IN MEAT WE TRUST

By the 1960s, cattle-feeding was controlled by punch cards that mixed precise formulas of corn, plants, meat, vitamins and antibiotics.

By CHARLES R. MORRIS

In Meat We Trust
By Marilyn Ogle 
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 368 pages, $28)

In the depths of the Great Depression in rural Georgia, Jesse Jewell contemplated the ruin of his seed business—like many businessmen in that unhappy time, he had lots of inventory but only destitute customers. So he persuaded a local bank to finance a risky purchase of young chicks, which he distributed to local farmers along with seed and meticulous instructions on how to feed them. When the chickens reached market size, he brought them to Atlanta—some live, some slaughtered and packed in ice—sold them all, and paid off the farmers who raised them. (click below to read more)


A quarter-century later, Jewell's business had evolved into a comprehensive chicken-manufacturing operation, from raw-material production—seeds, eggs and chicks—to slaughtering and packing. He still contracted chick-raising but specified the semi-automated facilities that would do the work and tightly controlled the feeding and watering regimens. Chickens, which were rarely seen on urban American tables earlier in the century, became a staple.

From its earliest days, the United States has pushed mass production and distribution further than anywhere else. The mass production of food is particularly challenging because food is so perishable, and in the case of meat, the raw materials are living, breathing creatures that feel and react, get sick, and may even fight back.

Maureen Ogle's "In Meat We Trust" is the story of the mass production of meat in America, from the earliest abattoirs to the "natural" and "organic" food movements of the present day. Ms. Ogle is a terrific writer, and she takes us on a brisk romp through two centuries of history, full of deft portraits of entrepreneurs, inventors, promoters and charlatans.

The author binds her stories together with a thematic thread—how the meat industry constantly reinvented itself as the U.S. evolved from a thinly populated agricultural country to the greatest-ever industrial power. The challenge was how to feed everybody in a fast-growing, rapidly urbanizing country. Food production was being forced farther and farther away from population centers even as agricultural land and labor supply steadily shrank.

The evolution of beef production illustrates the process. All major towns once had abattoirs near railroad stockyards, which slaughtered the arriving cattle and supplied carcasses to local butchers. But train trips left cattle battered and underweight, so refrigerated trains allowed the slaughtering to be shifted back to Chicago, leveraging its position as a national rail hub into leadership of the meat industry. Then, to satisfy ever-fussier consumers, a "feeding" industry evolved that took grass-fed cattle from ranchers and cornfed them to the desired weight and taste. The feeders eventually became the power center of the industry.

Much like Jewell, the feeders contracted with ranchers to bring them standardized cattle, then slaughtered the cattle at the feedlots, butchered the carcasses and packed the cuts in consumer-size containers—"boxed beef," it was called. Because of the reduction in handling and travel time, boxed meat was fresher and tastier than the average conventional butcher's. Supermarkets sprouted meat counters. Pork, poultry and other meat industries all followed more or less the same path.

The ultimate standardization was confinement—raising large numbers of animals outdoors left them vulnerable to predators, fighting and other uncontrolled variables. Moving them inside into automated feeding stalls was the obvious answer. Within about a decade, starting in the late 1950s, virtually the entire industry adopted the practice. By the 1960s, Ms. Ogle writes, feeding was controlled by punch cards that "minutely calculated feed formulas for the company's livestock . . . a thousand tons of alfalfa, corn, meat scraps, vitamins, minerals, antibiotics, and hormones." All those ingredients were individually arrayed in vertical bins that dumped the precise amounts into mixing trucks as they made their way to the confinement buildings.

The land-grant colleges helped drive the changes. Ranchers knew that feed dosed with animal protein led to bigger, healthier animals, so the scientists set out to identify and synthesize the magic "Animal Protein Factor." That effort led to the wide use of antibiotics of all kinds and synthetic hormones like DES, an estrogen-like compound that was eventually banned as carcinogenic. It isn't likely that any of these substances, in the amounts they are present in food, harm humans, but there were serious side effects on workers in DES plants. The wide use of antibiotics is currently a regulatory flash point because they have been plausibly fingered as a possible contributor to the alarming spread of MRSA—or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus—which has so alarmed hospital infection-control personnel.

Although Ms. Ogle generally cheers the consolidation impulse, her graphic description of catastrophic flooding of hog lagoons—lake-size excrement catchments—suggests that we may be reaching the limits of consolidation. The locavore movement is clearly not the answer. Green markets brighten big cities, but they are mostly an upper-quartile phenomenon. In most median-income households, both parents work to stay afloat, and neither parent has the energy for daily shopping and careful cooking. That's what the food industry is for. Ms. Ogle believes, all exceptions admitted, that it has delivered Americans good value, and her book makes that case in fascinating detail.

Mr. Morris's most recent books are "The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution" and "Comeback: America's New Economic Boom." He is a fellow at the Century Foundation.