Industrial Meat

Beginning in the 1820s, entrepreneurs discovered that whenever possible, it was cheaper to move the slaughterhouses and meat-processing facilities to the animal than to ship live animals to major population centers. As long as the meat could be kept from spoiling and could be transported economically, large-scale production facilities near livestock sources permitted economies of scale in meat production. Until well after the Civil War, these processes were limited to cured pork, as the meat still had to be transported considerable distances to population centers under nonrefrigerated conditions. (Well into the 1870s it remained easier to transport live cattle by moving them “on the hoof” than to try to convey fresh meat very far.) Fragmenting the labor processes to increase productivity and centralizing distribution reduced costs significantly—and eventually changed the types of pork consumed in America.