This paper examines the adoption, reconstruction and distribution of two quotidian objects – a footwear and a kind of food – both of which were, at least nominally, based on the technologies of indigenous populations, but refigured into tools of imperialism, military technologies, and consumer goods. By broadening our attention from the pharmaceutical, botanical and genetic aspects of bioprospecting we open up a range of human technologies and cultural adaptations to closer scrutiny; these two case studies demonstrate how doing so provides new insights into crucial topics in the history of science and technology, particularly the co-construction and communication of knowledge, and the relationship between national and supra-national knowledge communities. Specifically, pemmican is used to demonstrate the feasibility of global histories of science, while the science behind the various Vibram-style training shoes is shown to have a difficult, and largely unstudied history based in racial and evolutionary science; both are unavoidably products of a colonial past