Cattle in History, Culture, and Thought: Part 1 (October 2025): Industrial Beefs

Signs of growing demand for beef (and meat more generally) in major European cities like London and Paris were already evident as early as the eighteenth century, when cattle slaughter became more centralized and regulated. Historians situate the rise of the modern slaughterhouse in Europe within the period of industrialization beginning in the late eighteenth century, as Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse, edited by Paula Young Lee, and Meat Matters: Butchers, Politics, and Market Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris by Sydney Watts suggest. Using the case study of London’s Smithfield market, Robyn S. Metcalfe’s Meat, Commerce and the City furthermore shows how the slaughter of cattle shifted from the central marketplace to more marginal spaces over the nineteenth century due to concerns about public health and morality. In Meat Markets, moreover, Ted Geier shows how the penny press and other forms of popular and canonical literature treated the bloody spectacle of Smithfield.

However, the introduction of new technologies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries further transformed cattle slaughter. In Putting Meat on the American Table, Roger Horowitz shows how technological change increased beef consumption in the United States. The expansion of the railroad, especially after the 1860s, helped transform long cattle drives into faster cattle shipping, while the invention of the refrigerated railcar by the 1870s and the invention of the more mechanized “disassembly line” method of slaughter facilitated the centralization of cattle slaughter in major Midwestern hubs like Chicago and the dissemination of cheaper refrigerated meat to far-flung markets. As a result, beef became the most consumed meat in the United States by the early twentieth century.

Industrialization of meatpacking came with significant costs. Aggressive Midwestern meatpackers sidelined local slaughterers and butchers, crushing a budding labor movement and delivering often-adulterated meat at high prices to consumers. The hour-glass shape of the industry, in which an ever-smaller number of packing firms monopolized cattle acquisitions and beef sales, accentuated the misalignments of supply and demand that plagued that industry for much of the twentieth century, as Jimmy M. Skaggs explains in Prime Cut. The predictable result of this tension was political, economic, and social conflicts about cattle and beef. In that vein, Joshua Specht emphasizes the ecological changes wrought by the rise of beef and the political and economic struggles that arose from the centralization and standardization of the industry in Red Meat Republic. Struggles over land, government policy, labor, and retail surveyed therein point to broader bodies of scholarship.

In major U.S. cities, low wages made it difficult for working-class consumers to sustain culturally and nutritionally appropriate diets, leading to poor health, as Katherine Leonard Turner shows in How the Other Half Ate. This tension galvanized protest movements by beef consumers and workers laboring in the beef industry. Though initially making beef more affordable and ubiquitous, the centralization of beef production and retail also made workers increasingly susceptible to corporate greed. Rising beef prices, stemming from the consolidation of the Chicago Beef Trust over the late nineteenth century, fueled urban unrest. In one instance, Jewish immigrant women led a major protest aimed at shuttering kosher butcher shops in New York City when prices climbed too high, as Scott D. Seligman reveals in The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902. Relatedly, works like Kenneth R. Stow’s Feeding the Eternal City and Meat Matters: Ethnographic Refractions of the Beta Israel by Hagar Salamon have documented the unique significance of Kosher beef among diverse Jewish populations—and the frictions and cultural attitudes it generates—in contexts as diverse as early modern Rome and among Ethiopian Jews in contemporary Israel, respectively.

Beef production and consumption also subjected workers to hazardous and unhealthy conditions, and excessive consumption correlated with disease, from food-borne illness to cancer. In Imaging Animal Industry, Emily Kathryn Morgan documents how beef industrialists deployed photography to mitigate and restore public trust in the wake of Upton Sinclair’s scathing 1906 exposé of corporate corruption, animal cruelty, and worker exploitation, The Jungle. Exploring the paradoxes of meat as a food associated with both health and illness, Meat, Medicine and Human Health in the Twentieth Century, edited by Christian Bonah, David Cantor, and Mathias Dörries, features essays on pharmaceutical, endocrinological, nutritional, and epidemiological implications of increasing meat consumption in twentieth-century North America and Europe.

The transformations that shaped cattle raising and meat production over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped human relationships with cattle—and animals more generally—especially, as urbanization pushed these and other animals from population centers. Animal City by Andrew A. Robichaud shows how the gradual relegation of grazing commons and slaughterhouses from cities catalyzed important changes in the way people understood their relationships with animals. Social and political struggles over animals, including those advanced by local government officials and animal welfare activists, in turn, transformed what it meant to be human. In The City Is More Than Human, Frederick L. Brown emphasizes the binaries—human-animal, wild-domestic, pet-livestock—that humans have employed to make sense of the animals that have always inhabited urban spaces. The coexistence of benevolent and exploitative postures toward animals persists, for instance, in the pet food dish paradox—the increasingly intimate familial bonds with canine and feline companion animals and the growing reliance on commercial pet food made with the flesh of factory-farmed animals—is particularly conspicuous in contemporary vegetarian strongholds like Seattle.