In Meat We Trust

by Maureen Ogle

  Whatever we think of Wendell “Boss Hog” Murphy or Eldon Roth on one hand, and Michael Jacobson and Michael Pollan on the other, we are all responsible for what we have wrought. Decade upon decade, we’ve insisted on having it all—cheap food and odor-free air and quality meat and disposable incomes that enable us to buy cell phones. If the devastation wrought in the rains of North Carolina or the debacle over pink slime teaches us anything, it is that we won’t transform our meat culture by taming Big Food or replacing Big Ag with a locavore-centered, alternative food system, but by examining our sense of entitlement and the way it contributes to the high cost of cheap living.

  Not long after Roth turned out the lights in his plants, another event took place, one that went largely unnoticed: in August 2012, the Community Food Security Coalition announced that it would shut down its operations at the end of the year. CFSC directors explained that the organization had sown its seeds so successfully that there was no longer enough grant money to go around for all the related, connected, and spinoff groups that wanted it. The CFSC would hand off the food-reform baton to others who had been inspired by its work. That’s a “clean out your desk” moment we can applaud. Organic foods are supermarket staples; alternative is the new normal; the premium we pay for grass-fed beef and organic pork is our act of commitment to a better world. We Americans, the masters of having it all, have had our desires—for convenience, for cachet, for doing good—satisfied once again.

  As I wrote in the introduction to this book, I’m not buying it. I don’t believe we can have it all.

  I leave you with a final point to consider: we reaped the benefits of the CFSC, and yes, LFTB, because factory farming freed so many of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and thus us, from the need to grow and process food; freed them, and us, to instead dream big, think deep, and yes, launch crusades. Pollan, Schlosser, and I can write books in large part because we don’t have to spend time planting seeds and pulling weeds. Factory farming’s biggest crop is intellectual capital. So, thanks, Big Ag—and the USDA and family and corporate farmers—for giving us the cheap food that has nourished an extraordinary abundance of creative energy. Now let’s do something with it. Let’s decide what kind of society we want—not what kind of farming, not what kind of meat, but what kind of society.

  In the United States, deep change happens slowly. Our political machinery is less well oiled than it is unwieldy and cantankerous, but, like an old Farmall tractor, it will get the job done. Two things, however, are certain: We won’t move forward until we can talk to rather than at each other about the high price of cheap food. And we won’t starve while we try to decide how, if at all, to reinvent the American way of meat.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d planned to keep these thoughts brief—until I was so close to the end that its breath tickled my ear and I thought: Seven years is a serious chunk of life. The hell with brief. I want to honor the people who got me here.

  On this book and my previous one, I worked with Andrea Schulz, editor-in-chief at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She is this book’s true hero, its head cheerleader, its guide, its brains, not least because she coached me so skillfully through the beer book that I had the confidence to attempt this project. If this work has any merit, it is because of her efforts. For its flaws, blame me.

  I thank her and everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for their patience; seven years is a long time to wait for a payoff. I admire, too, their good cheer and resolve during 2008 and 2009, a grim moment in American publishing. I am grateful, and so should all of us be, that HMH and other publishers support complex projects like this one. The publishing industry, under so much attack these days from so many writers, is a major patron and subsidizer of intellectual work, especially for projects that require years rather than weeks to complete.

  Agents facilitate that patronage. I am grateful to Jay Mandel at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment: for his patience and forbearance, for his dry humor (so much the opposite of mine), and above all for his mild eye rolls that motion me toward even keel amid my random, off-keel enthusiasms.

  Once again, I thank the staff at Parks Library at Iowa State University. (If only we could convince the state legislature of its importance.) I also visited and received help from the staffs at the University of Iowa library and its special collections department, the Milwaukee Public Library, and the New-York Historical Society. For assistance at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, I thank Marcy Altman, Valerie K. Angeli, Layna DeLaurentis, and Steve Zawistowski. I am particularly grateful to Layna for her hospitality, and to Steve for taking time to share with me his knowledge of the Buffet transcriptions of Henry Bergh’s letters. Sibella Kraus supplied me with a copy of a document she’d written. I thank Nancy Hallock and Keith Arbour for their friendship and scholarly solidarity. When I needed some last-minute help, they dispatched it immediately. Onward, comrades!

  I thank the small army of physicians, surgeons, nurses, physical therapists, and massage therapists who gave me back my right arm. For a long moment, I was not sure I would be able to finish this book or any other. They pulled me out of the dark and into full health. There are no words to express my gratitude.

  My thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress, to the people who created these marvels of media, and to all those who’ve chosen to participate in and shape the New Community. In my mind, the finest aspect of “social” media is the way it allows different generations to talk to and work with each other. During the years I devoted to this book, I learned so much from, and was constantly inspired by, people half my age. I thank all of them.

  When the beer book came out in 2006, I landed smack in the middle of the craft beer industry, home to an extraordinary collection of creative, lively, engaging, ambitious, determined people, from those who make the beer, to those who sell it, to those who drink it. Most of all, I appreciate the camaraderie of those who write about craft beer. Every day I read their work and ponder their ideas, and my life is richer for that. Their passion, dedication to critical thinking and good writing, generosity, and friendship inspire me to reach higher and dig deeper. Folks: the next round’s on me.

  Where I would be without my friends, I do not know. They know who they are, but I especially thank Carrie and Mark Kabak for the love, laughter, and food; and Anat Baron for her inspiring eye, mind, and will. The Spalings showed up late in the game and almost single-handedly (groupedly?) got me through the last year of this project, and for that, and much more, I am grateful.

  As for my family—no one is more fortunate than I. In descending order by age: Bill Robinson, Kay Arvidson, Alys Sterling, Bernard van Maarseveen, Jen Robinson, Trevor Barnes, and the newest member of our tiny tribe, Willem Robinson van Maarseveen.

  Of that tribe, my beloved Bill is the center, the heart, the soul. I pray that his noble spirit will be my companion for many more years. Certainly it graces each page of this book.

  Finally, the book’s acknowledgment honors Bernard and Jen, who have shared, and with such loving generosity, the greatest of gifts.

  Notes

  Although most of these notes simply document the sources of quotations, a number of them elaborate on points made in the text. Some digital sources do not contain page numbers; in those cases, I’ve noted that the document was accessed online.

  Introduction

  [>] “Truly we may be called”: “Consumption of Meat,” American Farmer and Spirit of the Agricultural Journals of the Day 3, no. 2 (June 2, 1841): 9.

  [>] I respect the critics: Readers should note that my general argument in this book is a rejection, overt or otherwise, of the Marxists’ critique of “capital.” I am aware of that argument, and its complexities. I don’t agree with it and find it singularly useless for making substantive change.

  1. CARNIVORE AMERICA

  [>] “[ran] over the grass”: Quoted in Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock
in Early New England,” William and Mary Quarterly 3d series, 51 (October 1994): 604.

  [>] “savage people”: Quoted in ibid., 604.

  [>] “advantageously . . . scituated”: Quoted in James S. Magg, “Cattle Raising in Colonial South Carolina” (master’s thesis, University of Kansas, 1964), 26.

  [>] “Hogs swarm like Vermine”: Quoted in Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933), 206.

  [>] In Maryland in the late 1600s: The example is from Henry Michael Miller, “Colonization and Subsistence Change on the 17th Century Chesapeake Frontier” (Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1984), 378.

  [>] “live stock”: Quoted in Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford University Press, 2004), 143.

  [>] When we bite: The discussion of the biology, chemistry, and nutrition of meat is based primarily on two sources, both of which are marvels of accessible prose: First, the two editions of Harold McGee’s masterwork On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. The original edition appeared in 1984 (Collier Books). The revised and updated version—for which McGee rewrote nearly every page—was published in 2004 (Scribner). Second, Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food, 2d ed. (Oxford University Press, 2006). One of the best general sources for information about meat in early human history is Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, eds., The Cambridge World History of Food (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  [>] The average white colonial American: Colonial and preindustrial statistics represent the best estimates compiled by many scholars. I relied on information in Edwin J. Perkins, “Socio-Economic Development of the Colonies,” in A Companion to the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Blackwell Publishers, 2000); and Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Clarendon Press, 1990).

  [>] “[E]ven in the humblest”: Gottlieb Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania, ed. and trans. Oscar Handlin and John Clive (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), 49.

  [>] “because he thought”: Quoted in James E. McWilliams, A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (Columbia University Press, 2005), 185.

  [>] “Custom of ye Country”: All quotes from “A Mutiny of the Servants,” William and Mary Quarterly 11 (July 1902): 34–37.

  [>] “The Cattle of Carolina”: Quoted in Magg, “Cattle Raising,” 28.

  [>] “there was no longer any holding”: William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 253, 254.

  [>] “deer and skins”: Quoted in Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 207.

  [>] “Your hogs & Cattle”: Quoted in ibid., 221.

  [>] “Violent Intrusions”: Quoted in ibid., 240.

  [>] “[W]hat will Cattell”: Quoted in ibid., 236.

  [>] One of the most important: For a good description of the cattle-corn-hog complex by one of its practitioners, see William Renick, Memoirs, Correspondence and Reminiscences (Union-Herald Book and Job Printing, 1880), 11, 12. Renick originally wrote the essay for the 1860 United States Census. The best surveys of this phase of American agriculture are in John C. Hudson, Making the Corn Belt: A Geographical History of Middle-Western Agriculture (Indiana University Press, 1994); and Paul C. Henlein, Cattle Kingdom in the Ohio Valley, 1783–1860 (University of Kentucky Press, 1959).

  [>] “long moving lines”: Rev. I. F. King, “The Coming and Going of Ohio Droving,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society Publications 17 (1908): 249.

  [>] “up the river”: Quoted in James Westfall Thompson, A History of Livestock Raising in the United States, 1607–1860 (1942; reprint, Scholarly Resources, 1973), 95. The book was initially published as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural History Series no. 5, November 1942.

  [>] “I alwase”: Harris’s life is recounted in Mrs. Mary Vose Harris, ed., “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Harris,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year 1923 30 (1923): 72–101.

  [>] “There are few things”: “Consumption of Meat,” 9.

  [>] One popular cookery book: For this example see “General Operations of Cookery,” American Farmer 7, no. 35 (November 18, 1825): 278.

  [>] “nicely”: A Farmer’s Wife, “Household Affairs,” Cultivator 1 (April 1834): 31.

  [>] “free negroes”: Quoted in “Cobbett on the Expenses of House- Keeping in America,” The American Farmer 6, no. 16 (July 9, 1824): 123.

  [>] “highly-seasoned flesh-meat”: Quoted in Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Greenwood Press, 1980), 34.

  [>] “overload[ed] the stomach”: Cincinnati Mirror, November 26, 1831, p. 35.

  [>] “beyond all question”: Jno. Stainback Wilson, “Health Department,” Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine 60 (February 1860): 178.

  [>] “excessive use of fat”: Jno. Stainback Wilson, “Health Department,” Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine 57 (November 1858): 372.

  [>] “Eastern demand”: “Meats, Milk, and Fruits,” New York Times, May 25, 1852, p. 2.

  [>] “great law of the movement”: Silas L. Loomis, “Distribution and Movement of Neat Cattle in the United States,” Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1863 (Government Printing Office, 1863), 259; emphasis in original. Also published as HR Ex. Doc. no. 91, 38th Cong., 1st sess.

  [>] “western”: Charles W. Taylor, “Importance of Raising and Feeding More Cattle and Sheep,” Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1864 (Government Printing Office, 1865), 255. Also published as HR Ex. Doc. no. 68, 38th Cong., 2d sess.

  [>] “as literally to blacken”: Quoted in William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), 215.

  [>] “Why”: Quoted in Scott Michael Kleeb, “The Atlantic West: Cowboys, Capitalists and the Making of an American Myth” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2006), 88.

  [>] “long-legged”: “New-York Cattle Market,” New York Tribune, July 4, 1854, p. 8.

  [>] “Stampeded last night”: “Driving Cattle from Texas to Iowa, 1866,” Annals of Iowa 14, no. 4 (April 1924): 252, 253.

  [>] “contented to live quietly”: Joseph G. McCoy, “Historic and Biographic Sketch,” Kansas Magazine 1 (December 1909): 49. For a marvelous appreciation of McCoy, see Don D. Walker, “History Through a Cow’s Horn: Joseph G. McCoy and His Historical Sketches of the Cattle Trade,” in Clio’s Cowboys: Studies in the Historiography of the Cattle Trade (University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 1–24.

  [>] “establish a market”: Joseph G. McCoy, Historical Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest, ed. Ralph P. Bieber (1874; reprint, Arthur H. Clark Company, 1940), 112.

  [>] “a man of hasty temper”: C. F. Gross to J. B. Edwards, May 4, 1925, J. B. Edwards Collection, microfilm version, Kansas State Historical Society.

  [>] “log huts”: Quoted in Ralph P. Bieber, “Introduction,” in Joseph G. McCoy, Historical Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest (1874; reprint, Arthur H. Clark Company, 1940), 58.

  [>] “Texas fever”: In the 1860s, theories abounded about the cause of Texas fever, but another quarter-century passed before veterinarians discovered the source of the disease: microscopic organisms that attacked the animals’ blood cells. Ticks spread the disease from one animal to another.

  [>] “to stop the drover”: McCoy, Historical Sketches, 96.

  [>] “only the one place”: Thomas Dove Foster to John Morrell, March 9, 1875; Box 1, Morrell Meat Packing Company Collection, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

  [>] “great facilities”: Quoted in Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860 (1925; reprint, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1941), 399.

  [>] “The number of swine
”: Quoted in ibid., 439.

  [>] The numbers were stark: Statistics are in William P. McDermott, “Rushing the Milk Train: The Harlem Valley in Transition, 1845–1875,” Hudson Valley Regional Review 18, no. 1 (March 2001): 36.

  [>] “was a business that moved itself”: New York State Legislature, Special Committee on Railroads, Proceedings of the Special Committee on Railroads (Evening Post Steam Presses, 1879–1880), vol. 4, p. 3317. The report is often referred to as the Hepburn Report, after committee chair A. B. Hepburn.

  [>] “this butcher and that”: Ibid., vol. 4, p. 3318.

  [>] “The more you can concentrate”: Ibid., vol. 2, p. 1727.

  2. “We Are Here to Make Money”

  [>] “abominable nuisances”: “Dressed Beef,” New York Times, November 15, 1882, p. 4. The description of the facility is in “A Huge Meat Refrigerator,” New York Times, October 10, 1882, p. 8.

  [>] “trying to force their beef”: Quoted in “Dressed Beef and Live Cattle,” New York Times, November 15, 1882, p. 5.

  [>] “sharks”: Quoted in “Western Dressed Beef,” Boston Globe, November 23, 1882, p. 1.

  [>] “gigantic fortunes”: Quoted in “The Fresh-Beef War,” Boston Herald, November 14, 1882, p. 11. Swift made the comments about his early days as a cattle dealer at a moment when the railroads threatened to retaliate. Swift is not identified by name in this article, but it’s clear from details in it that the reporter was interviewing Swift and a partner, presumably his brother Edwin.