Cattle in History, Culture, and Thought: Part 2 (November 2025): Home

Meat consumption has risen dramatically since the 1960s, but one of the most significant changes in recent decades revolves around the shifting geography of beef. The first part of this series featured works exploring the development and expansion of cattle raising across the Americas since the 1490s. It emphasized how growing demand for beef in the affluent world drove an expanding bovine frontier, not only mowing down Indigenous people and animals on the Great Plains of the United States, but pushing north and south of what became its political border with Canada and Mexico. The rise of factory farming and the consolidation of a global beef supply chain in the mid-twentieth century helped meet skyrocketing demand in the United States and Europe, as we saw. However, these developments also raised concerns pertaining to health, the environment, and, to a lesser extent, animal suffering. These ethical difficulties with modern meat helped catalyze a shift in consumption habits in the developed world, especially Europe, where demand for beef plateaued and eventually contracted slightly. To be clear, beef consumption in the affluent world is still astronomical, but the burden of the West’s voracious appetite for protein is now shared with poultry, fish, and dairy—industries no less brutal, but presumed to be healthier and slightly less environmentally catastrophic.

Yet, beef and pork consumption have surged across the developing world. Works like Changing Meat Cultures, edited by Arve Hansen and Karen Lykke Syse, have explored the normalization of meat-eating in areas where it has historically been more circumscribed, like Southeast Asia. The normalization and spread of factory farming techniques to the developing world is the focus of Harvey Neo and Jody Emel’s Geographies of Meat. The authors draw attention to the uneven adoptions of industrial technologies and the cultural tensions they render in Asia, the Americas, and Europe. One popular theory frames the expanding global consumption of beef as a reflection of rising incomes in the developing world. This explanation builds on Bennett’s law, which posits an inverse correlation between per capita income and the proportion of nutrition derived from grains. Josh Berson challenges this explanation in The Meat Question. Denaturalizing the consumption of animals as a marker of development, he compellingly shows that rising meat consumption was actually associated with growing economic instability, often manifesting in a dearth of nutritious options, as it was under a system of coerced labor and colonial exploitation. This fascinating account of meat as consolation for a winnowing diet counters the conventional valuation of meat as a harbinger of progress.

If not attributable to rising incomes, then what explains the global love affair with beef? According to Wilson J. Warren’s Meat Makes People Powerful, rising meat consumption is the result of deliberate efforts by policy makers and scientists to promote it. The discovery of protein and B vitamins around the turn of the twentieth century led scientists, the state, and beef lobbyists to push for expanded beef consumption as a source of vital nutrients, and even in some cases as a therapeutic. Beef’s association with efforts to build a healthier, stronger, more robust population meant that it had long been entangled with the eugenics movement. In East Asian countries, especially Japan and China, where diets remained largely free of red meat since ancient times, post–World War II reformers reframed meat consumption as a driver of national development and modernization.

The consequences of this growing global demand for beef have been dramatic. Nearly one million bovines are slaughtered each day, suffering painful, terrifying, and gruesome deaths after lifetimes of confinement and cruelty. Environmental destruction, greenhouse gas emissions, habitat loss, and extinctions have reached true crisis levels. Displacement and labor exploitation have increased along with the speed of the disassembly line. Tainted, adulterated, or diseased meat continues to threaten human health, while industrial production methods and elevated consumption have fueled antibiotic-resistant pathogens and preventable illness. This essay highlights works exploring those threats. As we will see, much of this work congregates around environmental and animal ethics. While both these philosophical points of view inform broader social movements, the expansive body of scholarship on the moral standing of cattle—and animals more generally—has provided important new insights about how structures of power and hierarchy operate, and how they might be dismantled.

Bonnie A. Lucero is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean at Texas Christian University. Her most recent monograph is Race and Reproduction in Cuba (2022), published by the University of Georgia Press. She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled “The Land of the Skinny Cow: Beef Politics in Cuba, 1927–1963.”