Despite all these virtues, however, the pig did have one main disadvantage that limited its commercial prospects: Unlike cattle, swine are hard, if not impossible, to drive for long distances. Hogs were thus slaughtered in many small-scale packinghouses scattered across mid-nineteenth-century America. The plants in Cincinnati were the only exception. Situated near where several rivers join the Ohio and benefiting from the Miami and Erie Canal, opened in 1827, Cincinnati emerged by the 1830s as the nation’s leader in pork packing. The city managed to tap the rich agricultural resources of the Ohio valley so successfully that it eventually became known as Porkopolis.3
Cincinnati’s pork packers took the first steps in streamlining meat production. Long before Henry Ford employed the assembly line for mass-producing cars, Porkopolis packers pioneered a method for slaughtering animals in large numbers. By hanging pigs from a rotating wheel, workers were able to efficiently gut the animal before sending it on to the chopping table, where butchers would finish the job of cutting the meat and packing it off to market. “No iron cog-wheels could work with more regular motion,” wrote landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted on a visit to the city in the 1850s. “Plump falls the hog upon the table, chop, chop; chop chop; chop, chop, fall the cleavers. All is over.” Thus was born the “disassembly line” for the mass slaughtering of livestock.4
Exactly how much pork Americans produced in the nineteenth century is difficult to say. But a conservative estimate places production in 1849 at 139 pounds per capita, declining to 119 pounds 40 years later. By that time, the grasslands of the Great Plains had been opened for settlement, and beef had begun to take on a larger role in the American diet.5
In the 1850s, the area west of the Mississippi River, save for eastern Texas and the very western extreme of California, was largely a cattle-free zone. Over the next 50 years, however, bovines increased dramatically; they rose from 15 million in 1870 to 35 million in 1900. Once the buffalo had been driven to the brink of extinction, cattle filed into their former eco-niches. There was only one problem. Population growth in the West did not keep pace with cattle’s rise to dominance. In 1880, more than half the nation’s cattle resided west of the Mississippi, in an area with less than a quarter of the American population. How to get the cattle protein into the stomachs of people in the populous East became a problem in desperate need of a solution.6
Cattle drovers and later the railroad emerged to help resolve this dilemma. But the perishability of beef, which, unlike pork, did not lend itself as well to salting or smoking, meant that the animals had to be slaughtered near where they would be consumed. Before the end of the nineteenth century, beef packing remained in the hands of local butchers, who ran small-scale operations to serve their communities.7
The advent of refrigeration, however, revolutionized the beef-packing industry. Efforts to develop a refrigerated railroad car began in the 1850s, but only late the following decade was a car with enough cold air circulation developed to carry a load of dressed beef (cleaned animal carcasses) between Chicago and Boston. The legendary Gustavus F. Swift later hired an engineer to improve the refrigerated railroad car, enhancements that would soon make his cars the most popular among the nation’s major beef producers.8
By the 1880s, the slaughter and marketing of beef evolved from a local business handled by neighborhood butchers into a national industry dominated by major meatpacking centers such as Chicago, Kansas City, and St. Louis. A handful of companies, Swift and Armour the most prominent, emerged to capture the newly industrialized meatpacking trade. In the 1880s, these companies began building branch houses across the nation, cold-storage facilities that received the dressed beef from packinghouses and distributed it to grocers, who marketed it to consumers. In 1887, the five largest packinghouses had just a few branch houses in operation. Ten years later, however, the companies had 20 plants and roughly 600 branch houses for distributing their product. Meat now traveled in refrigerated railroad cars from the Midwest as far as California.9
The national trade in dressed beef, however, did have its critics. Railroads, which had previously invested large sums of money in building stock cars for transporting animals, were among the first to object. The railroad companies also believed they would lose money as the lighter dressed beef replaced the considerably heavier live cattle. Butchers, meanwhile, feared for their jobs, as the new meatpacking industry took over the role of slaughtering, improving on the disassembly line originally developed for pork. In 1886, the meat cutters assembled to form the Butcher’s National Protective Association, an organization that tried to undermine consumer confidence in dressed beef by warning that it was unsanitary.10
The most famous critic of meatpacking was journalist Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel, The Jungle, included vivid descriptions of the horrific conditions found in meatpacking plants. “It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.” President Theodore Roosevelt read the book and wasted no time in dispatching federal investigators to Chicago to learn more about the industry’s filthy conditions, information that was then used to pressure Congress into passing legislation (the 1906 Meat Inspection Act) mandating sanitary workplace conditions for those companies engaged in the interstate meat trade.11
MARKET ROOM
Cattle carcasses, also known as dressed beef, were stored in large rooms cooled with ice, like the one shown in this late-nineteenth-century Chicago packinghouse. The meat was then shipped to butchers, who cut it up for sale to consumers. (Chicago Historical Society)
Sinclair’s book proved upsetting to people accustomed to purchasing meat from trusted local butchers. But if they were disgusted by conditions at the faraway packinghouses, consumers also must have found it hard to resist the lower prices that the meat-packers offered. When a steer was slaughtered, only a little more than half of its live weight could be cut up into usable meat for sale. The other 45 percent of the steer was wasted, as was the cost of shipping it. With dressed meat, however, packers transported a far higher percentage of usable beef, lowering their transportation costs and allowing them to pass some of the savings on to consumers. Meat-packers also encouraged their distributors to slice the dressed beef up into a variety of cuts and to do everything possible to enhance its appearance, in order to lure consumers into buying more on impulse.12
By World War I, meatpacking had diffused across the Great Plains. Chicago still led the nation in production, followed by Kansas City, Omaha, and St. Louis. The so-called Big Five meat-packers accounted for roughly half of all red meat produced in the United States. The giants controlled about 90 percent of all the branch houses, assuming almost complete dominance in some markets. Nearly all the beef distributed in New York City, for example, came from the Big Five.13
Ironically, Sinclair’s novel, by drawing attention to the unsanitary environment in the factories and sparking a legislative initiative, helped to restore the public’s confidence in meat, and thus laid the groundwork for the industry’s eventual success. And yet, Sinclair actually set out not to indict meat but to alert people to the brutal labor conditions present in the plants. What mainly concerned him was the plight of immigrant laborers, who worked at high speeds and had to contend with new production technologies that he compared to “the thumbscrew of the medieval torture chamber.” The new corporate slaughterhouses dehumanized workers and made them indifferent to the fast-paced killing of living creatures. “It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.”14
FAT IS KING
Before a steer made its trip from the plains grasslands to the stockyard for slaughter, it made one last stop. After cattle had been allowed to graze on the western range for a period of years, they journeyed to Iowa o
r Illinois. There a stock feeder purchased them and briefly fattened the animals on corn before shipping them off to the meat-packers. A symbiotic relationship emerged between the grasslands and the Corn Belt. The former reared cattle; the latter fattened them in preparation for slaughter. Grasslands and feedlots combined to produce the fat-laced beef that meat-packers found easiest to sell to consumers.15
Prior to the Civil War, stock feeders waited until steers were five or six years old before finishing them on grain and shipping them to market. But by the latter part of the nineteenth century, they could no longer be bothered with the five-year wait. Land was expensive in Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois, where the feedlot grew to dominance, and to make the land pay, stock feeders felt pressured to purchase young steers—two years old—and to fatten them quickly on corn. The speedup allowed for a far more intensive and profitable use of their property.16
By the late nineteenth century, feedlots gained in popularity in the Midwest and, in the process, allowed the meatpacking industry to further indulge consumers with fat-laden beef. When slaughtered, cattle finished on feedlot corn were fatter than animals raised on grass alone. But it took large amounts of grain to produce relatively small amounts of protein.
When the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA; established in 1862 under Lincoln) created its beef grading system in 1927, it further solidified the grip that fatty meat had over the American diet. Under the USDA guidelines, the higher the fat content, the better the beef quality. By giving marbled beef its stamp of approval, the government increased pressure on stockmen to feed cattle as much grain as possible to yield the most profitable product. The new quality grades also helped to institutionalize the feedlot and made raising livestock a more factory-oriented enterprise.
Feedlots became even more central to animal agriculture after World War II, when the development of aluminum irrigation pipe and hybrid varieties of sorghum transformed the southern plains into the nation’s major feed grain region. The genetic enhancement of sorghum, a major source of animal feed, allowed the crop to tolerate the closely spaced plantings found on irrigated farms. It also helped the crop adapt nicely to the high doses of nitrogen-based fertilizer widely employed after the war. Using knowledge gained from the wartime production of explosives, manufacturers made an inexpensive new breed of fertilizers that freed farmers from the task of growing clover and alfalfa hay. In the past, cattle and sheep were fed these grasses and their manure was spread over fields to supply it with the nitrogen that corn, wheat, and other crops took from the soil. With the advent of artificially produced fertilizers, however, farmers had even more freedom to specialize in either the crop or the animal end of the business.17
Cattle once played a role in a diversified farming regime that integrated animals and crops. Stock produced the manure for carrying nutrients back to soils depleted by raising corn or wheat. But as occurred earlier in the city, the feedlot broke the manure and crop cycle and instead transformed cattle into virtual machines for channeling grain into fat. Cattle went from being valuable carriers of nutrients and solar energy, the lifeblood of the farm system, into half-ton fat factories.
SPEEDUP
Despite these innovations at the packing plant and feedlot, it took time for beef to outdistance pork for dominance over the national palate. As late as 1950, pork still had the edge, with Americans consuming about six pounds more pig than cow per person. What happened to make beef the centerpiece of the U.S. diet?18
To begin with, a number of important changes on feedlots further streamlined beef production. In 1935, only about five percent of the nation’s more than 40 million beef cattle were fed grain. But after World War II, giant feedlots sprung up to capitalize on the demand for high-quality cuts of meat. Grocery chains, such as Safeway Stores, sought prime cuts of beef to cater to more affluent and discriminating consumers. Since cattle fed only on grass could not make the grade, massive feedlots stepped in to serve this emerging market. Some of these operations, such as the Texas County Feedlot, built in Oklahoma in 1965, handled as many as 50,000 animals a year. Many of the feedlots made the Great Plains their home, eventually drawing the meat-packers with them.19
By the postwar period, the calves sent to feedlots were more likely to have been raised on planted pasture than allowed to roam freely over the public range as in the past. After reaching a weight of 400 pounds, the animals were then sold to feedlots, where they doubled in weight in as little as four months—a big improvement over the time it once took to finish cattle for slaughter. A number of factors helped to shorten the fattening process. First, beginning in the 1950s, stock raisers began using feeds laced with antibiotics. The steady dose of medicine promoted growth and also gave farmers the ability to confine massive numbers of animals—not just cattle, but pigs and chickens as well—together without the worry of contagious diseases. The use of antibiotic feed additives skyrocketed, increasing from 490,000 pounds in 1954 to some 1.2 million pounds in 1960 to roughly 9 million pounds in the mid-1980s. By the 1990s, animals consumed 30 times the amount of antibiotics used by human beings.20
A second factor that helped to propel weight gain was the development of the synthetic hormone DES (diethylstilbestrol). Discovered in the 1930s, DES, an artificial form of estrogen, promoted growth, increasing the weight of steers from 15 to 19 percent. By the 1950s, DES was commonly employed on feedlots. Feedlot managers had grown so attached to the drug that when its use was finally banned in 1979 because of the dangers it posed to human health, they ignored the prohibition and continued to implant animals—some 427,275 cattle alone—with it.21
While antibiotics and hormone therapy shortened the time cattle spent on the feedlot, another set of changes hastened the slaughtering process. Technologically speaking, there had been relatively little change on the killing floors of packing plants between 1930 and 1960. Then, in the 1960s, a host of new instruments—stunners, hide skinners, electric knives, and power saws—increased productivity in meatpacking by nearly 50 percent.22
A new generation of firms arose—the old Big Five had been hobbled by federal antitrust actions—to take advantage of the technological changes revolutionizing beef production. Chicago, Kansas City, and St. Louis, once the major packing centers, gave way to new plants built in Denison, Iowa; Dakota City, Nebraska; Holcomb, Kansas; and elsewhere on the Great Plains near the giant feedlots—cutting down on transportation costs. Iowa Beef Packers (IBP), founded in 1960, emerged as the most innovative of the new generation of firms. Over the course of the next 20 years, the company constructed factories in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Texas, and Kansas. In 1981, it built a 14-acre meat plant in Holcomb, a state-of-the-art facility that then ranked as the largest slaughterhouse in the world.23
But the company’s greatest innovation was the “boxed beef” concept. In 1967, the company took the earlier dressed beef idea one step further: It began wrapping beef in individual packages instead of shipping entire carcasses. If it was more efficient to ship sides of beef, as opposed to live animals, it was even more profitable to load trucks and railroad cars with tightly fitting boxes. “A side of beef has an awkward shape—it can’t be neatly packed, and a side has a lot of bone and trim that will never go into the meat case,” explained one IBP executive. “It was logical to move to boxed beef.” It was not long before the operators of feedlots insisted on buying cattle with a uniform size, weight, and genetic stock so that when cut they would fit nicely into a box. Boxed beef saved on transportation costs and also allowed supermarkets to rid themselves of many highly paid butchers, with IBP shipping a product cut specifically for the retail trade.24
In 1970, the company changed its name from Iowa Beef Packers to Iowa Beef Processors to reflect the streamlining of its slaughtering operation. By using capital-intensive technology to simplify and speed up the killing and cutting of animals, IBP was able to employ cheap, immigrant labor, often people of Mexican or Laotian descent. As IBP’s chief executive officer put it in 1980, “We’re prou
d of our workers, but basically we can teach anybody to do a job in our plant in 30 days or less—they don’t need the skills of an old-time butcher who had to know how to cut up a whole carcass.” The disassembly line, with its chutes, chains, and conveyor belts, moved so quickly that in one IBP plant workers were reportedly denied bathroom breaks. Others resorted to taking methamphetamines. The pace of the line has made meatpacking today one of America’s most dangerous trades, with approximately 43,000 workers reported injured or ill every year. Working conditions at U.S. slaughterhouses, one food expert recently observed, are “now clearly more dangerous and debilitating than at any time since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle” in 1906. Conveniently, the states hosting the nation’s largest feedlots were also ones that tended to be solidly anti-union.25
By 1980, IBP had become the leading boxed beef processor in the nation, slaughtering 5.7 million cattle in its 10 plants. Behind it were other giants, Cargill and ConAgra, who also championed the new, neater trend in packaging. In 1976, Americans were consuming nearly 130 pounds of beef per person, more than double the amount they ate in 1950. The sudden and enormous rise in beef-eating, however, was not simply the result of developments in feedlots and packinghouses. Cultural changes in how and where Americans went about eating that beef also played an important role.26
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