Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 1 (2022), p. 159

Claas Kirchhelle’s book Pyrrhic progress: The history of antibiotics in Anglo-American food production is a substantial and useful historical analysis of the controversies associated with the use of antibiotics in animal husbandry in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) since the end of World War II. The book reveals and discusses the politics surrounding the use of antibiotics in animal husbandry, showing how it has been oriented towards profit, served the interest of Western economies, and been instrumental to the production of cheap food, shaping the broader productivist agricultural paradigm that persists today. The book should be of great interest to a wide variety of audiences, even if its content and not always jargon-free language are mostly targeted at academics who wish to explore this emerging field of research.

One of the merits of Kirchhelle’s book is the rich diversity of materials on which the author draws, which range from more traditional sources such as archival material from government and industry publications, newspaper articles, to agricultural and veterinary manuals, consumer and activist publications, fashion and lifestyle magazines, and cookery books. Antibiotic use in animal husbandry is approached in the book as a multifaceted cultural phenomenon, intersecting science, industry, governments and society. Kirchhelle reminds us that the production and use of technologies such as antibiotics in animal husbandry materialize what Sheila Jasanoff has called ‘practices of state-making’, where science and technology are interwoven with power, norms and hierarchies. The author’s comparative and international approach is particularly valuable here as it supports an in-depth investigation of the broad and complex issue of antibiotic culture in animal husbandry.

This approach guides the structure of the book: divided into four parts, alternating between the US and the UK, Kirchhelle divides each part identically into three chapters or ‘spheres – public, agricultural, and regulatory’ (p. 10). After a very brief introduction on ‘the antibiotic dilemma’ and the author’s theoretical and methodological framework, Kirchhelle plunges into the heart of the matter with the case of the US, where the ‘“antibiotic era” truly began’ (p. 15). The story told in the first part begins in 1949, when two researchers from the American laboratory Lederle made public their first observations on the growth-promoting effects of continuous low-dose antibiotics (AGPs) in animal feed. It ends about two decades later, when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) organized a Symposium on the Use of Drugs in Animal Feeds to address ‘public concerns about AMR’ (antimicrobial resistance) in 1967 (pp. 71–72). The second part focuses on the UK, spanning from the end of World War II (a key period in the Western industrialization and intensification of animal husbandry) to 1969, when the famous British Swann report officially ‘called for pioneering precautionary restrictions of medically relevant antibiotics in AGPs’ (p. 75). Kirchhelle then returns to the US between 1967 and 2013, before completing the fourth and final part of the book looking at the UK between 1970 and 2018, when Europe decided to phase out the prophylactic use of antibiotics in animal husbandry.

The very rich and exhaustive analysis of the four parts ends with a surprisingly short conclusion in the form of a ‘four-story’ note. Albeit interesting, this note does not seem to live up to the expectations that the reader may have at this point on a continuation of the conversation with the scholarship alluded to in the introduction, such as the works of Sheila Jasanoff, Ulrich Beck, and Niklas Luhmann. Whereas the choice of 2018 for the last part of the book on the UK case seems to coincide with a regulatory decision in Europe, that of 2013 for the US seems less obvious: rather than ending with another failure of the US administration to put regulatory restrictions in place, Kirchhelle’s empirical and theoretical contributions would have benefited from an exploration of the mechanisms that ultimately drove the US (like the UK, 11 years earlier) to ban the use of antibiotics as food supplements in 2017. Further, although serving as opening and closing of the book, the experiences and practices of farmers also seem to have been overlooked in the book. It feels as if they are quickly conflated with, if not replaced by, a series of dominant and often limited discourses and media representations of trade unions and the farming press. While the author admits that ‘many of [the sources] are elite and were written about rather than by actors themselves’ (p. 11), more could have been imagined and done to bring out the less visible actors and rather marginal voices in Kirchhelle’s stories. This purpose would have been better fulfilled by including other sources of information, such as videos, images, diaries, and interviews, for a more critical and comprehensive exploration of the role of different publics and their perceptions on the topic. Could the linear, and perhaps too rigid, chronological organization separated by types of actors (as stable and definable entities) have prevented the author from navigating more freely across different publics and epistemologies? This question is not just limited to humans as actors. Indeed, the book offers many anecdotes and images in which farmed animals are represented, and their individuality and relationship to humans could have been further highlighted and explored.

Kirchhelle succeeds, however, in producing a clear and comprehensive descriptive review of the Anglo-American history of agricultural antibiotics from the perspective of science, industry and government. Careful cross-referencing between sections and chapters undoubtedly helps the reader navigate the complexity across different spheres of technocratic powers, interests, and their co-production. Not everything can be covered in one single book and the meticulous work done by Kirchhelle is certainly commendable: the book stimulates the reader imagination for developing further stories and historical investigations of farmed antibiotics that would be more-than-Western, more-than-elitist and more-than-human.