Free The Hormone Factory by Saskia Goldschmidt

department, gave me the gist of the first few conversations he’d had with the farmers. After optimistically setting off on his bike, he’d covered miles and miles of dirt road, only to get the same reaction wherever he went: “They stare at you, their jaws slowly dropping; at first they frown and then they begin to snicker. ‘Has that meatpackin’ Jew gone right off his rocker? That’s a good ’un … four and a half cents fer a liter of horse piss, that’s more’n we get fer a friggin’ liter of milk. So what you gonna do with it, the piss? Turn it into champagne? No need fer food coloring, anyhow.’ ” Uproarious laughter, and a jerk of the head suggesting Jaspers get the hell out of there if he didn’t want a kick in the backside.
    The request for horse piss must have stirred up some vague, atavistic trepidation in the farmers’ hearts. Their poverty was great; the depression had affected them as it had everyone else, on top of which a long-standing milk price war had further nibbled away at their already paltry earnings, and so some extra income from collecting what to them was a worthless waste product should have been more than welcome. But they could not fathom why we were so interested in the urine, and it made them wary. After all, make a pact with the devil and you can never go back. The request that sounded so meshuggah to themmust have awoken some seed hidden deep within, a fear planted there by their forefathers’ dark whispers about the Jewish race and its occult practices. To a simple farmer, there couldn’t have been all that much difference between horse piss and the blood of Christian children.
    Thanks to the intervention of the local veterinarian, we did in the end manage to overcome their misgivings, and for many years they kept their pregnant mares isolated for a number of gestational weeks, collecting the urine via a special drain into barrels provided by us. The vats were collected at specific sites, then conveyed to the factory in an old jalopy. Sometimes, when the sandy paths got flooded, we’d have to get a day laborer in thigh-high waders to walk ahead of the vehicle to make sure it didn’t hit a sinkhole and disappear in the muck with its precious cargo.
    It was quite a smelly job, boiling and then filtering twelve thousand liters of horse pee; you had to pour in gallons of alcohol from wicker-wrapped carboys until you wound up with a semisolid mass that might in the end yield just a handful of pure, very fine crystals, which, after being sterilized, could produce amazing, though variable, results.
    The farmers’ mistrust was rekindled ten years later, when the country was mobilizing for war. Sinister rumors about the purported practices of the Chosen People began to circulate once more, and the farmers started passing up their four and a half cents a liter on account of the whispers—doubtlessly started by the brownshirts, who’d started crawling out of the woodwork and throwing their weight around in public ever more brazenly—that we were using the stuff to make poison gas. Now that was what you’d call chutzpah, in light of the genocide to come.

15 …
    Even in the wild years of the stock market crash and the economic recession that followed, we managed to keep our heads above water. By the time the crisis broke, I was fortunately no longer an inexperienced young whippersnapper but had grown into a tough businessman unafraid of making the hard decisions. During those stormy years, when I’d finessed the handing off of the oil, fats, and soap production to one of our rivals, we also made the decision to diversify by going into canned goods, thus creating a new sales avenue for ourselves. Thanks to such measures, we managed to keep both our well-regarded meatpacking business and the fledgling Farmacom afloat.
    Our insulin exports had steadily increased before the market collapse, thanks in no small part to Aaron’s efforts; that can’t be denied. He had actually