History of America's meat-processing manufacture

Virtually every animal on World either kills other animals to sustain itself or is unfortunate enough to play the opposite function, existence devoured past another animal for the same purpose. Man beings are no exception. In fact, they turned the concern of converting animals into nutrient into a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Using news reports, historical accounts, manufacture timelines, and other sources, Stacker chronicled the history of the American meat-processing industry, the largest segment of the U.s. agronomics sector past far.

The animal manufacture produces 52 billion pounds of meat and 48 billion pounds of poultry every year. That comes from 2.2 million sheep and lambs, 32.2 1000000 cattle and calves, 121 million hogs, 242 1000000 turkeys, and an amazing ix billion chickens—again that's the number of animals whose lives are sacrificed for human consumption every single twelvemonth in the U.S. lonely.

The bridge betwixt those living, feeling animals and the compress-wrapped steaks and drive-thru cheeseburgers that Americans gobble up by the ton is the meat-processing industry. It's as former every bit the land itself—older, even—and its history is baked into the history of America. Small- and medium-sized family farms tasked with feeding a few one thousand colonists transformed over the centuries into a juggernaut of billion-dollar corporations that wring profits out of factory farms that farmers a few generations agone wouldn't even recognize every bit being farms at all.

Forth the fashion, the meat-processing manufacture served as a driving force in the rise of the railroad industry, the labor move, trucking, and transportation. It was responsible for game-changing innovations such as mechanized refrigeration and the associates line. The realities of the industry take fueled major reforms, public outrage, and activist movements, merely mostly the meat-processing industry has been subconscious away from the sensitive eyes and minds of an American population that is almost totally disconnected from the origins of the nutrient it consumes.

The piece of work of slaughtering animals and turning their carcasses into nutrient has long been and remains today largely the realm of underpaid immigrant laborers who work for long hours at some of the most physically and psychologically taxing work imaginable. The corporate titans whose fortunes their labor creates are at present and have always been amid the wealthiest and most politically influential powerbrokers in the country.

Go on reading for 50 cardinal moments in the history of America's meat-processing industry.

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1662: The meatpacking industry is born

English colonist and fur trader William Pynchon was the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1662, he became the New Earth's first meatpacker when he began packing big quantities of salted pork into barrels for export to the W Indies.

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1742: Boston emerges as America's meatpacking hub

In 1742, Brighton Market, located most Boston, held the beginning meat auction in the colonies. Cattle farmers and ranchers slaughtered their animals and brought the resulting meat to Brighton for sale. The moment positioned Boston as the new center of colonial America'southward meat trade.

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1779: Offset cattle drive

In 1779, the Spanish—eager to bulldoze their British rivals out of the New Globe—joined the American Revolution. That twelvemonth, the Spanish governor of Louisiana asked neighboring Texas to send cattle to feed his troops fighting on the front. The Commanding General of New Spain authorized the transfer of two,000 caput of cattle from Texas to the Louisiana territory—it was the first official Texas cattle drive in history.

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1813: 'Uncle Sam' feeds the troops

During the war of 1812, a meat packer from Troy, New York, named Samuel Wilson filled a contract to supply meat to American troops fighting the British. He stamped his barrels with the initials "U.S." for "The states," just playing on Wilson'due south get-go proper name, soldiers joked that the provisions came from "Uncle Sam." The name stuck and has forever since been synonymous with the federal government.

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1818: The rise of 'Porkopolis'

Elisha Mills in 1818 started the kickoff large-calibration pork-packing constitute in Cincinnati, where pigs were slaughtered and their meat was preserved in brine-filled barrels to meet the growing demand for salted pork. Because of its advantageous geography and proximity to transportation hubs—not to mention its vast supply of salt and inexpensive immigrant labor—Cincinnati became the pork-producing capital of the world, with dozens of pork companies emerging at that place. At that place were 85,000 pigs beingness candy at that place annually by 1833; by 1850, Cincinnati earned the nickname "Porkopolis."

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Mid-1800s: Cattle becomes king

Pork was the meat of choice in America from colonial times until the early 1800s when beef began growing in popularity. By the mid-1800s, small family farms could no longer meet the demand. The era of the cattle barons emerged as massive ranches sprung upwards in the West, where enormous herds could be grazed on endless open up prairies before being ushered to market by cowboys on epic cross-country cattle drives.

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1861: The Civil War

When war broke out between the North and Southward in 1861, Texas ranchers left their farms to fight for the Confederacy. Those who lived returned to a land overrun by cattle—left to their ain devices, cattle herds multiplied exponentially and by the war'south finish in 1865, roughly five million longhorn cattle were roaming wild in Texas. There was no market for beef in the decimated Southern economy, but demand was rampant in the North, where ranchers could get 10 times more for a head of cattle than they could in the S—if only they could become their longhorns to the Yankee markets.

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1862: Lincoln forms the USDA

In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a Congressional human activity that created the U.s. Section of Agriculture (USDA). At a time when half of the American population lived and worked on farms—compared to 2% today—Lincoln called it "the People'south Department." The USDA is nevertheless charged with ensuring that meat is safe, properly inspected, and correctly packaged to this day.

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1862: The Homestead Act

The signing of the Homestead Act sent waves of bold and aggressive pioneers and immigrants flooding out of the eastern cities west in search of state and a new start. The act divvied up the boundless grazing lands of the wealthy, powerful, and often trigger-happy cattle barons who saw the land the Homesteaders were settling equally the source of their fortunes. Cowboys became hired gunmen as encarmine Range Wars raged between cattlemen and the new arrivals—the meatpacking manufacture was nearly to exist transformed forever.

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1865: The rise of the Midwest

Boston, and later Philadelphia, had been the central hubs of the U.S.' meatpacking industry in the country'southward early years, simply in the mid-1860s, the Midwest grew to become the core of the industry. It made sense, every bit Midwestern cities were located strategically between the vast grasslands of the West—where huge herds of cattle were raised—and the hungry cities in the E that generated an unquenchable demand for meat. In 1865, the Chicago stockyards became the U.S.' biggest livestock marketplace, and Cincinnati Omaha, Nebraska, and Kansas City, Kansas emerged every bit major meatpacking hubs.

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1867: The Existent McCoy

Chicago livestock trader Joseph McCoy wanted to position himself as the dominant middleman in the American meat manufacture and worked to bring cattle from Texas to his functioning in Chicago for processing and distribution to the Eastward. With hordes of Homesteaders and bloody range wars making traditional cattle drives more than difficult, McCoy turned to the burgeoning railroad industry and congenital a town called Abilene in a strategically centralized spot in Kansas—it was America'southward starting time cowtown. He advertised heavily and offered a good cost to ranchers who would evangelize their cattle to his railyard in Abilene—and he delivered on his hope, entering the phrase "the real McCoy" into the American lexicon.

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1867: The railroad revolution

In 1867 in Abilene, McCoy transported America'south first shipment of cattle by railroad—and his ambitious and expensive gamble paid off. Information technology dramatically shortened the time it took to bring meat to marketplace; old-schoolhouse cattle drives took months to complete and ofttimes resulted in huge losses of herds. Information technology was the beginning of a new era in the meat industry and the dawn of the "Wild West," as rugged, lawless, prosperous, and violent cowtowns began coalescing around major railroad aircraft points where thousands of cattle were herded onto train cars for ship as thousands of dollars were irresolute easily.

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1867: Barbed wire

The fate of the Western open range, the cattle barons whose fortunes were built on information technology, and the iconic cowboys who did the difficult work of driving cattle for endless miles was sealed in 1867 with the arrival of 1 of history's most depression-tech merely consequential inventions: spinous wire. Thousands of miles of cheap but highly effective barbed wire presently cordoned off pocket-sized farms and homesteads across the Due west, making large scale open up cattle grazing impossible. Between the Homestead Act, the arrival of the railroads, and an endless crisscrossing of bulletproof spinous wire, the open range was doomed and the meatpacking industry entered into the modern era.

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1870s: Dis-associates lines

Past the 1870s, meatpacking plants were using technology like steam power, monorail trolleys, and mechanical mixers, choppers, and stuffers in manufacturing plant settings where stationary workers doing private jobs broke downwardly and candy animal carcasses that continuously passed by them. These and then-chosen dis-assembly lines allowed for fast, consistent, and efficient processing. A young entrepreneur named Henry Ford was so inspired by the procedure when he visited a meat plant that he used the concept for the ground of his auto assembly lines.

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1877: The refrigerated railcar

Many people and companies experimented with refrigerated railroad cars dating back to the mid-19th century, but all attempts had flaws that made them impractical and unreliable. Information technology was much cheaper and more efficient to slaughter cattle in Chicago and then send their carcasses Eastward instead of transporting the animals while they were all the same alive, only that could only exist done in the wintertime months. And so, in 1877, two men named Joel Tiffany and Andrew Chase secured patents that made the dream of a refrigerated railroad car a reality—cattle could now be transported live to Chicago, slaughtered, and processed into meat, before existence shipped to Eastern cities without spoiling at any time of yr.

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1880: U.s. beef reigns supreme

Before the refrigerated railcar, ranchers bred cattle for endurance to survive long, grueling cattle drives, simply the invention of the cold car allowed ranchers to breed cattle for the quality of their meat. As early on as 1880, American ranchers were exporting their beef to England, which had long been considered the domicile of the finest beefiness in the world; at present, that title was now squarely in the easily of the American rancher.

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1883: The nascency of a behemothic

In 1883, Bavarian immigrant and butcher Oscar Mayer opened his first meat marketplace in Chicago. On the very beginning day, sales totaled $59—groovy for a time when cuts of pork sold for between 8 and 12 cents per pound. Today, the Oscar Mayer company does more than $5 billion in annual sales and represents one of the most famous names in American meat.

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1884: Arthur forms the Agency of Fauna Manufacture (BAI)

In 1884, President Chester Arthur signed a law that created the BAI. Equally part of the USDA, the BAI was tasked with preventing ill animals from entering the U.S. food supply. Quarantine stations were ready across several cities to screen and separate diseased imported animals to foreclose their meat from going to marketplace.

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1890: Harrison signs get-go meat inspection constabulary

As foreign countries began scrutinizing U.S. exports of meat more strictly, American meat producers found it harder to compete in overseas markets. President Benjamin Harrison signed a nib that mandated a final inspection of all meat products earlier they left for markets on foreign shores.

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1893: Meat goes to college

In 1893, a Academy of Minnesota instructor named Andrew Boss taught a course called "Teaching in Killing, Dressing, Cut, and Curing Meat"—it is the first known higher education grade that provided education and education related to meatpacking. The moment spawned a revolution in which academia and agriculture would merge. The University of Minnesota unveiled the first meat laboratory effectually 1900, and in the first two decades of the 20th century, dozens of major colleges and universities across the state began adding courses dealing with livestock and meat.

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1897: Meat processors unionize

The rise of the meat-processing manufacture coincided with the rise of the American labor move, and merely as coal miners, steelworkers, and railroad workers sought power through commonage bargaining, so, too, did meat workers. In 1897, the Confederate Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of Due north America was chartered by the American Federation of Labor. They organized to need higher pay, better working conditions, and task security.

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1898: National Alive Stock Growers Association

By 1898, fifty-fifty wealthy and influential cattle ranchers were under the thumbs of powerful interests like banks, insurance companies, railroad corporations, and stockyard groups, many of which were monopolies that enforced their will through price-fixing. That year, cattle ranchers countered past forming the National Live Stock Growers Association, which would subsequently become the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA). More than than 120 years later, the NCBA is notwithstanding the most prominent organization representing America'due south cattle ranchers.

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1900: Meatpacking dominates America

Past the turn of the 20th century, meatpacking was America'south biggest manufacture by far. Its $ane billion in annual sales was more than the almanac budget of the U.S. government. With demand soaring in America'southward ever-expanding cities, enormous slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants emerged in Midwestern hubs like Chicago, Milwaukee, and Kansas City that were situated betwixt the vast cattle ranches in the West and the densely populated cities that generated need in the East. They were congenital and operated to procedure as much meat equally quickly as possible, which led to ghastly conditions that were unsanitary and unsafe for animals and workers alike.

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1906: Upton Sinclair publishes 'The Jungle'

One of the most prolific and important writers in American history, Upton Sinclair published "The Jungle" in 1906. In graphic detail, the book chronicled the dangerous, barbarous, and filthy world where America's meat was processed, shedding light on the plight of the impoverished and largely immigrant workers who toiled in them for what Sinclair chosen "wage slavery." The book did for the meatpacking industry what "Uncle Tom's Motel" did for abolitionism a half-century before. An appalled and outraged public demanded action.

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1906: The Neill-Reynolds report

In response to the public outcry in the wake of "The Jungle," President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned Charles P. Neill and James Bronson Reynolds to investigate the claims fabricated by Sinclair, which Roosevelt suspected the author might accept embellished to advance his socialist calendar. Afterwards making surprise inspections to major plants across the country, the Neill-Reynolds report confirmed Sinclair's assessment of the horrors of the American meat industry. One passage read, "In a word, we saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables rarely washed, pushed from room to room in rotten box carts, in all of which processes information technology was in the way of gathering clay, splinters, floor filth, and the expectoration of tuberculosis, and other diseased workers."

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1906: The Federal Meat Inspection Act

Roosevelt had seen plenty, and in 1906, he muscled Congress into passing the Federal Meat Inspection Human action (FMIA), which he signed the very same year that Sinclair published "The Jungle." It mandated strictly regulated germ-free conditions for earlier, during, and after the slaughter of animals, made it a crime to sell misbranded or adulterated cattle, and charged the USDA with conducting meticulous inspections. It also mandated strict inspections for all imported meat.

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1906: The Pure Food and Drug Act

On the very same day that Roosevelt signed FMIA, he likewise signed the Pure Food and Drug Deed, a series of pregnant consumer protections that banned the sale or transport of any goods—including meat—that were mislabeled or impure. It represented the kickoff time that companies had to list active ingredients on labels for things similar drugs and cosmetics, and that meatpacking companies were forced to listing whatever preservatives or other chemical agents used in product. Before that, apples were commonly treated with poisonous ruby-red dyes and meat was treated with poisons like borax and formaldehyde to kill mold or disguise rot.

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1919: The Light-green Bay Packers

On Aug. 11, 1919, two erstwhile high school football rivals named Earl Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun organized a football squad of their ain. Strapped for cash, Lambeau—a worker at a meatpacking plant—asked his employer, the Indian Packing Visitor, for funds to pay for equipment and uniforms. His boss agreed and gave the pair $500 on the condition that the team would be named for the sponsor—the result was the Green Bay Packers, i of the oldest, nearly storied, and most successful NFL franchises in football history.

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1919 FTC meatpacking study

With World War I in the history books, President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 ordered the FTC to behave a thorough investigation of the meatpacking industry. The FTC issued a written report stating that v companies—Wilson, Swift, Morris, Cudahy, and Armour—controlled well-nigh the entire industry and acted equally a monopoly. The "Big V" were shown to make contest essentially incommunicable for smaller companies and to systematically defraud consumers and producers akin by fixing prices, restricting the flow of food, and manipulating markets.

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1921: Packers and Stockyards Act

The 1919 FTC study led to the Packers and Stockyards Act, anti-trust legislation designed to regulate the industry and dilute the enormous power wielded past the Big Five. Amongst the most of import reforms was that the act fabricated stockyards office as public utilities and forbade companies that owned stockyards from dealing in the animals they maintained. It provided oversight, prohibited unlawful practices, made pricing structures more than transparent, and stoked competition.

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1924: Introduction of meat grading

Congress in 1916 passed a law mandating a grading system to allocate different types, cuts, and qualities of meat that consumers could use to make educated purchasing decisions. A tentative beef-grading system was established and in 1924, those standards were published and codified. Today, the USDA recognizes 8 grades of meat, with the iii most common and highest quality being U.S. Prime, U.S. Choice, and U.S. Select.

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1920s: The mass product of chickens begins

Originally founded every bit an agrarian lodge, the early U.Southward. was made upwards largely of small- and medium-sized farms where animals roamed freely—that all changed when farmers and ranchers began fencing in their animals with barbed wire in the late 19th century. In the 1920s, a new era of industrial-scale farming began when poultry became the first mill-farmed animal. Chickens and hens were the first animals to be raised indoors in enormous quantities for egg production and slaughter.

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1930s: The Depression and Dust Basin

The one-two dial of the Great Low and the Dust Bowl brought the country—including the cattle and meat industries—to its knees. Bank failures, foreclosures, and the obliteration of millions of acres of grazing and ranching lands led to widespread herd liquidations as a quarter-million farmers and ranchers went under.

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1931: Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

A federal agency called the Bureau of Chemistry was charged with enforcing the sweeping reforms that came with the landmark 1906 Federal Meat Inspection Human action and Pure Food and Drug Deed. In 1927, that agency was reorganized into the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration, which in 1931 became the Food and Drug Assistants.

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1939: Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act

More than xxx years after the major 1906 reforms, countless loopholes and disorganized enforcement meant that American consumers were yet inundated with substandard nutrient and drugs that were improperly produced and deceptively advertised. The 1939 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Human activity finally gave teeth to those reforms past giving the FDA the say-so to regulate, monitor, and enforce safe and quality standards for food and drugs produced, sold, and consumed in the U.S.

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1940: The refrigerated truck

In the 1930s, an engineer for the Werner Transportation Company in Minneapolis named Frederick McKinley Jones began developing trucks cooled by mechanical refrigeration. Before that, meat bound for marketplace in trucks was cooled with water ice—just ice was expensive, drivers had to stop oft to refresh it, and if the water ice melted, the meat spoiled and the shipment was lost. In 1940, Jones perfected his design, Werner began building his trucks, and meat could now be reliably transported over the road for long distances whatever fourth dimension of year.

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1940s: World War Two

The beef manufacture struggled during World State of war Two equally the government regulated virtually every aspect of the industry. Meat was a disquisitional component of the nutrient-supply chain, which was under enormous strain as the government struggled to feed its armed forces, civilian population, and starving allies overseas. Rationing, price controls, and new production standards were implemented—and for the first time in history, women dominated the meat-processing labor force.

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Fast food

Although White Castle has a history dating back to 1921, America'south fast-food culture was born in earnest in 1948 when sibling restaurateurs Dick and Mac McDonald adult the Speedee Service Arrangement at their California burger stands. Today, fast-food is a $223 billion industry—McDonald's alone sells 75 hamburgers every second at more than 37,000 locations—and the incredible demand for inexpensive and instant meals can only be met with mountains of inexpensive meat. The rise of fast-food culture would forever alter the way animals were raised, killed, and processed, giving ascension to the modern manufactory subcontract.

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1957: Poultry Products Inspection Human action

Poultry was always a minor player in the animal agricultural industry, and chickens, turkeys, and other birds were left out of major reforms targeting the meat production and processing industries—to this day, there's not a unmarried regulation protecting chickens from corruption. The rise of industrialized poultry farming in the 1920s, nevertheless, was linked to several major outbreaks of disease, as affliction is a natural byproduct of unnatural mill farming atmospheric condition. In 1957, the Poultry Products Inspection Act required the USDA's inspection arm to inspect birds before, during, and after slaughter and to prevent mislabeled poultry products from going to market place.

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1958: Humane Methods of Slaughter Deed

In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Humane Methods of Slaughter Human activity, which set the first standards for reducing pain and suffering during the procedure of transforming living, feeling animals into food. It called for animals to be apace and effectively stunned through mechanical, chemical, or electrical means before they were killed. While groundbreaking, the human activity did not include birds or fish and fabricated no provisions for how animals should be treated before slaughter.

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1967: Wholesome Meat Human action

The 1960s were a decade of reform—and also a decade when America'due south food-supply concatenation became vastly more sprawling and complex. The 1967 Wholesome Meat Human activity attempted to create uniform standards past compelling the states to create inspection programs that were equal to federal USDA procedures.

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1971: Chicago stockyards close

Since they kickoff opened nearly a century earlier in 1865, the 475 acres of land known as the Chicago stockyards helped give birth to one of America's great cities and positioned Chicago as the meat-processing capital of the world. Animals were shipped in that location from all over the country, leaving as meat products that fed people across the earth. 1971 signaled the terminate of ane of the greatest eras in meatpacking history when the Chicago stockyards closed.

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1970s: Rise of factory farming

In the 1970s, the pork and beefiness industries finally followed the lead of the poultry industry in adopting factory farming as the preferred business model for meat product. Designed to maximize product and profits while minimizing expenses without regard to animal welfare, factory farms breed, enhance, kill, and process hundreds of thousands of animals in enclosed, unclean, night, poorly ventilated, and horribly overcrowded indoor industrial settings without fresh air, grass, or sunlight. Not only are disease and infections rampant, but animals—ofttimes from birth—undergo tortuously cruel procedures like tail docking, beak-burning, and castration without whatsoever pain mitigation, all of which is performed by poorly paid, overworked, mostly-immigrant employees who are oft subject field both to physical injury and psychological trauma.

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1978: Slaughter Act updated

In 1978, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act was expanded to include imported meat. The update required meat producers overseas to meet or exceed USDA standards in how their animals were killed to be eligible for import to the U.South.

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1980: Mass consolidation begins

In 2010, the USDA and U.S. Justice Department heard testimony about a massive and widespread consolidation in the meat industry—detractors called information technology a conspiratorial monopolization—that witnessed countless small farms and ranches gobbled upwards by but a few industry giants. In the iii decades between 1980 and 2010, the number of hog farms dropped from 660,000 to 71,000 for an incredible decline of 89%—cattle ranches decreased by 40%. During that time, the portion of supermarket prices that ranchers and farmers received was cut in half—in 1980, a squealer farmer took a 50% cut from pork sold at market but by 2010, the same farmer received just 25%.

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1980: PETA

In 1980, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was formed and quickly grew into the country's premier animal rights organization. I of its near effective tactics was secret investigations—often conducted by moles who sought jobs in slaughterhouses to serve as spies—that dramatically increased public awareness of horrifying and systematic cruelty to animals at slaughterhouses, meat-processing facilities, and manufactory farms. Their piece of work too exposed horrible abuses at animal laboratories, fur and leather producing facilities, regime labs, and animal-based entertainment operations such as circuses.

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1990: 'Ag-gag' laws emerge

In 1990, Kansas passed the Farm Creature and Field Ingather and Research Facilities Protection Act, which made it a crime to trespass on animal-processing plants for the purpose of recording or otherwise documenting animal abuse and other violations. States across the country before long followed suit, passing their own laws and expanding on banned beliefs, like getting a job at a meat plant for the purpose of exposing creature cruelty. Today many big agriculture states enforce strict ag-gag laws, many of which come with severe penalties and are fifty-fifty considered "eco-terrorism" nether the police.

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2001: 'They Die Piece past Piece'

On April 10, 2001, the Washington Post printed a front-folio story with the headline "They Die Slice by Piece." Harkening back to Sinclair'southward "The Jungle," the commodity chronicled in graphic detail appalling and widespread instances of animals commonly and regularly existence chopped apart at the joints, bled to death, skinned, disemboweled, dunked in tanks of boiling water, and strung up past a unmarried leg while alive and fully conscious, later on existence improperly stunned or not stunned at all. Too like "The Jungle," the article sparked widespread outrage, raised mainstream sensation of creature cruelty at factory farms, and sparked boycotts of fast-food companies driving much of the demand.

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2020: COVID-19 hotspots

In the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus began spreading out of command across the country, meatpacking facilities apace emerged as major COVID-19 hotspots, even in places where virus infections were otherwise low. Meatpacking is concrete, easily-on work conducted indoors in close quarters, atmospheric condition that put meat processing workers—who are mostly immigrants and African-Americans—at take a chance more than about any population other than nursing home residents and prisoners. 2020 reporting from ProPublica and other organizations revealed a concerted campaign from the highest levels of the manufacture to downplay the crisis, stymie testing efforts, resist reforms and safety measures, and misreport infection rates.

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2020: Modern monopolies

The coronavirus crunch revealed just how vulnerable America'southward nutrient supply chain is to disruption and simply how dangerously consolidated the meat industry has become. Different at the turn of the 20th century when the Big Five controlled virtually the entire manufacture, today, just four companies dominate America's meat production—Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS control more 85% of America's beef supply. In Apr 2020, the Organization for Competitive Markets joined a growing chorus of industry watchers who called on Congress to finally alive up to the promise of the Packers and Stockyards Act a century before and break upward the meat-processing monopolies once and for all.

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