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Meat Packing

Since its origins in the 19th century, the meatpacking industry has used the technologies of mass production and refrigerated transport to increase popular access to animal protein. Nevertheless, the variability of live animals and their rapid deterioration after slaughter slowed the application of industrial techniques and led ultimately to significant changes in the taste and healthfulness of meat. Humans have salted and smoked meats to slow decay since ancient times, and rules governing the industry have been a focus of religious and civic authorities. Medieval butchers guilds, for example, regulated the preparation of a wide range of sausage, hams, and fresh meats. Early modern urbanization in Europe encouraged a continental trade in livestock, which expanded further in the 19th century with railroad and steamship transport. Bringing live animals to market, however, posed significant pollution problems and also spread diseases such as pleuropneumonia, bovine tuberculosis, and foot-and-mouth disease.

The growth of industrial packing in stock-raising regions promised to increase urban meat supplies while avoiding these drawbacks. The transformation began in Cincinnati about 1830 with the large-scale slaughter of hogs from throughout the Ohio River Valley. Packers devised an efficient division of labor, employing teams of specialized workers, each of whom performed a single, repetitive task, cutting away a ham or a side of bacon, until the hog vanished completely at the end of this ‘‘disassembly line.’’ Once packed in barrels of brine, the meat was shipped east by barge. At first, the industry functioned only in winter months, when freezing temperatures slowed the process of decay, but by the 1850s the arrival of railroads and ice harvesting extended production year-round. During the Civil War, access to hogs fattened on corn from Iowa and Nebraska allowed Chicago to replace Cincinnati as the meatpacking capital, ‘‘Porkopolis.’’

Mechanical refrigeration was another critical breakthrough, giving urban consumers greater access to fresh beef. Unlike pork, which took well to curing, corned and jerked beef were less palatable. The 1867 opening of the Chisholm Trail, driving Texas longhorns north to the railhead at Abilene, Kansas, replaced declining local supplies for eastern markets. Yet live cattle transport had barely begun when George Hammond first shipped beef by railroad icebox, and within a decade, refrigerated rail cars had become economical. Applying the same industrial techniques used for hogs, the Chicago meatpacking firms of Hammond, Swift, and Armour dominated the beef trade as well by the turn of the 20th century.

Horizontally integrated packinghouses processing all manner of livestock facilitated industrial concentration. These multistory factories benefited from economies of scale by making continuous use of facilities, unlike local butchers who slaughtered at most for a few hours a day, and by replacing skilled tradesmen with a relatively untrained industrial workforce (2500).

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