Wed Dec 20 07:41:41 EST 2006
Published by EH.NET (December 2006)
Richard Perren, _Taste, Trade and Technology: The Development of the
International Meat Industry since 1840_. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate
Publishing, 2006. xi + 285 pp. $100 (cloth), ISBN: 0-7546-3648-8.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Lee A. Craig, Department of Economics, North
Carolina State University.
Roughly an hour's drive from my home in Raleigh, North Carolina, in
the town of Tar Heel, one finds what is advertised as "the world's
largest pork slaughterhouse," where the Smithfield Packing Company
"processes" 30,000 animals a day. A hundred years ago, according to
figures cited by Alfred Chandler, Armour and Swift each averaged
about the same number of animals per day.[1] At the time, pork alone
accounted for between two and four percent of U.S. GDP.[2] For good
reason Chandler emphasized the meat industry in his masterful study
of the rise of big business. The meat trade remains big business.
Richard Perren's _Taste, Trade and Technology_ documents the history
of that business. Over the past three decades, Perren, Reader in
Economic History at the University of Aberdeen (UK), has written
extensively about the meat trade, and this volume serves as something
of a summary of his research. It is the trading specifically, rather
than production, which receives the majority of the focus, and it is
the international component of that trading that gets the most
detailed treatment. In particular Perren places British consumers at
the center of the trade -- the hub, so to speak -- around which the
major producer-exporters revolve. Those exporting countries include
the United States, Argentina, Uruguay, Australia and New Zealand.
This arrangement is appropriate enough, because in the late
nineteenth century the huge British market imported the equivalent of
roughly ten million animals a year, the majority of which came from
the aforementioned exporting countries.
The volume is divided into three sections, each corresponding with a
chronological era. The first era (1840-1914) covers what might be
referred to the rise of the industry, and, as Perren writes, "the
main development driving the whole process was technical change in
the meat processing industry" (p. 38). Although meat, on the hoof or
otherwise, had been traded for centuries, Perren documents the
tremendous growth of the trade in the late nineteenth century, as
production expanded in the exporting countries. The second era
(1914-1945) emphasizes the ways in which governments increasingly
exerted "official control" over the industry, including "enforcement
mechanisms, in the form of new health and veterinary regulations,
commercial marketing methods, the abandonment of free trade and the
introductions of tariffs and quotas" (p. 130). For those who come to
the volume from the agricultural production side of the industry,
this section is potentially the most informative, summarizing as it
does the origins and subsequent history of the public policies
governing the meat industry. Part Three covers the period from the
end of World War II to the present, and extends the themes in Part
Two with the addition of a detailed account of changes on the demand
side of the market, in particular the "relative changes in the
consumption of different types of meat" (p. 188).
Readers looking for a detailed account of the actual production side
of the trade -- that is, taking the animal from birth to the
processing plant, will not find this volume as useful as those
interested in what happens to the carcass after the slaughter.
Similarly, Perren works harder at explaining the impact of specific
technologies, such as mechanical refrigeration, than he does at
explaining the technologies themselves. However, there are plenty of
good volumes on animal husbandry and technology; Perren's
contribution is synthesizing and summarizing the history of the
trade. At this he succeeds.
Perren's strength is his ability to unravel the mysteries and
competing interests behind the scenes of negotiations concerning the
meat trade and then concisely summarizing them for the reader.
Scholars often find themselves in a situation in which we need a few
pages on a particular topic, only to find either a paragraph or a
several-hundred-page volume. With respect to the meat trade, however,
Perren's concise explanations of a subject like the New Zealand
marketing board or the Ottawa Imperial Conference of 1932 are
informative without being too detailed for the non-expert, and even
readers who think New Zealand lamb is an overrated dish, will be
edified by Perren's summary of that dish's political economy.
Needless to say, in each case, the quest for profit, albeit with
increasing help from the coercive powers of the state, is at the
heart of the story.
That story concludes with the present in which the confined hog
operations of eastern North Carolina represent the apogee of the
industry's evolution over the past two hundred years. With more hogs
than people -- ten million, at last count -- the state is home to a
pork industrial complex that concentrates production, with thousands
of animals penned together, in sheds the size of football fields.
Dealing with the concentrated waste from these operations, on a
coastal plain only a few feet above sea level, is a monumental
engineering feat -- one that has yet to be solved in a cost-efficient
manner. The open air lagoons in which the waste is processed emit an
odor that can be detected miles away. A standard story about the
local industry goes like this: A traveler from other parts, passing
through on his way to some place else, pulls into a "down east" gas
station to fill up. Upon emerging from his car, he detects the
unfamiliar and oppressive odor. Sniffing, he turns to a local and
asks: "What does that smell like to you?" The local pretends to
sniff, and, as if recognizing the smell for the first time, responds:
"Smells like money to me." Indeed. As Richard Perren documents, the
meat industry has smelled like money for a long time.
Notes:
1. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. _The Visible Hand: The Managerial
Revolution in American Business_. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1977, pp. 391-401. 2. Lee A. Craig and Matthew T. Holt.
"Mechanical Refrigeration, Seasonality, and the Hog-Corn Cycle,"
unpublished manuscript, North Carolina State University, 2006, p. 28.
Lee A. Craig is Alumni Distinguished Professor of Economics at North
Carolina State University. His most recent published research on Sus
scrofa domesticus includes, with Matthew T. Holt, "Nonlinear Dynamics
and Structural Change in the U.S. Hog-Corn Cycle," _American Journal
of Agricultural Economics_, 88 (Feb. 2006): 215-33.
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