“In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America,” by Maureen Ogle, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, NY, 2013. This 368-page hardback tells the story of the US meat industry starting with the Swift and Armour packing houses in Chicago, through the introduction of corporate farming of beef, pork and chicken, to today’s “natural”, “range fed”, and/or “organic” meat.
The tale is fundamentally that of food, and especially protein. Animal husbandry has been around from the stone age; meat is important to the human diet. As urban areas in the East grew large, their need for food supplies increased. “Cattle Kingdom in the Ohio Valley: 1783-1860,” by Paul C. Henlein, University of Kentucky Press, 1959, reports cattle drives of Missouri herds through Ohio to eastern markets as early as 1816.
By 1835, Cincinnati developed as a center of pork processing achieving the name Porkopolis. Steamboats on the Ohio River provided access to markets, and farmers in the area supplied hogs as a market for their corn. They improved their herds and confined them resulting in corn fed hogs worth 30 to 60% more than scavengers.
Ogle tells of Joe McCoy who made an arrangement with the Kansas Pacific Railroad to bring Texas longhorns to the railhead at Abilene, KS by 1867. Other sources tell of cattle drives from Texas in the 1840s to Sedalia, Baxter Springs, Springfield, and St. Louis, long before the arrival of railroads. The Texas cattle drives continued to about 1890. Chicago grew as a rail center and became the logical place for meat packing.
Meat packing was a messy, smelly operation. To feed their population, cities often had many of them. That meant cattle herded down the streets. After the Civil War, health authorities worked to create large centralized meat packing houses known as abattoirs. One of the first was Communipaw Abattoir opened in 1866 on the New Jersey waterfront across from New York City. It used improved assembly line processing.
In 1875, Gus Swift began processing meat in a large centralized operation in Chicago. He shipped “dressed” beef in ice packed refrigerated rail cars. He realized that in the East, most cattle came from Chicago, but shipping live cattle was inefficient. They needed feeding and watering during the trip. Only a fraction of the weight was saleable as food. It was more efficient to collect all the co-products for hides, fertilizer, buttons, rendering, etc., at one large site and ship the beef. He sold his beef at near cost, but made money on the co-products. Oleomargarine was one of the co-products. Battles raged with dairy interests.
Phillip Armour followed with his own Chicago meat packing operation in 1882. He differed from Swift in that he shipped boxes of “small cuts” to retailers. He then processed the rest into sausage and canned or corned beef. Hence, he shipped only the most saleable cuts.
The story of chicken begins with Jesse Jewell, a feed salesman from Gainesville, GA. Hard times in Georgia had been worsened by the boll weevil attack on cotton and by low Depression prices. Jewell pioneered the idea of providing baby chicks and feed to farmers on credit and then buying finished broilers back at a small profit. He provided credit for improved growing methods including housing chickens in long rows of stacked cages with automated feed and water. Jewell also slaughtered and packaged chickens. By 1945, chicken production in Georgia increased from 400,000 in 1934 to 30MM.
Fish meal and cod liver oil were important animal feed ingredients. When supplies were cut off during World War II, poultry weighed less at maturity. Research identified vitamin B12 as the missing essential. Merck could produce it by fermentation. American Cyanamid made it from the residue of the antibiotic Aureomycin. Hence, antibiotics became a feed ingredient.
Prime beef is obtained by raising cattle on grass for two years and then switching to corn for the third year. Large feedlot operations to carry out the second stage became popular in the 1950s. By 1968, 71% of US beef was produced in feedlots. Monfort of Greeley, CO took it to the next step of automating rations fed to each animal. This allowed improved efficiency as customers could customize diet and get animals of similar size for more uniform processing. Grocery chains and meat packers became “specification buyers”–not interested in the range of variations from small feeders. Similarly the diet could be adjusted for lower grades of beef like choice. In Colorado, sugar beet tops was a low cost feed ingredient. In 1954, Iowa State University found that feeding cattle a synthetic hormone, diethyl stilbesterol, DES, gave faster growth and greater feed efficiency. Confinement on pavement also improved efficiency.
Montfort opened its own meat packing plant in Weld Co., CO in 1960. It used the latest equipment to minimize labor requirements and to make jobs suitable for semiskilled labor. They also pioneered the sale of prime cuts as boxed beef. Iowa Beef, IBP, soon followed a similar plan in Denison, IA. They purchased cattle directly from farmers and feedlots.
The story of pork tells of Don Tyson of Springdale, AR, who in 1977 decided to enter the hog business. Tyson was already the largest broiler company with major operations in Arkansas. They had followed the same path as Jesse Jewell to create a hatchery, feed mill and dealership by World War II. By 1980, Tyson was breeding hogs and selling piglets to National Farms, a leader in modern hog farming. Another player was privately owned Cargill, who acquired MBPXL in 1978 to become the second largest meat packer. ConAgra acquired Montfort and the remnants of Armour from Greyhound Corporation.
In the nineties, food safety became an issue. Ralph Nader attacked the high fat content of hot dogs and Naderites challenged the safety of meat products, nutrition, and the way livestock were raised. Salmonella contamination made the news. Strontium-90 in milk. Unpronounceable food additives. Consumerism resulted in fear of the food supply and of the industry that processed food.
In 1971, Montford ran a trial in which 1000 yearlings were raised without antibiotics and DES and without a chemical dip when they went to slaughter. The test animals needed 10 to 15% longer to reach market weight and consumed 10% more feed. The carcasses yielded less meat due to diseased livers and parasite infected flesh.
Mel Coleman of Boulder, CO was an early pioneer of “natural” beef beginning in 1980. Coleman Natural Beef offered a natural, drug-free product which he slaughtered and butchered himself. Customers for the product were hard to find, but finally he identified Mrs. Gooch’s Ranch Markets in Southern California. Other stores in the area signed on. Finally Grand Union grocery chain signed a contract for 500 cattle per week. On request from retailers, Coleman soon added lamb, veal, pork and rabbit to his offerings. He expanded by contracting with neighbors to supply his requirements.
This is a nicely done book that tells the story in a readable, non-technical way. It covers the history of meat processing quite well. The information is presented in balanced fashion. This is not a diatribe. References, index.
