dutch-based scientist, unveiled the fruits of his own labor: laboratory-grown “hamburger.” Josh Schonwald, author of The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food, said he missed “the fat,” but that “the general bite [felt] like a hamburger.” (*5)

And so the world turns. More or less. More than a century after Professor Berthelot waxed rhapsodic about meat from the lab, we humans face our own watershed moment. Is there sufficient food for the future? Is a meat-centric diet viable in a resource-scarce and environmentally fragile world? Even assuming that Professor Post can figure out how to mass produce petri dish burger, will people eat it? Or will this project go the way of, say, Golden Rice, a genetically modified rice designed to prevent blindness among malnourished children?

Will we citizens of the twenty-first century, like those a century ago, place our faith in science? Or will we demand solutions to hunger that look to the past rather than science for inspiration --- small, local, natural?

Only time will tell, but this much is sure: when it comes to food, and especially meat, there’s not much new under the sun.

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*1: The interview with Berthelot is in Henry J. W. Dam, “Foods in the Year 2000,” McClure’s Magazine 3, no. 4 (September 1894): 303-12.

*2: “The Non-Beef-Eating Nations,” Saturday Evening Post, November 13, 1869, p. 8.

*3: Henry Smith Williams, “The Miracle-Workers: Modern Science in the Industrial World,” Everybody’s Magazine 17 (October 1907): 498.

*4: All the Effront quotations are from “Food From Waste Products,” Literary Digest 46 (January 4, 1913): 15-16. For a marvelous survey of how people have imagined and pondered foods and the future, see Warren Belasco, Meals To Come: A History of the Future of Food,” University of California Press, 2006.

*5: Quoted in "World's first lab-grown burger is eaten in London."

Wanna A Little Tease? Read the Introduction to IN MEAT WE TRUST

I just discovered that the entire text of the new book's Introduction is up at Amazon -- which means, hey, I can post it here, too. So, without further ado: The introduction to IN MEAT WE TRUST: AN UNEXPECTED HISTORY OF CARNIVORE AMERICA. (Complete, I might add, with some not-great photos of a few pages of the book.)

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Truly we may be called a carnivorous people,” wrote an anonymous American in 1841, a statement that is as accurate today as it was then. But to that general claim a twenty-first-century observer would likely add a host of caveats and modifiers: Although we Americans eat more meat than almost anyone else in the world, our meat-centric diets are killing us—or not, depending on whose opinion is consulted. Livestock production is bad for the environment—or not. The nation’s slaughterhouses churn out tainted meat and contribute to outbreaks of bacteria-related illnesses. Or not.

title page

The only thing commentators might agree on is this: in the early twenty-first century, battles over the production and consumption of meat are nearly as ferocious as those over, say, gun control and gay marriage. Why is that? Why do food activists want to ban the use of antibiotics, gestation stalls, and confinement in livestock production? Why have livestock producers, whether chicken growers, hog farmers, or cattle ranchers, turned to social media, blogs, and public relations campaigns to defend not just meat but their role in putting it on the nation’s tables? This book answers those questions and more by looking at the history of meat in America.

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The American system of making meat is now, and has long been, spectacularly successful, producing immense quantities of meat at prices that nearly everyone can a afford—in 2011, 92 billion pounds of beef, pork, and poultry (about a quarter of which was exported to other countries). Moreover, measured by the surest sign of efficiency—seamless invisibility—ours is not just the largest but also the most successful meat-making apparatus in the world, so efficient that until recently, the entire infrastructure was like air: invisible. Out of sight, out of mind.

No more. For the past quarter-century, thoughtful critics have challenged the American way of meat. They’ve questioned our seemingly insatiable carnivorous appetite and the price we pay to satisfy it, from pollution of water and air to the dangers of high-speed slaughtering operations; from the industry’s reliance on pharmaceuticals to the use of land to raise food for animals rather than humans. In response, meat producers have reduced their use of antibiotics and other drugs; have abandoned cost- cutting products like Lean Finely Textured Beef (“pink slime”); have taken chickens out of cages and pregnant sows out of tiny gestation stalls. Men and women around the country have committed themselves to raising livestock and making meat in ways that hearken back to the pre-factory era. This book examines how we got from there to here.

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In recent years, books about food in general and meat in particular have abounded and in sufficient variety to suit every political palate. Few of them, however, examine the historical underpinnings of our food system. That’s particularly true of ones that focus on meat. Most are critical of the American way of meat and assert an explanation of our carnivorous culture and its flaws that goes (briefly) like this:

Back in the old days, farm families raised a mixture of live- stock and crops, and their hogs, cattle, and chickens grazed freely, eating natural diets. That Elysian idyll ended in the mid- to late twentieth century when corporations barged in and converted rural America into an industrial handmaiden of agribusiness. The corporate farmers moved livestock off pasture and into what is called confinement: from birth to death, animals are penned in large feedlots or small crates, often spending their entire lives indoors and on concrete, forced to eat diets rich in hormones and antibiotics. Eventually these cattle, hogs, and chickens, diseased and infested with bacteria, end up at the nation’s slaughterhouses (also controlled by agribusiness), where poorly paid employees (many of them illegal immigrants) working in dangerous conditions transform live animals into meat products. Agribusiness profits; the losers are family farmers who can’t compete with Big Ag’s ruthless devotion to profit, and consumers who are doomed to diets of tainted, tasteless beef, pork, and chicken.

TOC

I respect the critics and share their desire for change. But I disagree both with their explanation of how we got to where we are and with their reliance on vague assertions as a justification for social change, no matter how well intended — especially when many of those assertions lack substance and accuracy. Consider, for example, this counter narrative, which is rooted in historical fact:

The number of livestock farmers has declined significantly in the last seventy or so years, but many people abandoned livestock production for reasons that had nothing to do with agribusiness. From the 1940s on, agriculture suffered chronic labor shortages as millions of men and women left rural America for the advantages of city life. Those who stayed on the land embraced factorylike, confinement-based livestock production because doing so enabled them to maximize their output and their profits even as labor supplies dwindled. Confinement livestock systems were born on the family farm and only subsequently adopted by corporate producers in the 1970s.

We may not agree with the decisions that led to that state of affairs, and there’s good reason to abhor the consequences, but on one point we can surely agree: real people made real choices based on what was best for themselves and their families.

Make no mistake: the history of meat in America has been shaped by corporate players like Gustavus Swift, Christian gentleman and meat- packing titan, and good ol’ Arkansas boy Don Tyson, a chicken “farmer” who built one of the largest food-making companies in the world. But that history also includes millions of anonymous Americans living in both town and country who, over many generations, shaped a meat-supply system designed to accommodate urban populations, dwindling supplies of farmland, and, most important, consumers who insisted that farmers and meatpackers provide them with high-quality, low-cost meat.

______________

The tale chronicled here ranges from the crucial, formative colonial era to the early twenty-first century, although the bulk of the narrative focuses on the second half of the twentieth century. It answers important questions about meat’s role in our society. How did the colonial experience shape American attitudes to- ward meat? Why did Americans move the business of butchering out of small urban shops into immense, factorylike slaughter- houses? Why do Americans now eat so much chicken, and why, for many decades, did they eat so little? Why a factory model of farming? When and why did manure lagoons, feedlots, and antibiotics become tools for raising livestock? What is integrated livestock production and why should we care? Why is ours a “carnivore nation”? My hope is that this historical context will enrich the debate over the future of meat in America.

My many years engrossed in a study of meat’s American history led me to a surprising conclusion: meat is the culinary equivalent of gasoline. Think about what happens whenever gas prices rise above a vaguely defined “acceptable” level: we blame greedy corporations and imagine a future of apocalyptic poverty in which we’ll be unable to afford new TV sets or that pair of shoes we crave; instead, we’ll be forced to spend every dime (or so it seems) to fill the tank.  But we pay up, cursing corporate greed as the pump’s ticker clicks away our hard-earned dollars. Then the price drops a few cents our routine, half-mile, gas-powered jaunts are once again affordable; and we rejoice. And because it’s so easy to blame corporations, few of us contemplate the morality and wisdom of using a car to travel a half-mile to pick up one item at a grocery store, which is what most of us do when gas prices are low.

So it is with meat. Most of us rarely think about it. After all, grocery store freezer and refrigerator cases are stuffed with it; burger- and chicken-centric restaurants abound; and nearly everyone can afford to eat meat whenever they want to. But when meat’s price rises above a (vaguely defined) acceptable level, tempers flare and consumers blame rich farmers, richer corporations, or government subsidy programs. We’re Americans, after all, and we’re entitled to meat. So we either pay up or stretch a pound of burger with rice or pasta (often by using an expensive processed product). Eventually the price of steak and bacon drops, and back to the meat counter we go with nary a thought about changing our diets or, more important, about the true cost of meat, the one that bar-coded price stickers don’t show.

Intro

That sense of entitlement is a crucial element of the history of meat in America. Price hikes as small as a penny a pound have inspired Americans to riot, trash butcher shops, and launch national meat boycotts. We Americans want what we want, but we rarely ponder the actual price or the irrationality of our desires. We demand cheap hamburger, but we don’t want the factory farms that make it possible. We want four-bedroom McMansions out in the semirural suburban fringe, but we raise hell when we sniff the presence of the nearby hog farm that provides affordable bacon. We want packages of precooked chicken and microwaveable sausages—and family farms too.

After years of working on this book, I’m convinced that we can’t have it all. But I also believe that if we understand that the past is different from the present, the future is ours to shape. My hope is that this book will help all of us understand how we got to where we are so that, if we are willing, we can imagine a different future and write a new history of meat in America.

Smithfield and Shuanghui: Yes, Please --- And A Bit of History, Too

The proposed sale of Smithfield Foods Inc. to China-based Shuanghui International Holdings Ltd. marks a great leap toward the end of the world as we know it. Or so some would have us believe. Public interest groups Food and Water Watch and the Center for Food Safety, for example, fear that the deal will endanger the quality and safety of American meats. Their argument is that Shuanghui will apply its inferior quality control to our food chain. Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley’s worry list is longer: The deal may affect national security. It will lead to higher prices for consumers and lower ones for hog farmers. Americans will end up eating pork made in China.

There’s no way to predict how the sale will affect farmers (except that demand for hogs will surely increase), but this much is clear: It’s unlikely that the quality of our meats will decline or that we’ll be buying hot dogs and pork chops that carry labels reading “Made In China.”

That’s because Shuanghui chairman Wan Long isn’t interested in supplying food to Americans, let alone applying Chinese quality control standards to his acquisition. His concerns are precisely the opposite: He’s interested in feeding Chinese consumers, not American ones, and in particular, he wants to feed China’s urban population.

Indeed, the key to understanding this “takeover” lies in China’s rapidly growing cities, about which more in a moment. But Mr. Wan knows that Chinese hog farmers can meet demand only by reinventing the way they raise livestock and by improving the quality of the hogs they sell. To do that, Shuanghui International needs expertise of a sort that no one in China’s agricultural and food processing sector has.

So Wan is buying it. And who better to buy it from than the people who created and operate the world’s most efficient meat supply system?

*  *  *

The American way of making meat offers a way to supply high quality, safe, low-cost protein to billions of people who don’t live on farms. That’s a crucial point, and one best understood by looking at this acquisition from a historical perspective. (See? I can’t avoid it!)

Americans began building a “modern” meat-making system just over a century ago at a moment when they confronted precisely the problem that the Chinese face now: an imbalance between rural and urban populations. In the 1860s, only about a quarter of Americans lived in cities; by 1920, more than half did. Today, about 80 percent of us live in an urban place.

Why does that matter? Here’s a fact about urbanites that is so obvious that most of us overlook it: city folks don’t grow their own food. Instead, they rely on farmers, the very people whose numbers drop even as more people depend on their output.

In 1860, for example, about 60 percent of Americans were farmers, making food for themselves, for the 25 percent of the population that lived in cities, and for shipment abroad. By 1920, fewer than 30 percent of Americans lived or worked on a farm, but more than half the population lived in a city. Today nearly all of us live in an urban place, but less than two percent of us work as farmers. (Most of the twenty percent who don’t live in an “urban” place reside in unincorporated areas or in towns with populations of less than 2,500.)

Put another way, two percent of Americans make food for 98 percent. We don’t notice that imbalance because we enjoy an extraordinarily efficient food supply system; in the U. S., food is everywhere we want to be.

That abundance and seamless efficiency didn’t happen overnight. Building our food system required decades of entrepreneurship, inventive creativity, and legal tinkering (including, it’s worth noting, the construction of agricultural “subsidies” that allow farmers to enjoy standard of living “parity” with urbanites).

Between 1900 and 1910, for example, urban growth outpaced agricultural technology and farmers struggled to keep up with demand. That gap between supply and demand produced predictable results: high food prices. (The phrase “high cost of living” entered the lexicon during those years as escalating food costs provoked head-scratching on the part of economists, and food riots on the part of angry urbanites.)

Farmers and others, including economists, scientists, and government officials, scrutinized the agricultural sector, trying to figure out how to increase its efficiency and thus its yields. Over the next century, they devised new technologies and techniques to do so: Tractors and other tools, hybrid crops, commercially manufactured livestock feeds, fertilizers, and herbicides and pesticides. “Integrated” management systems that coordinated the production and transfer of foodstuffs from farm to factory to grocer to consumer. Genetics research to improve livestock carcass yield.

The making of meat in particular was transformed into a well-oiled machine that required relatively little land (urban growth drove up land prices) or labor (as more Americans opted to live in cities, farmers faced chronic labor shortages). The quality and, yes, the safety of meats increased even as their prices dropped.

Today many Americans are critical of the way farmers raise livestock and meatpackers process beef, pork, and poultry. It’s true that so-called industrial livestock production operations can and do generate pollution, aren’t particularly pleasant neighbors, and rely on a form of organization that echoes that of a factory. It’s true, too, that packing plants move at rapid speeds and rely on unskilled labor.

But Americans adopted and promoted these methods of livestock production and meat processing in order to ensure abundant supplies of low-cost meat for an urban society. They aren’t perfect, but they place minimal demands on land and labor.

But hyper-efficient agricultural production and food processing do more than feed urbanites. Those are also the cornerstones of a "consumer economy," which is the kind of economy we have here in the United States. (*1) Consumer economies are based on the making, selling, and buying of non-essentials --- think cars and cosmetics, shoes designed for style rather than function, iPads and televisions.

The cornerstone of a consumer economy is disposable incomes; citizens must have money to spend on non-essentials. One way to ensure that consumers consume is with credit. In the 1920s in the U. S., for example, General Motors created the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) to provide low-interest loans so that Americans could purchase cars.

But a crucial factor in sustaining a consumer economy is low-cost food. The less money people must spend on food, the more they can spend on video games, books, and cell phones. How to get cheap food? By devising hyper-efficient methods of food production and processing. (*2)

*  *  *

Back to China, a nation whose urban population has grown at a remarkable pace. In 1970, 83 percent of Chinese lived in rural areas working as farmers who fed themselves and the 17 percent that lived in cities. Today, however, 51 percent of Chinese live in cities. The agricultural 49 percent, many of whom rely on methods that haven’t changed in centuries, struggle to keep pace with demand.

And more urban stomachs are on the way: The Chinese government has laid plans to move some 21 million people a year off of farms and into cities. (For a recent in-depth story about this plan, see this piece in the New York Times.) One consultancy group predicts that by 2025, 65 percent of China’s population will live in a city.

The rationale for this plan? The Chinese government has decided, for better or for worse, that its future lies in building a “consumer” economy.

The campaign to depopulate the countryside is seen as the best way to maintain China’s spectacular run of fast economic growth, with new city dwellers driving demand for decades to come.

“An objective rule in the process of modernization,” [said one Chinese official] “is we have to complete the process of urbanization and industrialization.” (both quotes from New York Times)

But this plan will only work if all those newly arrived city folks have money to spend (and so far, that part’s not working too well). One way to increased the “supply” of disposable income is --- you guessed --- by ensuring an abundance of cheap food.

And so, as Americans did a century ago, the Chinese must figure out how to match agricultural output by ever fewer farmers to ever-growing urban demand. They must improve not just agricultural efficiency but quality control, too. (There’s ample evidence that many of the food nightmares that have unfolded in China in recent years are due primarily to farmers scrambling to keep up with demand using technologies and skills that aren’t up to the task.)

And that is why Shuanghui wants Smithfield. Like other American meat processors, Smithfield is an old hand at feeding urbanites, but it’s also a master at coordinating farm, food processor, and consumer demand. Smithfield, like other American livestock- and meat-supply operations, operates an “integrated” production process, organizing high tech hog breeding, farrowing, and feeding operations at one end, streamlined packaging and distributing systems at the other, with as-automated-as-possible slaughtering and packing operations linking those two pieces.

That’s what Shuanghui is buying: Smithfield’s managerial, technical, agricultural, and scientific expertise.

Neither Wan Long nor China’s leaders are fools. They know that, historically, when the human beings have no food, political unrest follows. The Chinese must resolve their farm-city food equation; it’s in the world’s best interest that they do so.

If that requires the Chinese to buy American expertise, please: have at it! Better that than political turmoil that will make the events of 1949 or the Cultural Revolution look like small potatoes indeed. Only this time, every person on the planet will be dragged into the chaos. If the sale of Smithfield can help prevent that, more power to it and to Shuanghui International.

But at a time when American agriculture is under attack from Pollanist reformers, and many people crusade to transform modern livestock production into a pastoral, but antiquated, idyll, the Smithfield sale reminds us of the benefits of our meat supply system. If we turn our backs on it, we may not like the return to the past that our future will become.

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*1: Americans began shifting to a consumer economy about a century ago. The project gained impetus during the Great Depression of the 1930s. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal aimed at “priming the pump”: putting money into Americans’ pockets so that they could buy stuff and thus generate employment.

But Americans began the transition to a consumer economy only after they’d successfully built a “producer” economy: During the nineteenth century, Americans focused on building transportation infrastructure as well as factories for the manufacture of goods that furthered industrial development: rail ties and sewer pipes, machine tools and steam engines. By the end of the nineteenth century, that foundational structure was in place and they shifted their attention to manufacturing consumer goods --- radios, clothing, cosmetics, and cars. Americans bought such goods prior to twentieth century, of course, and they continued to invest in and manufacture producer goods after consumer consumer gained supremacy. But in the twentieth century, the economy revolved around making and getting (relatively) unnecessary “stuff.”

*2: Getting to “cheap food” isn’t as easy as it sounds because it requires a society to overcome the “paradox of plenty”: When food is abundant and supplies are greater than demand, consumers enjoy low prices, but food producers --- farmers --- earn little profit. If the reverse is true and demand outstrips supply, food prices rise. Farmers profit, but consumers howl.

Thus the fundamental contradiction of a consumer economy: the paradox of plenty (or, as farmers call it, the pain of plenty). Urbanites demand that farmers produce an abundance of foodstuffs. But if farmers comply, they earn little profit and so either can’t or won’t produce more. And so the consumer economy has grown hand-in-hand with one of the great balancing acts of American politics: the need to guarantee cheap food on one hand and income parity for farmers on the other, a need that spawned the programs and policies known collectively as “farm subsidies.” This balancing act was and still is complicated by the fact that most Americans live in cities and don’t produce their own food.

YouTube, Hilarity, and the Historian's Motherlode (*1)

A re-write of a piece I posted here a couple of years ago, and then re-wrote for Medium. _________________

A couple of years ago, someone I follow at Twitter (Adam Penenberg, to be precise) posted a link to an unintentionally hilarious but fascinating YouTube video from a 1994 episode of the “Today Show.”

The clip features the program’s then-anchors, Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel, and “sub-anchor” Elizabeth Vargas, pondering the “internet” and the use of the @ symbol. They don’t get the latter, and they know the former is something big, but they’re not sure what.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUs7iG1mNjI]

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Hilarious, right? “What is the internet anyway?” “Internet is, uh, that massive computer network that’s becoming really big now.”

Indeed, the first time I saw this clip back in 2011, my quickie, knee-jerk Twitter response was “Howling!”

But I’m a historian, and even as I tweeted, I was already enjoying another, richer response to the clip: “Ooooh . . . . The possibilities!”

Think about it. The three anchors hosted what was then, and still is, one of the most popular news programs on television — “popular” in that it commanded a huge audience and so carried considerable heft. Every morning, millions of people tuned in to the “Today” show.

So you’d think that these three well-known, well-paid journalists would be, ya know, clued in on that thing called the internet, which was already changing every. single. aspect. of human existence.

(And was already being enjoyed by a large swath of fairly ordinary people. I mean, this was 1994, for god’s sake. By that time, even I, who was not particularly interested in techno-stuff, had owned a PC for more than a decade and I had an email account.)

And yet — none of those three had the foggiest. (*2)

Translation: one of the most profound moments in human history had begun, but had not yet been noticed by what we now call the “mainstream media” (MSM). (*3) (*4)

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As a historian, I gotta tell you: the clip was a motherlode. (*5) It tripped my brain’s ignition switch and said organ began spewing questions.

And questions, my friends, are what we historians use to frame our work. They’re our footings and studs.

For example:

Why were the people launching this pivotal moment so far off the radar of mainstream journalists? (*6) And why was mainstream media oblivious about their work? (Those, by the way, are two quite different questions.)

How, if at all, did MSM’s ignorance of the extent/breadth/depth of the techno-shift shape the early history of the internet-and-web?

Did MSM’s obliviousness inadvertently foster internet/web pioneers’ fascination with/insistence on the much used/abused “information wants to be free” paradigm? (*7)

When, how, and why did Gumbel, Couric, and other journalistic powerhouses (and mock them all you will, but in the 1990s they were powerhouses) finally catch on? Who or what tipped them off?

And once aware, how did they, as journalists, then “shape” the story? How did their version of “what happened” differ from the narrative put forth by the internet/web pioneers?

---

I could rattle off questions indefinitely, but I’m not planning to research or write about any of this, so I’ll stop. (Hint to historians, grad students, etc.: Free topic! Have at it!)

But this example illustrates how historians go about their work. We react to a fact/moment/event by thinking: “Hmm. What’s up with that?”

And then our brains let rip with questions, and we start hunting for answers, and next thing we know, motherfuck, five, six, seven years have passed in pursuit of those answers. (*8)

It’s worth noting that the fuel that feeds and inspires those questions is the long-view, big-picture that is the historian’s mindset. Historians see life — i.e., the day-to-day weirdness of the human animal — in a Picasso-ish way: from simultaneous, multiple perspectives, and those perspectives are always elongated. We analyze life in terms of “time.” (*9)

And for better or for worse, we apply that point of view to damn near everything, including, in this case a seemingly trivial-bordering-on-silly YouTube video.

Here’s hoping that some other historian watched that clip and enjoyed the same reaction I did.

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1: For those who are wondering: no, I don’t write only and always about how historians do what they do. I’m using the topic to familiarize myself with Medium and its possibilities. My plan is to soon begin posting essays related to meat, food politics, and the like (because I just finished writing a history of meat in America and that’s The Big Stuff that’s on my mind).

*2: At the time I saw the clip, L. A. Lorek posted a Twitter link to a1994 article she’d written about the internet. Great companion piece.

3: Light bulb! Is this one reason that internet- and web-saturated folks today are so dismissive of said “mainstream media”? Can this clip help historians make sense of the history of that stance?

*4: That’s not necessarily a criticism, you know? We humans are rarely hyper-aware of Change with a capital C. (Although in the case of the YouTube clip, it’s telling that the three anchors didn’t “get” what the deal was with the www address being flashed on the screen. Someone at NBC “got it,” and enough so that the network already had a website. Again, that’s a useful and fascinating piece of information.)

*5: The Youtube clip falls into the category of a “primary source.” I wrote about those here.

*6: Obviously, some media were aware of what was going on. Indeed, some were founded specifically to report/record it; think, for example,Wired. But — apparently the anchors of the most popular daytime TV news program hadn’t gotten the memo.

*7: Oh, the “information wants to be free” thing. Oh oh oh. The phrase is part of a statement that Stewart Brand made in 1984. Been used and abused ever since. Now THERE is a topic that deserves a serious historian’s serious attention.

*8: If we’re lucky enough to have the time and wherewithal, we write a book about what we’ve learned; we tell the story of “what happened.” And if our luck holds, we publish that book for a large audience.

*9: Frankly, it’s a bit of a curse. The teensiest, most random, and apparently trivial thing becomes fodder for my reverse-telescope, time-focused lens. Maddening. (Although I wouldn’t give it up.)

But Hey --- Since I'm "Here" (Illustrated!)

By the way: book update: The copyedits happened last month. Dealing with copyedits is my least favorite part of the production process, so I was glad to get that over.

Last week, I proofread the galley (what was my typed manuscript now formatted and laid out as it will appear in "print" with the fonts, the spacing, the page numbers, etc.) (NB: the images you see here include some technical, page-setting stuff that will NOT appear in the final book.)

Proofreading involves reading the entire manuscript, word by word, out loud, starting with the last word in the manuscript. (Because reading it from start to finish means the text makes sense and thus it's too easy to read quickly and miss a typo).

This week is my favorite part of the production process: creating the index. For reasons that aren't clear to me, I'm a superb indexer. That's not a boast. Rather, it's a statement of weird, weird fact about me. Ask any writer of books and odds are that he/she will shudder at the idea of creating an index.

Not me. There's something about the process that I find satisfying and challenging and immensely creative. What can I say? I'm a sick twisted soul.

This part of the process is very much deadline-driven. Stuff MUST be completely on schedule. MUST. BE. So I've had my head down.

Once I send the index back to the production editor (most likely next Monday, July 15), I won't see my baby again until the UPS guy pulls up to my house in late September, early October with a box full of books. So this is it: The end of a seven-year process.

And yes, it ends not with a bang but a whimper. Of relief and a certain amount of sadness. BUT: I've got this idea in my head, one that's been rolling around in there for about a year and so on Monday after I hit "send," I'll be thinking about my next project.

It's something about . . . yoga and alternative technology and capitalism and craft beer and the 1970s and 1980s . . .  well, something like that . . . . We shall see!