Taste, Trade and Technology: The Development of the International Meat Industry since 1840 (review)

This is a very British book about the international meat industry. A volume in Ashgate's Modern Economic and Social History series, its principal contribution is charting the relationships between countries engaged in the meat business, especially the nations in Latin America, plus Australia and New Zealand that exported most of their production to the United Kingdom.

The author notes several times that Britain was "the largest market for internationally traded meat." His analysis through much of the volume is intended to unravel the significance of these international relationships. It is curious how a nation with such a primitive and localistic butchering tradition sparked innovation in animal breeding, international shipping of refrigerated and frozen meat, and massive investment in modern slaughterhouses tens of thousands of miles from the consumers who wanted access to beef and other meat products.

Perren argues that much of the expansion of meat production in the Commonwealth nations and Latin America was the result of British demand. His argument seems strongest with regard to Australia and New Zealand where their small populations provided a limited basis for modern meat production. The British appetite for meat, especially beef, created a strong stimulus to improve livestock breeds, feeding practices, and processing methods so as to create a meat the British consumers would eat. For Latin American countries, it is somewhat harder to distinguish the relative importance of domestic demand and international trade. Nations such as Argentina had strong domestic traditions of meat consumption—yet it is unclear if international trade intersected with or may have clashed with domestic preferences and practices.

The American meat industry—the world's largest—is an outlier in this story since strong domestic demand rendered American meat an insignificant factor in British markets. American companies viewed international trade as desirable only when domestic demand flagged, and after 1900, American consumers bought almost all that was produced in their country. The original contribution in Perren's book regarding American firms is their significant role in the international meat industry through Latin American operations. He shows how their superior financial resources and advanced technology made them fitting partners for British policies intended to ensure sufficient meat supplies at home through imports from Argentina and Uruguay.

His principal concern with international trade shapes the treatment of the health hazards encountered by the meat industry. He concentrates on the impact of hoof and mouth disease, especially its devastation of British stock in the 1990s and early 2000s, along with the impact on EU nations, noting very effectively the dramatic impact on international trade. He does not, however, comparably discuss the consumer dimensions of health issues, especially food contamination such as E Coli and salmonella as these had little impact on international trade in meat products.

Perren struggles at times to calibrate the role of political regulation and government intervention in the international meat business. In later chapters he decries the "distortions" (eg pp. 157, 180) in international trade that stemmed from preferential treatment of domestic agriculture by national governments and the European Union after 1950. Yet, earlier he shows in great detail how the British government assigned export quotas to particular firms in Latin American, in the process favoring American and British companies over Argentinian and Uruguyan—owned operations in the 1920s and 1930s. Unexplained is why British control over exports in this earlier period did not constitute a "distortion" equivalent to post-World War II policies.

Perren's arguments are supported by excellent data on meat production and distribution, especially the international flows of meat products. In this respect, this study is a very strong contribution to understanding the impact of British demand on international economic development of export-oriented food industries. Certainly, it is far superior to Jeremy Rifkin's study Beyond Beef that stressed the international impact of British demand for meat, but in a jeremiad filled with factual errors...