Q: Welcome to Leipzig, Dr. Broughton! Can you tell us a bit about your academic journey and what brought you to your current research on the Brazilian beef industry?
Thank you for the kind welcome. I came to work on the history of the Brazilian beef industry while I was still working on my Ph.D. at the Global Intellectual History Graduate School at the Free University of Berlin. At the time my supervisor, Nadin Heé, was writing a book about the Global History of Tuna. So I became very interested in food history, especially the importance of food in different social contexts and how these reflect wider historical issues connected to the production and consumption of different foods. Furthermore, when I first arrived in Brazil in 2016 I was really struck by the quantity of meat in people's daily diets. I’m talking about middle-class consumption here, but as I spent more time in Brazil, I began to realise just how much meat is consumed by the entire population. This was quite shocking to me – especially because I lived in Germany, a very meat-centric place by European standards. So this was something that really interested me and I began to fashion into a research project.
Q: You have worked in various academic environments in the UK, Germany, and Brazil. How have these different contexts influenced your research approach?
I have gathered a range of different experiences that have influenced my research by working across institutions. As a doctoral candidate at the Free University of Berlin, I worked alongside several historians who were particularly interested in the subjects of cattle commodification and food systems, while also working within the fields of Global and Transimperial History. Working with these scholars helped me to understand the spatial potential of my research and the entanglement of different imperial forces in the growth of the Brazilian beef industry. While working as a teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London, I became closely connected with the Food Studies Centre there. This connection broadened my horizons to the interdisciplinary potential of my work as I found large number of scholars, especially anthropologists and sociologists, who were interested in many of the same subjects and research questions as me. When I presented part of my research to students at Unicamp, State University of Campinas, I was really impressed by the level of insight students had into my research. They were able to see clear connections between my work and other fields of history writing, especially Labour History and Environmental History, which has really enriched my research perspective and led me to think about new research methodologies.
Q: Your research spans multiple themes, including nationalism, capitalism, and animal commodification. What is it about the Brazilian beef industry that makes it such a compelling case study for these topics?
Today, beef is a major story in Brazil. It was a major issue in the recent 2022 national elections which saw the now-reelected president Lula promising to give back every Brazilian “Churrasco, Picanha e cerveja”. (BBQ, Steak and Beer). This promise highlighted the centrality of beef to the everyday lives of Brazilians. However, this situation is quite surprising given how small and less prestigious the beef industry was at the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly in relation to Brazil’s regional competitors, Argentina and Uruguay. The meteoric growth of the Brazilian beef industry during the twentieth century, which today alternates with the United States for the position of the world's largest beef producer, is therefore emblematic of the emergence of vast global meat markets, that were central to the story of Brazilian capitalism. Moreover, it was contingent on the commodification of cattle by Brazilian policymakers and ranchers, who sought to take advantage of these markets by reengineering cattle and natural environments in order to enhance production. As a consequence, beef became central to a project of nation-building and modernisation that gained pace in the middle of the twentieth century and helped to fuel the creation of new domestic tourism markets. Furthermore, Brazilian national cuisine was reshaped by the growing abundance of beef leading to the transformation of existing recipes, eating practices, the invention of new cuts of meat, and progressive increases in meat consumption during the twentieth century.
Q: In your research, you discuss the role of knowledge transfer between Brazil and other countries, such as the importation of cattle breeds from India. How did these cross-border exchanges impact both Brazil’s agricultural practices and its national identity?
The introduction of Zebu cattle from British India during the nineteenth century was an incredibly transformative event in terms of the Brazilian beef industry. This allowed cattle ranchers to expand their operations deeper into Brazil’s tropical and semi-tropical environments due to the Zebu’s resistance to the high tropical temperatures, diseases, and pests. As a result, beef began to become a more significant part of the Brazilian economy and led to an expansion of the cattle frontier, particularly during the mid-twentieth century. Accompanying the frontier, new restaurants were opened by migrants from beef-producing regions, particularly Rio Grande do Sul, who travelled throughout Brazil motivated by the potential of profiting from the country’s expanding road network. One cooking practice that these restaurants popularised was churrasco (BBQ), which despite having clear regional origins in the Brazilian south has grown into a national signifier thereby paralleling the trajectory of other regional foods that have become symbols of national cuisine.
Q: The historical development of the Brazilian beef industry exists in a context that is national as well as global. Can you elaborate on how international collaborations, investments, and scientific advancements shaped Brazil’s role in the global beef market in the 20th and 21st century?
The rise of the Brazilian beef industry was not solely a product of local or national dynamics, but also of global interactions involving imperial actors, which fuelled the creation of new infrastructures and the circulation of knowledge. The American, British, Portuguese and Japanese Empires all played different roles in the creation of essential infrastructure, such as agricultural settlements, railways, shipping lanes, slaughterhouses and meat packing plants, through capital investment and labour migration that allowed the beef industry to form and expand. Additionally, imperial actors, together with Brazilian ranchers and policymakers, played a key role in introducing new breeds of cattle and varieties of grasses to boost productivity, as well as promoting environmental and veterinary expertise to expand cattle pastures by reengineering biomes, such as the Cerrado and Amazon rainforest.
Q: What do you hope to achieve during your time in Leipzig, both in terms of your research and in engaging with the academic community here?
During my time at Leipzig, I hope to connect my research to the range of scholars also present here at the ReCentGlobe. I am particularly keen to engage with scholars working at the Centre for Transimperial History and the Leipzig Lab. Through these engagements, I hope to develop new methodological insights which will help to extend my research and find scholars who I can collaborate with further in the future.