In Meat We Trust

by Maureen Ogle

  [>] “political and culinary appeal”: Kim Severson, “Grass Roots Revolution—Will New Beef Put Corn-Raised Cattle out to Pasture?” San Francisco Chronicle, June 19, 2002; accessed online.

  [>] “add[ed] in the invisible costs”: Michael Pollan, “Power Steer,” New York Times Magazine, March 31, 2002; accessed online.

  [>] “As you know”: Quoted in Kim Severson, “High Stakes—Bay Area at the Forefront of the Big-Bucks Battle Between Proponents of Grass-Fed Beef and Traditional Cattlemen,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 19, 2002; accessed online.

  [>] “People want to imagine”: Quoted in ibid.

  [>] “prominent”: Milford Prewitt, “Chefs Challenge Peers to Serve Grass-Fed Beef,” Nation’s Restaurant News, May 20, 2002, p. 3.

  [>] “ironic”: Quoted in ibid., 235.

  [>] “nanny culture”: Ibid.

  [>] “a haughty organization”: Quoted in ibid.

  [>] “We are an elitist”: Quoted in ibid.

  [>] “I consciously deferred”: Quoted in Stacy Finz, “Founder Says New Owners Changing Product Protocol,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 22, 2009; accessed online.

  [>] Then there was: It’s clear that The Omnivore’s Dilemma, like The Jungle and Silent Spring, was less launching pad than tipping point. It resonated with a public accustomed to asserting its consumer rights and to the allure of alternative foods, whether meat or arugula. But there’s no doubt that it also energized a new generation of food activists and converted millions of otherwise indifferent consumers into organic aficionados.

  [>] “The Easter holiday”: See “Letters,” Lancaster (PA) Intelligencer Journal, March 28, 2002. I found many examples of these form letters, including ones sent on the occasion of World Farm Animals Day, October 2, also the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi.

  [>] “Nothing [is] more heartbreaking”: Steve Moest, “Why Pork Producers Do What They Do,” Freeport (IL) Journal-Standard, May 6, 2012; accessed online.

  Bibliography

  Five minutes into this project, I realized that its potential bibliography was approximately the size of the known universe and that I could spend the next decade doing nothing but wading through primary sources—newspapers and magazines, meatpacking and agricultural trade journals, congressional hearings, USDA reports, various other federal, state, and city government documents, and the like. And that didn’t include an equally stupefying quantity of secondary sources: what other historians as well as sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, and random writers had written about cattle, hogs, chickens, slaughterhouses, ranching and ranchers, feedlots, food retailing, veterinary medicine, vegetarianism, and a nerve-shattering collection of other topics more or less related to meat.

  Conclusion: Trying to read every relevant source was a fool’s game. Nor, I soon realized, could I include everything that I read in this bibliography; a full list would run to hundreds of pages and my editors would hate me. What follows, then, is the rational middle ground: a bibliography of primary and secondary sources that I found to be the most useful. (Many additional sources, however, are cited in the notes.)

  As a historian, I focus on primary documents; I want to find out for myself “what happened,” rather than another historian’s interpretation of what happened. That meant that I read thousands of primary documents. Rather than detail each one (another fool’s errand), I’ve instead identified the databases and catalogs from which I drew sources, as well as the titles of the most important newspapers on which I relied and serials that are not indexed in the databases.

  Note: Most of the databases listed are attached to digital indexes, but the magazines, journals, and documents to which those indexes refer are not necessarily digitized. This project involved hours of communing with microfilm and microfiche machines.

  DATABASES AND CATALOGS

  19th Century Historical United States Newspapers

  19th Century Masterfile

  ABI/INFORM Global

  Access World News

  Accessible Archives

  Agricola

  Alt-Press Watch

  American Historical Imprints

  American Periodical Series (digital and microfilm)

  Archive Finder

  Catalog of U.S. Government Publications

  Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CORE)

  Early American Imprints

  Early American Newspapers

  Early American Periodicals

  EBSCOhost

  genealogybank.com

  HarpWeek

  Hathi Trust Digital Library

  Home Economics Archive:

  Research, Tradition, History (HEARTH)

  Index to USDA Agricultural Economic Reports

  Index to USDA Agriculture Information Bulletins

  Making of America

  National Agricultural Library

  newspaperarchive.com

  ProQuest Congressional

  ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

  Readers’ Guide Retrospective

  WorldCat

  PERIODICALS AND NEWSPAPERS

  Alternative Agriculture News

  American Egg and Poultry Review

  American Poultry Advocate

  American Poultry Journal

  Boston Globe

  Chicago Tribune

  Des Moines Register

  Farm Journal

  Farm Quarterly

  Feedstuffs

  Godey’s Lady’s Book

  Meat and Live Stock Digest

  Milwaukee Sentinel

  National Hog Farmer

  National Provisioner

  New York Produce Review and American Creamery

  New York Times

  Poultry Science

  Reliable Poultry Journal

  Successful Farming

  Wallaces Farmer

  Wall Street Journal

  Washington Post

  OTHER PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES

  Ackerman, Michael. “Interpreting the Newer Knowledge of Nutrition: Science, Interests, and Values in the Making of Dietary Advice in the United States, 1915–1965.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2005.

  Aduddell, Robert, and Louis Cain. “The Consent Decree in the Meatpacking Industry, 1920–1956.” Business History Review 55, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 359–78.

  ———. “Location and Collusion in the Meat Packing Industry.” In Business Enterprise and Economic Change: Essays in Honor of Harold F. Williamson, edited by Louis P. Cain and Paul J. Uselding, 85–117. The Kent State University Press, 1973.

  ———. “Public Policy Toward ‘The Greatest Trust in the World.’” Business History Review 55, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 217–42.

  Allen, Patricia. “Reweaving the Food Security Safety Net: Mediating Entitlement and Entrepreneurship.” Agriculture and Human Values 16, no. 2 (June 1999): 117–29.

  ———. “Sustainability and Sustenance: The Politics of Sustainable Agriculture and Community Food Security.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California–Santa Cruz, 1998.

  ———. Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

  Allen, Patricia, ed. Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability. John Wiley & Sons, 1993.

  Amstutz, David Lee. “Nebraska’s Live Stock Sanitary Commission and the Rise of American Progressivism.” Great Plains Quarterly 28, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 259–75.

  Anderson, E. N. Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture. New York University Press, 2005.

  Anderson, Jay Allan. “‘A Solid Sufficiency’: An Ethnography of Yeoman Foodways in Stuart England.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1971.

  ———. Industrializing the Corn Belt: Agriculture, Technology, and Environment, 1945–1972. Northern Illinois University Press, 2009.

  ———. “Lard to Lean: Making the Meat-Type Hog in Post-World War II America.” In Food Chains: From Farmyard to
Shopping Cart, edited by Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz, 29–46. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

  Anderson, Molly D., and John T. Cook. “Community Food Security: Practice in Need of Theory?” Agriculture and Human Values 16, no. 2 (June 1999): 141–50.

  Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. Oxford University Press, 2004.

  Apple, Rima D. Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture. Rutgers University Press, 1996.

  Appleby, Joyce. “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic.” Journal of American History 68 (March 1982): 833–49.

  Arnould, Richard J. “Changing Patterns of Concentration in American Meat Packing, 1880–1963.” Business History Review 45, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 18–34.

  Aronson, Naomi. “Nutrition as a Social Problem: A Case Study of Entrepreneurial Strategy in Science.” Social Problems 29, no. 5 (June 1982): 474–87.

  ———. “Social Definitions of Entitlement: Food Needs, 1885–1920.” Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 51–61.

  Arthur, Anthony. Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair. Random House, 2006.

  Atkinson, Eva Lash. “Kansas City’s Livestock Trade and Packing Industry, 1870–1914: A Study in Regional Growth.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas, 1971.

  Backer, Kellen. “World War II and the Triumph of Industrialized Food.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2012.

  Baker, Andrew H., and Holly V. Izard. “New England Farmers and the Marketplace, 1780–1865: A Case Study.” Agricultural History 65 (Summer 1991): 29–52.

  Baker, Andrew H., and Holly Izard Paterson. “Farmers’ Adaptations to Market in Early-Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts.” In The Farm; The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife: Annual Proceedings 1986, edited by Peter Benes, Jane Montague Benes, and Ross W. Beales. Boston University, 1988.

  Barham, Mary Elizabeth. “Sustainable Agriculture in the United States and France: A Polanyian Perspective.” Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1999.

  Barkema, Alan, and Michael L. Cook. “The Changing U.S. Pork Industry: A Dilemma for Public Policy.” Economic Review 78, no. 2 (Second Quarter 1993): 49–65.

  Barnett, L. Margaret. “‘Every Man His Own Physician’: Dietetic Fads, 1890–1914.” In The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840–1940, edited by Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham, 155–78. Rodopi, 1995.

  Barnhart, Walt. Kenny’s Shoes: A Walk Through the Storied Life of the Remarkable Kenneth W. Monfort. Infinity Publishing, 2008.

  Beal, Thomas David. “Selling Gotham: The Retail Trade in New York City from the Public Market to Alexander T. Stewart’s Marble Palace, 1625–1860.” Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York–Stony Brook, 1998.

  Beeman, Randall S., and James A. Pritchard. A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century. University Press of Kansas, 2001.

  Beers, Diane L. For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States. Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2006.

  Belasco, Warren J. Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry. 2d ed. Cornell University Press, 2007.

  ———. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food. University of California Press, 2006.

  Belasco, Warren, and Roger Horowitz, eds. Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

  Belden, Joe, Gibby Edwards, Cynthia Guyer, and Lee Webb. New Directions in Farm, Land and Food Policies: A Time for State and Local Action. Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies, Agriculture Project, [1979].

  Belden, Joe, and Gregg Forte. Toward a National Food Policy. Exploratory Project for Economic Alternatives, 1976.

  Bellows, Anne C., and Michael W. Hamm. “U.S.-Based Community Food Security: Influences, Practice, Debate.” Journal for the Study of Food and Society 6, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 31–44.

  Benjamin, Gary L. “Industrialization in Hog Production: Implications for Midwest Agriculture.” Economic Perspectives 21, no. 1 (January/February 1997): 2–13.

  Berry, Jeffrey M. “Consumers and the Hunger Lobby.” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 34, no. 3 (1982): 68–78.

  ———. Lobbying for the People: The Political Behavior of Public Interest Groups. Princeton University Press, 1977.

  Beus, Curtis E., and Riley E. Dunlap. “Conventional Versus Alternative Agriculture: The Paradigmatic Roots of the Debate.” Rural Sociology 55, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 590–616.

  Bidwell, Percy Wells, and John I. Falconer. History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860. 1925. Reprint, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1941.

  Bieber, Ralph P. “Introduction.” In Joseph G. McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest, edited by Ralph P. Bieber, 17–68. 1874. Reprint, Arthur H. Clark Company, 1940.

  Blum, Joseph A. “South San Francisco: The Making of an Industrial City.” California History 63 (Spring 1984): 114–34.

  Bonanno, Alessandro, and Douglas H. Constance. “Corporations and the State in the Global Era: The Case of Seaboard Farms and Texas.” Rural Sociology 71, no. 1 (2006): 59–84.

  ———. “Mega Hog Farms in the Texas Panhandle Region: Corporate Actions and Local Resistance.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 22 (2000): 83–110.

  Bonnen, James T., William P. Browne, and David B. Schweikhardt. “Further Observations on the Changing Nature of National Agricultural Policy Decision Processes, 1946–1995.” Agricultural History 70, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 130–52.

  Bosso, Christopher J. Pesticides and Politics: The Life Cycle of a Public Issue. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987.

  Boston, Massachusetts. City Document no. 74. Report on the Sale of Bad Meat in Boston. N.p., [1871].

  Bovee, David. “The Church and the Land: The National Catholic Rural Life Conference and American Society, 1923–1985.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1986.

  Bowen, Joanne. “A Comparative Analysis of the New England and Chesapeake Herding Systems.” In Historical Archaeology of the Chesapeake, edited by Paul A. Shackel and Barbara J. Little, 155–67. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.

  ———. “A Study of Seasonality and Subsistence: Eighteenth-Century Suffield, Connecticut.” Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1990.

  Boyd, William. “Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production.” Technology and Culture 42, no. 4 (October 2001): 631–64.

  Boyd, William, and Michael Watts. “Agro-Industrial Just-in-Time: The Chicken Industry and Postwar American Capitalism.” In Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring, edited by David Goodman and Michael Watts, 192–225. Routledge, 1997.

  [Bradley, Cyrus P.] “Journal of Cyrus P. Bradley.” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications 15 (1906): 207–70.

  Bradley, Karen J. “Agrarian Ideology and Agricultural Policy: California Grangers and the Post-World War II Farm Policy Debate.” Agricultural History 69, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 240–56.

  Bradley, Linda J., and Barbara D. Merino. “Stuart Chase: A Radical CPA and the Meat Packing Investigation, 1917–1918.” Business and Economic History 23, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 190–200.

  Braeman, John. “The Square Deal in Action: A Case Study in the Growth of the ‘National Police Power.’” In Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America, edited by John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and Everett Walters, 35–80. Ohio State University Press, 1964.

  Brantz, Dorothee. “Slaughter in the City: The Establishment of Public Abattoirs in Paris and Berlin, 1780–1914.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2003.

  Breitbach, Carrie. “Changing Landscapes of Social Reproduction in South Dakota: Restructuring the Cattle Beef Industry.” Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, 2006.

  Brinkley, Douglas. The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America. HarperCollins, 20
09.

  Broadway, Michael J., and Donald D. Stull. “‘I’ll Do Whatever You Want, but It Hurts’: Worker Safety and Community Health in Modern Meatpacking.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 5, no. 2 (2008): 27–37.

  ———. “The Wages of Food Factories.” Food & Foodways 18, no. 1/2 (2010): 43–65.

  Brody, David. The Butcher Workmen: A Study of Unionization. Harvard University Press, 1964.

  Brooks, Richard David. “Cattle Ranching in Colonial South Carolina: A Case Study in History and Archaeology of the Lazarus/Catherina Brown Cowpen.” Master’s thesis, University of South Carolina, 1988.

  Brown, Ralph H. Historical Geography of the United States. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948.

  Browne, William P. “Challenging Industrialization: The Rekindling of Agrarian Protest in a Modern Agriculture, 1977–1987.” Studies in American Political Development 7 (Spring 1993): 1–34.

  ———. Cultivating Congress: Constituents, Issues, and Interests in Agricultural Policymaking. University Press of Kansas, 1995.

  ———. Private Interests, Public Policy, and American Agriculture. University Press of Kansas, 1988.

  Bugos, Glenn E. “Intellectual Property Protection in the American Chicken-Breeding Industry.” Business History Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 127–68.

  Buhr, Brian Lee. “Economic Impacts of Growth Promotants in the Beef, Pork, and Poultry Industries.” Ph.D. dissertation, Iowa State University, 1992.

  Burnett, Edmund Cody. “Hog Raising and Hog Driving in the Region of the French Broad River.” Agricultural History 20 (April 1946): 86–103.

  Burnett, Paul. “The Visible Land: Agricultural Economics, US Export Agriculture, and International Development, 1918–65.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2008.