The week of Thanksgiving the town gets quiet in a particular way. The school buses stop. The turnaround crews thin out, or they don't, depending on the year and the unit, and the hotels along the interstate either empty or stay full of men in fire-resistant shirts eating a holiday plate at a chain restaurant because the job doesn't know it's a holiday. In the houses the ovens go on early. The bird goes in before the parade starts on television. By noon the whole street smells like the same thing, and by two the men are asleep in front of the game and the women are doing the dishes, or the other way around, depending on the house.
It is the most domestic day of the year. Nobody thinks about the channel on Thanksgiving. That is fine. The channel does not need to be thought about. But if you follow the dinner backward, plate by plate, you will find that almost every part of it passes through a pipe, and the most important part passes through a process that most people have never heard of and that has, by a reasonable accounting, made about half of the people at the table possible.
Start with the easy one. The oven. If it is gas, then the blue flame under the bird is methane, one carbon and four hydrogens, meeting the oxygen in the kitchen and coming apart into carbon dioxide and water and heat. You can see that it is water, sometimes, on a cold morning, when the kitchen windows fog. If the oven is electric, the story is the same one step removed, more often than not: gas is the largest single source of power on the Texas grid, and somewhere out there a turbine is burning it to spin a generator, and the heat in the element is that gas, converted twice and delivered on a wire. Either way the turkey is probably cooked on a hydrocarbon. It was going to be. Most things are.
Half the people in Baytown could tell you that much, and where the gas goes. The deeper layer is the part nobody sees, and it is in the meat itself.
A turkey is protein, mostly, and protein is built from amino acids, and every amino acid has nitrogen in it. There is no life without nitrogen. It is in every protein, every enzyme, every strand of DNA. The air is nearly four-fifths nitrogen, more nitrogen than anything else, and almost none of it can be used. Nitrogen in the air comes as two atoms bound to each other by a triple bond, one of the strongest bonds in ordinary chemistry, and neither a turkey nor a corn plant nor a person can break it. It goes in with every breath and out with every breath, unchanged. We are drowning in it and cannot drink.
For all of history before Haber, the nitrogen that fed the world came from a few slow sources. Lightning broke some of it. Certain bacteria, living in lumps on the roots of beans and clover, broke a little more, using an enzyme that does at soil temperature what a factory needs heat and pressure to do, but slowly, and only for the plant that houses them. Manure moved it around. Guano, the droppings of seabirds piled up on dry islands over thousands of years, was mined and shipped across oceans, and nations argued over the islands. The size of the harvest was fixed, in the end, by how much usable nitrogen the soil could gather, and the size of the harvest fixed the size of the population.
Then two Germans broke the bond. Fritz Haber, in a laboratory before the First World War, found that if you took nitrogen from the air and hydrogen from somewhere else, and squeezed them together at a couple of hundred atmospheres and a few hundred degrees over a metal catalyst, a fraction of them would join into ammonia, and if you pulled the ammonia out and sent the rest back around, the fraction added up. Carl Bosch, at BASF, took the bench experiment and made it a plant, which was the harder job, because nothing that size had ever been made to hold that pressure. The first reactors burst. Hydrogen crept into the steel and made it brittle, and Bosch's answer was a liner of soft iron inside a steel jacket, with holes drilled through the jacket so that whatever hydrogen got through the liner could leak out harmlessly instead of building up. A colleague, Alwin Mittasch, ran through thousands of catalyst recipes before settling on iron with a few additives, which is near enough what the plants still use. The process carries Haber's and Bosch's names. Ammonia is nitrogen and hydrogen, and ammonia can be turned into fertilizer, and fertilizer can be spread on a field, and the field will grow more corn than it has any natural right to.
And the hydrogen, in most of the plants on earth that do this, comes from natural gas; in some countries it comes from coal, which is worse for the air and the same for the chemistry. Methane is taken apart with steam at high temperature and what comes off is hydrogen and carbon oxides. The hydrogen goes to the ammonia reactor. So the ammonia is, in a fairly direct sense, made of air and natural gas. The fertilizer is made of air and natural gas. The corn is grown on it. The turkey eats the corn. And you eat the turkey.
Which brings us to the number that is hard to sit with. Scientists who have traced the flow of nitrogen through the world's food have concluded that about half of the nitrogen in a living human body today came through the Haber-Bosch process at some point. Not half of the food. Half of the nitrogen in you. In the muscle, in the enzymes, in the letters of your genes. It was air a few years ago, and it was made usable in a steel vessel by hydrogen that had been natural gas, and it went into a field and a plant and an animal and a plate and you. Roughly half of the people alive would not be alive without it, because the fields could not have fed them.
I am not going to tell you that the plants here make ammonia, because I do not know that any of them do, and this site does not guess. But a refinery makes hydrogen. Nearly every one of them does, and uses it by the ton. Hydrogen is what a refinery uses to clean the sulfur out of fuel and to take heavy molecules apart into lighter ones, and a refinery gets much of that hydrogen the same way an ammonia plant does, from natural gas and steam, in a unit called a steam reformer. The steam reformer at a refinery and the steam reformer at a fertilizer plant are cousins. They are the same idea built for different customers. When someone here says that the process that fed you is like the ones on the channel, they are describing the equipment, not reaching for a figure of speech.
And the gas itself, the feedstock for all of it, has a stop fifteen minutes up 146. Gas does not come out of a well as one thing. It comes up as a mix, and near the field the heavier parts are stripped out of it, the ethane and propane and butane, and the methane goes on down the pipe toward the burner and the reformer. The liquids go to Mont Belvieu, into the caverns in the salt dome, and there they are split apart and held until someone needs them. So the molecule that will become fertilizer and the molecule that will become the plastic wrap over the leftovers came up out of the ground together, and one of them went north into the country's kitchens and fields, and the other went into the salt under Chambers County to wait.
So the dinner, followed all the way back, looks like this. The heat under the bird is gas. The electricity for the mixer and the refrigerator and the television with the parade on it is gas, more likely than not, at a turbine somewhere. The plastic on the cranberries and the bag the bird came in and the film over the pie are petrochemicals, most of them descended from ethylene, which is made down the road by cracking hydrocarbons at somewhere around 850 degrees Celsius. And the turkey, the sweet potatoes, the corn in the cornbread, the wheat in the rolls, are nitrogen that was pulled out of the air by a process running on gas. The table is a hydrocarbon in a dozen disguises.
None of this is a reason to feel guilty and none of it is a reason to feel proud. It is just what is true. Thanksgiving is a holiday about being fed, and the honest thing to say about being fed, since Haber, is that the field alone could not do it. The field needed a reactor. The reactor needed hydrogen. The hydrogen needed gas. Somewhere in that chain, on the channel or on a channel like it, a crew was on shift.
There is a grace that gets said at a lot of tables in this town, in English or in Spanish, and the shortest version of it thanks God for the food and the hands that prepared it. The hands that prepared it. The cook hears that and looks at her own. But the sentence is longer than she knows, and it does not need to be rewritten to be true; it only needs to be followed. The hands go back through the grocery clerk and the truck driver and the man on the processing line and the farmer, and then, past the farmer, through the hands on a shift at a reformer somewhere, holding a pressure that turns air into something a corn plant can use. Nobody at the table can see that far down the chain, and the grace was never meant to. It was meant to point.
The turkey does not know any of this and neither does the corn. The corn just grew, faster and taller than its ancestors, in a field that had been given more nitrogen than any prairie ever held. The turkey just ate. The people at the table say the words, if they say them, and pass the plate. The chain is invisible from the kitchen, which is how you can tell it is working.
But if you get up after dinner and drive out along the bay, past the park, and look across at the complex with the towers lit, you are looking at one end of the chain from the other. The hydrogen units are in there somewhere, hidden in the steel. The gas is coming in on pipe you cannot see. The crews are on shift, because the plant does not have a Thursday off. And somewhere north of here, on a farm you will never see, the field that grew the corn that fed the bird is bare and cold, waiting for spring and for a truck to come with the next load of what the air could not give it on its own.
The dishes are done by now. The house is warm with gas. Somebody has wrapped the carcass in plastic that was ethylene a month ago and put it in a refrigerator running on a turbine's electricity. The nitrogen in the leftovers, which was air a season back, will be soup tomorrow and then it will be you. The town spent the day being thankful without needing to know exactly what for, which may be the only way anyone ever manages it. In the refrigerator the carcass sits under its film, cooling, and the light goes off when the door shuts.