#AcademicRunPlaylist - 12/1/24

The geese know that it's time to go south for the winter, and while enjoying their migratory display I was also able to enjoy a few books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was "Red Meat Republic" by Joshua Specht. This book presents a powerful case for the US beef industry as a microcosm of changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution in the US. Starting with the dispossession of Native Americans and their role in the bison industry, Specht charts how the spread of the railroads allowed for radical shifts in beef consumption. Paired with refrigeration technology and global capital flows, he shows how this accelerated the delivery of beef to ever wider numbers of people and how it facilitated a concentration of wealth and power in chokepoints of this industry - the nascent commodity traders and meat packers.

This book also covers how the period of the "cowboy" and the myth of widespread beef eating began, with essentially no basis in reality given that large scale cattle farming didn't exist before the railroads. The familiar beat of US consumers protesting high beef prices but not working conditions in the industry, the desire to return to a "natural" diet, and the increasingly gendered notions of meat consumption demonstrate how timeless these trends are and how little progress has been made in the 100+ years since the manifestation of the large-scale been industry. Highly recommend. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691182315/red-meat-republic

Last was "Who We Are and How We Got Here" by David Reich. In the first two thirds of this book, Reich delivers an incredible view the development and geographic dispersal of various human and human-ancestor populations. He clearly demonstrates how dramatically different groups of people moved over time, centering mixing as inherent to the human condition. Along the way he explains the modern genetic and statistical techniques that have allowed us to sequence DNA from skeletons that are tens of thousands of years old, including emulating techniques from computing chip production to ensure a clean sequencing environment!

You should probably stop after part 2 of this book, because unfortunately Reich takes the predictable heel turn all too common in books like this - advocating for eugenics. His argument belies a total lack of understanding of the non-genetic determinants of outcomes (discrimination anyone?). Rather than reading part 3, you'd be much better off reading the essential "The Social Life of DNA" by Alondra Nelson. With that in mind, I highly recommend the first two parts. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/247850/who-we-are-and-how-we-got-here-by-david-reich/