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#12 Meat Part 2: America’s Dressed Beef Destiny
So far in the story of America's Food Culture, there has been no turning the majority of the population away from a gustatory lust for beef. In the 19th Century, that regard for locally butchered red meat created unhealthy cesspools in heavily trafficked urban areas and polluted drinking water. At the same time, it drove the creation of a hugely capital-intensive railroad system designed largely for the transport of beef-on-the-hoof. That culinary culture also gave us a distribution system controlled by the owners of rolling stock. If you wanted to sell beef, you had to play by the railroad magnates' rules.
Swift improved on early versions of refrigerated railcars. This model derailed frequently as the carcasses swung from side to side on curves. The cooling was uneven and the meat often spoiled.
Gustavus Swift
Gustavus Swift (1839-1903), a young cattle broker, spent a few months in the Chicago Union Stockyards and saw a system ripe for disruption. Why move whole cattle from the Midwest to eastern urban centers? Only about 65% of a whole steer becomes a carcass, and of that only about 65% becomes edible beef (the rest is fat trim and bone). (See iGrow.)
Working conditions in the Union Stockyards--exposed by Uption Sinclair's The Jungle--prompted federal regulation to control meat processing.
Swift, another vertical integrator, centralized and industrialized the slaughter of beef in Chicago. He then devised a system of refrigerated rail cars that delivered dressed beef to butchers in urban centers. He designed his own rail infrastructure (making an end run around entrenched interests who refused to work with him). And he taught local butchers how to offer his dressed beef to consumers through new modes of retail marketing.
His marketing genius hit on predatory pricing to overcome consumer resistance to a new way of buying beef. He derived the bulk of his fortune by processing meat byproducts in a centralized location, which concomitantly reduced the waste and pollution of his slaughtering operations.
Efficient as were Swift's "disassembly" plants in Chicago, they were also rife with food-system abuses. Everything from rodents, feces, and even the occasional worker's finger went into sausages and other ground products. These abuses, as well as abysmal working conditions, were exposed in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, published in 1906, which led to the formation of the Food and Drug Administration and greater focus on food safety.
By removing the ambience of slaughter from daily life for most American's, Swift (and his Meat Trust cohort, including Armour & Morris) pushed consumers a giant step away from the source of one of their primary nutritional items. Industrialized food became the norm in American foodways.
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So far in the story of America's Food Culture, there has been no turning the majority of the population away from a gustatory lust for beef. In the 19th Century, that regard for locally butchered red meat created unhealthy cesspools in heavily trafficked urban areas and polluted drinking water. At the same time, it drove the creation of a hugely capital-intensive railroad system designed largely for the transport of beef-on-the-hoof. That culinary culture also gave us a distribution system controlled by the owners of rolling stock. If you wanted to sell beef, you had to play by the railroad magnates' rules.
Swift improved on early versions of refrigerated railcars. This model derailed frequently as the carcasses swung from side to side on curves. The cooling was uneven and the meat often spoiled.
Gustavus Swift
Gustavus Swift (1839-1903), a young cattle broker, spent a few months in the Chicago Union Stockyards and saw a system ripe for disruption. Why move whole cattle from the Midwest to eastern urban centers? Only about 65% of a whole steer becomes a carcass, and of that only about 65% becomes edible beef (the rest is fat trim and bone). (See iGrow.)
Working conditions in the Union Stockyards--exposed by Uption Sinclair's The Jungle--prompted federal regulation to control meat processing.
Swift, another vertical integrator, centralized and industrialized the slaughter of beef in Chicago. He then devised a system of refrigerated rail cars that delivered dressed beef to butchers in urban centers. He designed his own rail infrastructure (making an end run around entrenched interests who refused to work with him). And he taught local butchers how to offer his dressed beef to consumers through new modes of retail marketing.
His marketing genius hit on predatory pricing to overcome consumer resistance to a new way of buying beef. He derived the bulk of his fortune by processing meat byproducts in a centralized location, which concomitantly reduced the waste and pollution of his slaughtering operations.
Efficient as were Swift's "disassembly" plants in Chicago, they were also rife with food-system abuses. Everything from rodents, feces, and even the occasional worker's finger went into sausages and other ground products. These abuses, as well as abysmal working conditions, were exposed in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, published in 1906, which led to the formation of the Food and Drug Administration and greater focus on food safety.
By removing the ambience of slaughter from daily life for most American's, Swift (and his Meat Trust cohort, including Armour & Morris) pushed consumers a giant step away from the source of one of their primary nutritional items. Industrialized food became the norm in American foodways.