“Full of Good from Sunny Lands”: Paper presented by Frank Veraart
Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting 2025, Luxembourg
10 October 2025
Abstract:
“Rich harvest of ripe fruit for Planta. Abundance from warm countries: bananas, lemons, coffee and tea. But also… coconuts and palm fruits, the suppliers of easily digestible vegetable fats for Planta”: this was one of the slogans advertised in the 1960s by margarine brand Planta. Planta was produced since 1915 by the Dutch margarine manufacturer Jurgens, who, together with other Dutch margarine producers and British soap producers Lever Brothers was one of the founding fathers of Unilever. The scramble for fats and plant-oils had brought the entrepreneurs together and laid the foundation of a large trans-national agro-food complex. Dutch harbors played a crucial role in the transshipment of commodities from around the world to be processed in the hinterlands. These activities also fed into the development of feed industries that served the modernization of Europe´s agriculture especially after the Second World War. In agricultural history and history of technology much attention has gone to the modernization of food and agriculture, but much less to the entanglement of the ´ghost acres´ that provided the massive inputs of fats and protein to Europe. Where did the resources selected by the food and feed industries come from? How did these European preferences change markets and affect agricultural communities around the globe? This paper wants to highlight these missing links and to place these ´shadow places´ in the spotlight to investigate the global origins of Dutch fat and oil demand.
Link to conference website: https://www.historyoftechnology.org/annual-meeting/2025-shot-annual-meeting/