Abstract Summary
Much of mid-twentieth-century US food science and technology had a prospective and promissory orientation — one that combined dire forecasts of a food-scarce future with robust claims by industry to provide solutions that could mitigate the effects of the coming catastrophe. Such was the case with many of the novel protein-based food sources under development during wartime and in the postwar years, including chlorella algae, powders made from fisheries bycatch, and plant-based protein products. But what happened when industry failed to commercialize on this research, or when consumers rejected these products in the marketplace? This paper will consider the case of General Mills’ Bontrae, a unique “spun” soy protein product developed over more than a decade and at the cost of millions of dollars in R&D investment, only to vanish from the US market within a few years of its launch in the 1970s. This paper will tell the story of Bontrae’s development and failure in the US marketplace in the 1960s and 1970s and its global afterlives. The story of Bontrae is not only about a consumer technology that flopped; it also has cultural implications for the technoscientific narrative of Malthusian crisis that justified, at least in part, its intensive development — and for our own era of promissory technologies. I will ask, what is the fate of the imagined futures embedded in failed technologies?
