Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation (review)

Roger Horowitz opens Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation with the observation that America is a meat-eating nation. Throughout his narrative, he examines the forces that allow so much meat—six to eight ounces per person per day—to satiate Americans' appetite. The central questions driving Horowitz's analysis are (a) what is the relationship between producing and consuming a product and (b) how does the nature of the good affect this relationship? In drawing on Siegfried Gideon's Mechanization Takes Command, Horowitz illustrates how the materiality of products, in this case meat, resist subordination. Confounding the irregularities and perishability of meat that make it difficult to mechanize its production is the potential for it to cause illness and death if not handled properly. Throughout his study, Horowitz illustrates how a meat product can be transformed into quasi-industrial products depending on how successful producers were in developing and applying new production techniques. However, what was and what was not meat was equally dependent on consumers' constructions and perceptions of these foods, not just on what packers could produce. A good example of this conflict was consumers' rejection of frozen beef because it looked brown rather than the cherry red color of freshly cut meat. Despite an industry campaign to educate consumers, the women who purchased meat for their families refused to buy frozen beef because to them brown meat was spoiled.

Although Horowitz briefly touches on early meat production, the book mainly focuses on the transformation of meat from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Through this chronology, Horowitz unfolds a multifaceted awareness of how meat was conceptualized by examining not only the nature of domestic meat production but also how urbanization and industrialization altered Americans' relationship to their food. Through a series of case studies devoted to various meats, including beef, pork, hot dogs, and chicken, Horowitz examines the dynamic connection among living organisms, food production, technological change, and eating habits.

In his chapter on pork, for example, Horowitz adeptly illustrates how the once ubiquitous barrel pork of the early nineteenth century became "the other white meat" by the end of the twentieth century. As meatpackers identified a market for ham and bacon rather than undifferentiated slabs of pork brined in a barrel, they sought to increase production of these more profitable branded items. Despite technological breakthroughs in mass-producing ham in the 1920s, companies such as Armour and Swift could not change consumers' perceptions that it was a special food reserved for holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, and so ham consumption never reached the level packers envisioned. By the 1960s, fresh pork attained a more dominant place in the American diet largely because of the expansion of refrigeration into retail outlets and consumers' homes. This transition to fresh pork not only reflected a dramatic shift in consumption patterns but also the definition of pork itself. Pork no longer was a term reserved for cured pork in a barrel; it was now a type of fresh meat, as well as ham and bacon. Likewise, Horowitz explains how chicken shifted from being a type of fowl or poultry into a generic category of meat, in addition to how automation transformed hot dogs into a meat rather then a form of sausage.

Horowitz's research points out that although producers sought more efficient and profitable ways to produce meat and consumers demanded a variety of wholesome meats at inexpensive prices, the very nature of meat itself has led to a provisioning system that is vulnerable to outbreaks of Salmonella and Escherichia coli, environmental degradation, and controversies over the widespread use of sub-clinical antibiotics. Although there has never been an unproblematic solution to supplying the vast quantity of meat Americans eat, the circumstances surrounding the mass production of meat has resulted in an uneasy compromise...