On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread: Rationalizing Technologies and the Canadian State, 1912-1935

Canada's little-known protein-grading debate serves here as a narrative platform on which significant, but long overlooked, conjunctures of western Canadian history ­ environmental, biochemical, political, and cultural ­ are assembled. By enabling this assemblage, the protein-grading debate discloses the necessity of integrating 'materialist' (including environmental) and 'idealist' readings of Prairie history. Read under the integrative light cast by the protein debate, a few basic themes of Western history, concerning, for instance, the federal state's rationalized 'vision' of the West and its natural avails, earn some nuance, while certain others, such as the concept of aridity, might be cast entirely anew.