Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production

In his 1948 classic, Mechanization Takes Command, Siegfried Giedion posed the following question: "What happens when mechanization encounters organic substance?" 1 Well aware of the application of mass-production techniques to agriculture and of the role of genetics in facilitating "the structural alteration of plants and animals," Giedion nevertheless held to a basic distinction between "living substance" and mechanization. The idea of nature as technics, of biophysical systems as technological systems, would have seemed inappropriate in his framework. For Giedion, interventions in the organic growth process were qualitatively different from efforts to subject other aspects of modern life to the dictates of the machine.