The Balance-Sheet of Nature
The Balance-Sheet of Nature
Chapter 8 follows the rise of an invisible form of value—nutritional value—by examining the sudden enormous popularity of analytic chemistry in the 1840s. It begins by laying out theories of food from the 1830s, such as those around the controversial soil amendment plaster, which was cast as a stimulant, a true food, a condiment, a source of vital force, and a dangerous intoxicant. It shows how a new class of analytic chemists promised to describe the landscape in calculable monetary terms, placing different elements of the landscape in debit and credit relationship with each other. Predictably, different groups of improvers deployed this reasoning to their own ends—for example, as tenants and landlords cast blame for soil degradation on each other. However, nutritional accounting proved too complex for the messy landscapes of farming. Instead, like other improvers chemists refocused their attention on goods: in this case artificial fertilizers. Here too, agreement about the nature of nutrition remained elusive. While academic chemists revealed “frauds,” fertilizer manufacturers made cases for alternative theories of nutrition within their allied journals. This battle not only laid the groundwork for the disinterested state experiment stations, but established centers of credibility that persisted in catalogues and advertisements.
Keywords: agricultural chemistry, chemical analysis, nutritional value, Justus Von Liebig, food, soil degradation
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