Krev, mléko a elixír života! / Bílkoviny a česká společnost 1945–1970
Blood, Milk, and the Elixir of Life! / Proteins and Czech Society, 1945–1970

Summary/Abstract: After the Second World War, concepts previously associated exclusively with the scientific community increasingly permeated all areas of everyday life, becoming important symbols that embodied a new era and an emerging lifestyle. The study focuses on protein as one of these scientific concepts that became deeply rooted even among the broadest segments of the public. The author’s aim is to contribute to clarifying the mechanisms of this discursive transformation, to point out both its continuities and its specific new elements, and, above all, to illuminate the semantic field of the selected concept in its contemporary contexts and to show its symbolic role, particularly in relation to the concept of the scientification of everyday life. In postwar Czechoslovakia, which soon embarked on the path of state socialism and adopted Marxism-Leninism as its official ideology, proteins played an extremely important role for two fundamental and closely interrelated reasons. Based on Engels’ definition of life as a mode of existence of proteins, this substance was perceived as an elixir of life. This view corresponded to the then dominant theory of the origin of life advanced by the Soviet biochemist Alexander Ivanovich Oparin (1894–1980), which posited the emergence of life from protein-like coacervate droplets containing the beginnings of structured matter on the shelves of tropical seas. According to these ideas, synthesizing proteins would have meant mastering all the secrets of life. Long before the Second World War, however, the public had primarily encountered the concept of proteins in connection with nutrition, and especially in the second half of the 1940s and early 1950s the issue of proteins was perceived as the most important nutritional problem in Czechoslovakia and a basic measure of dietary quality. The concept of life-giving protein, the proportion of which determines the quality of nutrition, became one of the fundamental pillars of contemporary ideas about healthy eating. Discussion revolved mainly around the distinction between complete (mostly animal) and incomplete (plant) proteins, although the boundaries between these categories were subject to change. While experts placed primary emphasis on the consumption of milk and dairy products, the public – as well as politicians and professionals in the public catering sector – emphasized meat, whose growing consumption became the main parameter of the population’s standard of living. Research conducted in the second half of the 1960s clearly demonstrated that there was an adequate supply of protein in the Czech diet; nevertheless, the problem of protein deficiency played an important role in debates about conditions in so-called Third World countries. Scientific assistance to developing countries underpinned extensive research programs into non-traditional sources of protein, which, according to futurological visions, were to create a food base for the anticipated demographic boom. In conclusion, the author argues that the doctrine emphasizing the need for a high proportion of animal protein continued to function during the period of normalization as one of the core pillars of the official doctrine of healthy nutrition, but gradually turned into a mere phrase whose validity and meaning were no longer subject to verification. By the late 1980s, and especially following the regime change in the 1990s, new dietary trends emerged in Czech society that put an end to the preference for protein.

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