The Guardian:
The transformations that remade beef production between the end of the American civil war in 1865 and the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act in 1906 stretched from the Great Plains to the kitchen table.
Meatpacking lines, pioneered in the 1860s in Cincinnati’s pork packinghouses, were the first modern production lines. The innovation was that they kept products moving continuously, eliminating downtime and requiring workers to synchronise their movements to keep pace. This idea was enormously influential. In his memoirs, Henry Ford explained that his idea for continuous motion assembly “came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef”.
When I lived on a farm, I was involved in a very minor aspect of the beef industry and even at that level, it was pretty brutal. I can’t imagine it on an industrial scale.
Something I learned when I worked for the newspaper in St. Joseph, MO, was the reason why that town, which was where the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon Trails crossed the Missouri River. (They started a bit south in Independence.) Most people at the time thought St. Joseph would become the center of commerce for the area because of that crossing.
The railroads wanted to build their main bridges there. But the owners of the meat packing industry in St. Joseph didn’t want to have anything to do with it. The believed if they allowed the railroads to put their railheads there, that would lead to the unions coming to town, which would lead to union workers in their plants demanding higher wages and better working conditions.
So they said no thanks. The railroads went with Kansas City instead, and the rest is history. And St. Joseph has remained a backwater to this day because of it.
What a pack of conservative, selfish tools. Better-paid workers and rail transport would have expanded the local economy and benefited everyone. But no.
I love beef, but given the way most of it is manufactured in this country, I’m also mostly prepared to leave it behind should the current substitutes improve and scale to a competitive cost.
The poison that is beef will soon perish from our palettes