Controversies in Modern Meat Production

Appears in

Published 2004

About

Invisible Animals

Historian William Cronon has written eloquently about the disappearance of our food animals as the system of meat production changed in the 19th century:

Formerly, a person could not easily have forgotten that pork and beef were the creation of an intricate, symbiotic partnership between animals and human beings. One was not likely to forget that pigs and cattle had died so that people might eat, for one saw them grazing in familiar pastures, and regularly visited the barnyards and butcher shops where they gave up their lives in the service of one’s daily meal. . . . As time went on, fewer of those who ate meat could say that they had ever seen the living creature whose flesh they were chewing; fewer still could say that they had actually killed the animal themselves. In the packers’ world, it was easy not to remember that eating was a moral act inextricably bound to killing. . . . Meat was a neatly wrapped package one bought at the market. Nature did not have much to do with it.

—William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, 1991