In ‘Red Meat Republic,’ the Story of How Beef Made Chicago and Changed America

Chicago’s connections to the meat processing industry are well known. The city was once known as the “hog butcher to the world.” But the beef industry didn’t just spur Chicago’s development. In a new book, historian Joshua Specht says the beef industry helped modern America itself. The book is called “Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America.” “I had been curious about food production since I was in college and thinking about our food choices,” Specht said about why he wanted to write the book. “I realized that the early history of beef production hadn’t really been well covered. We know the 20^th century story … McDonald’s, etc. … But this late 19th century story of the Chicago stockyards and the development of the American West hadn’t really been appreciated...MORE

By the late nineteenth century, Americans rich and poor had come to expect high-quality fresh beef with almost every meal. Beef production in the United States had gone from small-scale, localized operations to a highly centralized industry spanning the country, with cattle bred on ranches in the rural West, slaughtered in Chicago, and consumed in the nation’s rapidly growing cities. Red Meat Republic tells the remarkable story of the violent conflict over who would reap the benefits of this new industry and who would bear its heavy costs.
Joshua Specht puts people at the heart of his story—the big cattle ranchers who helped to drive the nation’s westward expansion, the meatpackers who created a radically new kind of industrialized slaughterhouse, and the stockyard workers who were subjected to the shocking and unsanitary conditions described by Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle. Specht brings to life a turbulent era marked by Indian wars, Chicago labor unrest, and food riots in the streets of New York. He shows how the enduring success of the cattle-beef complex—centralized, low cost, and meatpacker dominated—was a consequence of the meatpackers’ ability to make their interests overlap with those of a hungry public, while the interests of struggling ranchers, desperate workers, and bankrupt butchers took a backseat. America—and the American table—would never be the same again.
A compelling and unfailingly enjoyable read, Red Meat Republic reveals the complex history of exploitation and innovation behind the food we consume today. Amazon.com