Originally published on July 29, 2026 (Episode 468).
Introduction
In early 1965, three executives boarded a plane in Japan, bound for the United States. “Unbeknownst to the U.S. Customs, they were carrying corporate secrets. Each man had carefully placed two vials of an isomerase enzyme into their pockets before the flight.” With it, they would change the world. For after two arduous years of nearly aerobic chemical engineering, their corporation produced what it called Isomerose 30. We know it, or its technically improved successors, as corn syrup.
That’s how my guest Brian Leech begins his intricate, multi-valenced history of what went on in Clinton, Iowa, from the 1960s through the 1980s. It’s food history, it’s labor history, it’s technological history, it’s environmental history, it’s regional history—“and not any single one of them, which is to say,” to quote the great Edmund Morgan, “that it is good history.”
About the Guest
Brian James Leech is Professor of History at Augustana College. His work ranges across labor, environmental, and urban history, often focusing on the American Midwest. He is the author of The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit and has long explored how industry, communities, and landscapes shape one another. This is his third appearance on Historically Thinking.
For Further Investigation
Brian James Leech, “Sweet Solution, Sticky Situation: Mill Technology, Organized Labor, and the Midwestern Origins of High Fructose Corn Syrup,” Middle West Review, Volume 10, Number 1, Fall 2023
—, The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit (University of Nevada Press, 2019)
Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (Yale University Press, 2010)
Jon Lauck, The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History (University of Iowa, 2013)
John C. Hudson, Making the Corn Belt: A Geographical History of Middle-Western Agriculture (Indiana University Press, 1994)
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Penguin, 1986)
Related Episodes
Environmental History: Brian Leach explains the basics
Picky: Helen Zoe Veit on How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History
The Lost Region: Jon Lauck on why the Midwest matters
Tags
Food History • Labor History • Environmental History • Technology • Midwest • Iowa • Corn • Corn Syrup • Industrial History • Agricultural History • Brian Leech
