Meat Makes People Powerful: A Global History of the Modern Era by Wilson J. Warren (review)

The past hundred and fifty years have been an age of mass meat consumption that is unrivaled in human history. Although some earlier hunter-gatherers and nomadic-pastoralists ate as much meat as the average western consumer, they were invariably small in numbers. Among populous agrarian societies, regular access to meat had always been limited to a tiny elite. This carnivorous diet has been made possible for the industrial working classes of the west, as previous scholarship has shown, through the imperial conquest of vast rangeland and new technologies for industrial slaughter, refrigerated preservation, and "fast food" manufacturing. Wilson Warren's book contributes to this literature by examining the rise of industrial carnivory in a global context, with particular emphasis on Japan and China. He observes that even as meat consumption has recently declined slightly in Europe and its settler colonies due to growing awareness of its health and environmental costs, overall consumption continues to rise with demand from hundreds of millions of newly middle-class Asians. As a historian, Warren does not try to predict the outcome of this dietary transition or say whether the meat industry can sustainably feed billions of customers, but he rightly notes the critical importance of these questions for the future of humanity.

Whereas economists typically draw a simple correlation between wealth and meat consumption, Warren problematizes the assumption that humans have an innate hunger for meat that is limited only by access. Europeans have long associated meat with noble status, although the preferred types have varied widely. Nevertheless, many Asian societies, particularly those influenced by Buddhism, did not value the consumption of animal flesh. As Warren shows, demand for meat in these countries emerged from promotional campaigns dedicated to inculcating the belief, as suggested by his title, that meat was essential for building strong and modern nations. Nor was propaganda alone sufficient, for governments in the west as in the east also had to guarantee the healthful-ness of meat through regular inspection of supply chains, while also managing the inevitable pollution from transporting and slaughtering livestock. Moreover, the success of these campaigns depended on increasing the distance between consumers and living animals by transforming flesh and organs into more sanitized products such as Liebig's beef extract and McDonald's chicken nuggets. Contrary to the beliefs of the low-carbohydrate-diet faddist Robert Atkins (who is curiously absent from the book), there was nothing natural about the modern demand for meat.

The growing supply of meat likewise depended on government policies to promote the production and trade of livestock. To explain this political economy of meat, Warren adopts the perspective of food regime theory, a sociological blend of commodity chain and world systems analysis that recognizes two historical food regimes, a late-nineteenth-century British effort to control the international trade in wheat and meat and a post-World War II attempt by the United States to export surplus commodities. The first food regime underwrote the financial and technological infrastructure that brought refrigerated meat from the grasslands of North and South America and Australasia to the working classes of Britain and other North Atlantic nations. Asian mass consumption was a product of the second food regime, which developed confined animal feedlot operations (CAFOs) as a means of converting surplus grain and newly discovered antibiotics into inexpensive meat. Yet even here, as Warren shows, the United States had only an indirect role in supporting the growth of meat consumption in Japan and China, where government policies sought to ensure food self-sufficiency through the 1990s. Nevertheless, soybean exports from the United States and other former settler colonies supported the growth of domestic livestock industries, first in postwar Japan and later in postreform China. Perhaps more important still for the growth of Asian meat consumption was the fast food restaurant model, which has been thoroughly localized in Japan and China.

Warren also devotes...