The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise, and Meat in Mexico City, 1890-1917 (review)

For its meat, Mexico City depended on a complex supply chain that involved ranchers, railroads, and retail butcher shops scattered throughout the capital. Consumers wanted fresh meat slaughtered the same day, and the system's hub was the municipal slaughterhouse. By the 1890s, the trend was toward more beef consumption and less mutton; pork consumption remained constant. Some twenty merchants controlled the bulk of the cattle import business. The slaughterhouse itself employed hundreds of workers. Once dressed, meat was carted to retail outlets. Merchant importers provided credit to retailers, who in turn extended credit to their customers.

Beef was cut into thin strips for carne asada, which venders often sold on the street or that went into various moles for stews. Pork production was less centralized, as hogs could be purchased from nearby villages. Despite the rules against it, the city's tocineros (hog butchers) routinely slaughtered clandestinely, or maintained smaller, licensed facilities. Tocineros salted and dried hams, bacon, and sausage; they rendered down the fat into lard, fried the pork rinds, and made soap with the leftover scraps.

During the Porfiriato (1876–1911), Mexico's modernizers gained the upper hand. The regime saw itself as the guardian of scientific progress; to this end, it promoted technology and expertise. The new administrator at San Lucas, the capital's slaughterhouse, was a veterinarian trained in bacteriology who regarded the chaotic situation there as a threat to public health. Because the overcrowded facility lacked sufficient water to clean it up properly, the "putrefaction of blood and other organic materials" created "a constant bad odor perceptible at a great distance" (p. 60). There ensued a long battle to modernize the capital's meat supply.

In 1897, San Lucas closed, and at a cost of a million pesos, a new slaughterhouse opened at Peralvillo. It had administrative offices and laboratories equipped with microscopes, but its layout showed how little its planners understood how it should operate properly. There were bottlenecks at every turn and numerous dangers to workers. At San Lucas, meat had been ready for carting by 9 o'clock in the morning; at Peralvillo, shops were still waiting for meat at 9 o'clock at night. Soon Peralvillo closed down and San Lucas reopened. But the modernizers did not give up. They licensed La Internacional, a conglomerate dominated by the Terrazas clan, to build a new refrigerated facility. In return, the city council granted La Internacional a monopoly on livestock slaughter, setting a fee for each animal killed. The new facility opened in 1905. La Internacional slaughtered its beef first, and hence beat the competition to market. Soon it was at loggerheads with other merchant importers and their retail customers. To settle the dispute, the Porfirian government imposed a rotation system.

Refrigeration was the lynchpin of the new meatpacking technology. Meat could be chilled in one place and then sold later on somewhere else. Backed by British capital, entrepreneur Louis DeKay constructed a modern meatpacking plant at Uruapan; for economies of scale, he bought out La Internacional and the Terrazas clan. His strategy was to flood the Mexican market with cheap refrigerated beef. Low prices would bring consumers to DeKay's outlets and thus undermine the old retail shops.

But consumers resisted buying refrigerated beef. "It loses its juice, becomes discolored, and tenderizes as it decomposes," critics claimed (p. 10). Merchant importers, workers at the capital's slaughterhouse, and retail butchers combined to cause DeKay no end of grief. DeKay's plan failed not because of any "sausage rebellion," which was just another round in the infighting that characterized slaughterhouse affairs. What defeated DeKay was the Mexican Revolution. He sided with the Huerta government, which proved ephemeral. In the end, he fled Mexico before the victorious Constitutionalist forces could take the capital.

What describes Jeffrey Pilcher's book best is its subtitle—"public health, private enterprise, and meat in Mexico...