A Brief History of Meat in the United States

So why is meat in particular such a contentious issue in the United States? To better understand this, we must look at the history of “meat” in this country. As Maureen Ogle, a historian, writes in In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America, “[t]o the men and women who settled North America, the idea of a world without livestock was as peculiar, and dangerous, as the notion of a world without God.

Meat also provided a relatively stable source of nutrition, as more plant-based diets required more labor to produce, while meat could be dried, preserved, or slaughtered at appropriate periods of time.^[409] Indeed, as Ogle chronicles, meat played an especially prominent role in the American diet. “Across Europe, a non-royal was lucky to see meat once or twice a week. A typical [colonial] American adult male, in contrast, put away two hundred pounds a year.”^[410]

Eventually, what began as a more homesteading enterprise transformed into its own economy. Ogle traces the development of the cattle-grazing, feeding, and driving enterprise of the Ohio River Valley area of the United States,^[411] as well as the 1840 center of pork production in Cincinnati, then sometimes referred to as Porktopolis,^[412] a term later “stolen” by Chicago.^[413]

Indeed, by the late 1800s, the “American[] prodigious appetite for meat” had become “world-renowned.”^[414] This led to the development of vast additional

grazing areas out West,^[415] which in turn transformed the American landscape not only through the movement of livestock production geographies but in terms of the US transportation industry.^[416] That is, the livestock

stockyard at Chicago was funded primarily by railroad companies, which recognized that livestock represented one of their more lucrative and important categories of freight....

But that transformation also shaped American consumers’ relationship to meat. The more that consumers, especially in cities, became isolated from meat production, the more they came to value their isolation from the sights and smells of livestock slaughter. “[I]n the 1870s and after[,] Americans wanted cit­ies. They wanted meat, too. But they no longer wanted the one in the other. In modern America, the making of meat would increasingly be out of sight and out of mind.”^[418]

Ogle also traces the growth of the meat industry in America through the tri­umph of the meatpacking sector over the American beef market.^[419] But while she details the various legal and economic mechanisms used to solidify this dominance, she also recognizes consumers’ roles.

The rising standard of living [in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century] shaped shoppers’ demands, and people in every economic class developed an insatiable appetite for fresh beef. But not just any cuts. Fami­lies satisfied with tongue or cheek twenty years earlier now demanded finer cuts.^[420]

Adding to the desire to reach a perceived better standard of living was also the belief in the late nineteenth century that “linked food to national power and racial superiority.”^[421] She describes essays published during that period that linked European and American geopolitical dominance to their meat-rich diets and Asian “inoffensive”ness to their more grain and plant-based diets.^[422] This combination of institutional disconnect, desire for a particular standard of

The Legal Definition of Meat 109 living, and connection with national status led to a sense of entitlement to meat. During this period of time,

[u]rban Americans didn’t care that meat comes from animals, or that food for those animals, like its human counterpart, depends on weather.

But eventually the American consumer became more circumspect regarding its approach towards meat. First, Upton Sinclair’s expose on the unfair labor practices and negligible food safety standards of the livestock industry cap­tured the public imagination.^[424] Then, the Federal Trade Commission’s series of investigations regarding the anticompetitive practices of the packer industry highlighted the suspect economic practices.^[425] Finally, various popular nutri­tionists arose touting the additional benefits of “vitamins” contained in “once- lowly foodstuffs” over meats.^[426]

In response, “The Meat Institute, a packers’ trade Association, and the American National Livestock Association mounted a pro-meat publicity campaign.”^[427] They ended up, in the 1920s, persuading the USDA to promote and protect the entire US meat production system, integrating meat promotion with the federal government.^[428]

Much of the remainder of Ogle’s comprehensive history explores the ways in which livestock market interests, food safety and food security interests, nutri­tional interests, and environmental/sustainability interests sparred throughout in the twentieth century.^[429] What does Ogle ultimately conclude about the American consumer’s relationship to meat? That

[we’re] a complicated group, we Americans, and we struggle to reconcile our conflicting desires and passions. On one hand, many of us want meat, lots of it, and we don’t care how it’s made as long as it doesn’t cost much. On the other, some of us are determined to break the chains that bind livestock production and meatpacking to assembly-line processes.^[430]

Ogle, consistent with her perspective as a historian, leaves few detailed rec­ommendations for the future, but her recounting of the American history with

meat is still relevant in framing how we might approach what foodstuffs we choose to call “meat.” First, her historical account suggests that meat presents a particular signifier in the traditional American diet: one of “necessity” in terms of political, power, and cultural identity.^[431] Next, it demonstrates that the American consumer’s expectations of “meat” are interwoven with various market dynamics. Finally, it highlights how these expectations and desires can be shaped by other concerns, such as food safety, nutritional impacts, and even sustainability issues.

III.