In Meat We Trust (49 page)

[>]
“Big Three”: A useful account of the battle for standards is in Samuel Fromartz,
Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew
(Harcourt, 2006), chapter 6.

[>]
“like robins”: C. Clare Hinrichs and Patricia Allen, “Selective Patronage and Social Justice: Local Food Consumer Campaigns in Historical Context,”
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics
21 (2008): 330. Their essay details the background of the campaign.

[>]
Alternative livestock and meat production: On the complications of making meat, see Chelsea Bardot Lewis and Christian J. Peters, “A Capacity Assessment of New England’s Large Animal Slaughter Facilities as Relative to Meat Production for the Regional Food System,”
Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems
27, no. 3 (September 2012): 192–99; Lauren Elizabeth Gwin, “New Pastures, New Food: Building Viable Alternatives to Conventional Beef” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California–Berkeley, 2006); and Lauren Gwin, “Scaling-up Sustainable Livestock Production: Innovation and Challenges for Grass-Fed Beef in the U.S.,”
Journal of Sustainable Agriculture
33 (2009): 189–209. The point about lack of livestock farmers is made in C. Clare Hinrichs and Rick Welsh, “The Effects of the Industrialization of US Livestock Agriculture on Promoting Sustainable Production Practices,”
Agriculture and Human Values
20, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 125–41.

[>]
The rules that the USDA: For a summary of the rules, see U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Market and Trade Economics Division and Resource Economics Division,
Recent Growth Patterns in the U.S
.
Organic Foods Market
, by Carolyn Dimitri and Catherine Greene, Information Bulletin no. 777, September 2002, p. 19.

[>]
“custom-kill”: Quoted in Rod Dreher, “USDA-Disapproved: Small Farmers and Big Government,”
National Review
27 (January 2003); accessed online. Dreher interviewed Jenny Drake, who, at this writing, still owns Peaceful Pastures. She eventually found USDA-sanctioned slaughtering facilities.

[>]
“I’d have to build”: Quoted in ibid.

[>]
“I told them”: Quoted in ibid.

[>]
“do we want to let people”: Quoted in ibid.

[>]
“hire someone”: The Massachusetts man’s problem is detailed in Molly Colin, “Elite Meat: Shoppers Sold on Organic Produce Find Its Main-Course Counterpart—Certified Beef, Poultry, and Pork—to Be Elusive,”
Christian Science Monitor
, July 14, 2003; accessed online.

[>]
“a little bit bigger piece”: Quoted in Worth Wren Jr., “Beefing Up Bottom Line—Cattle Industry Using Range of Marketing Initiatives,”
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
, May 7, 2000; accessed online. A useful survey of the state of grass-fed beef just after the turn of the century is John Lozier, Edward Rayburn, and Jane Shaw, “Growing and Selling Pasture-Finished Beef: Results of a Nationwide Survey,”
Journal of Sustainable Agriculture
25, no. 2 (2004): 93–112.

[>]
“political and culinary appeal”: Kim Severson, “Grass Roots Revolution—Will New Beef Put Corn-Raised Cattle out to Pasture?”
San Francisco Chronicle
, June 19, 2002; accessed online.

[>]
“add[ed] in the invisible costs”: Michael Pollan, “Power Steer,”
New York Times Magazine
, March 31, 2002; accessed online.

[>]
“As you know”: Quoted in Kim Severson, “High Stakes—Bay Area at the Forefront of the Big-Bucks Battle Between Proponents of Grass-Fed Beef and Traditional Cattlemen,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, June 19, 2002; accessed online.

[>]
“People want to imagine”: Quoted in ibid.

[>]
“prominent”: Milford Prewitt, “Chefs Challenge Peers to Serve Grass-Fed Beef,”
Nation’s Restaurant News
, May 20, 2002, p. 3.

[>]
“ironic”: Quoted in ibid., 235.

[>]
“nanny culture”: Ibid.

[>]
“a haughty organization”: Quoted in ibid.

[>]
“We are an elitist”: Quoted in ibid.

[>]
“I consciously deferred”: Quoted in Stacy Finz, “Founder Says New Owners Changing Product Protocol,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 22, 2009; accessed online.

[>]
Then there was: It’s clear that
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
, like
The Jungle
and
Silent Spring
, was less launching pad than tipping point. It resonated with a public accustomed to asserting its consumer rights and to the allure of alternative foods, whether meat or arugula. But there’s no doubt that it also energized a new generation of food activists and converted millions of otherwise indifferent consumers into organic aficionados.

[>]
“The Easter holiday”: See “Letters,”
Lancaster (PA) Intelligencer Journal
, March 28, 2002. I found many examples of these form letters, including ones sent on the occasion of World Farm Animals Day, October 2, also the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi.

[>]
“Nothing [is] more heartbreaking”: Steve Moest, “Why Pork Producers Do What They Do,”
Freeport (IL) Journal-Standard
, May 6, 2012; accessed online.

Bibliography

Five minutes into this project, I realized that its potential bibliography was approximately the size of the known universe and that I could spend the next decade doing nothing but wading through primary sources—newspapers and magazines, meatpacking and agricultural trade journals, congressional hearings, USDA reports, various other federal, state, and city government documents, and the like. And that didn’t include an equally stupefying quantity of secondary sources: what other historians as well as sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, and random writers had written about cattle, hogs, chickens, slaughterhouses, ranching and ranchers, feedlots, food retailing, veterinary medicine, vegetarianism, and a nerve-shattering collection of other topics more or less related to meat.

Conclusion: Trying to read every relevant source was a fool’s game. Nor, I soon realized, could I include everything that I read in this bibliography; a full list would run to hundreds of pages and my editors would hate me. What follows, then, is the rational middle ground: a bibliography of primary and secondary sources that I found to be the most useful. (Many additional sources, however, are cited in the notes.)

As a historian, I focus on primary documents; I want to find out for myself “what happened,” rather than another historian’s interpretation of what happened. That meant that I read thousands of primary documents. Rather than detail each one (another fool’s errand), I’ve instead identified the databases and catalogs from which I drew sources, as well as the titles of the most important newspapers on which I relied and serials that are not indexed in the databases.

Note: Most of the databases listed are attached to digital
indexes
, but the magazines, journals, and documents to which those indexes refer are not necessarily digitized. This project involved hours of communing with microfilm and microfiche machines.

DATABASES AND CATALOGS

19th Century Historical United States Newspapers

19th Century Masterfile

ABI/INFORM Global

Access World News

Accessible Archives

Agricola

Alt-Press Watch

American Historical Imprints

American Periodical Series (digital and microfilm)

Archive Finder

Catalog of U.S. Government Publications

Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CORE)

Early American Imprints

Early American Newspapers

Early American Periodicals

EBSCOhost

genealogybank.com

HarpWeek

Hathi Trust Digital Library

Home Economics Archive:

      Research, Tradition, History (HEARTH)

Index to USDA Agricultural Economic Reports

Index to USDA Agriculture Information Bulletins

Making of America

National Agricultural Library

newspaperarchive.com

ProQuest Congressional

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Readers’ Guide Retrospective

WorldCat

PERIODICALS AND NEWSPAPERS

Alternative Agriculture News

American Egg and Poultry Review

American Poultry Advocate

American Poultry Journal

Boston Globe

Chicago Tribune

Des Moines Register

Farm Journal

Farm Quarterly

Feedstuffs

Godey’s Lady’s Book

Meat and Live Stock Digest

Milwaukee Sentinel

National Hog Farmer

National Provisioner

New York Produce Review and American Creamery

New York Times

Poultry Science

Reliable Poultry Journal

Successful Farming

Wallaces Farmer

Wall Street Journal

Washington Post

OTHER PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES

Ackerman, Michael. “Interpreting the Newer Knowledge of Nutrition: Science, Interests, and Values in the Making of Dietary Advice in the United States, 1915–1965.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2005.

Aduddell, Robert, and Louis Cain. “The Consent Decree in the Meatpacking Industry, 1920–1956.”
Business History Review
55, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 359–78.

———. “Location and Collusion in the Meat Packing Industry.” In
Business Enterprise and Economic Change: Essays in Honor of Harold F. Williamson
, edited by Louis P. Cain and Paul J. Uselding, 85–117. The Kent State University Press, 1973.

———. “Public Policy Toward ‘The Greatest Trust in the World.’”
Business History Review
55, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 217–42.

Allen, Patricia. “Reweaving the Food Security Safety Net: Mediating Entitlement and Entrepreneurship.”
Agriculture and Human Values
16, no. 2 (June 1999): 117–29.

———. “Sustainability and Sustenance: The Politics of Sustainable Agriculture and Community Food Security.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California–Santa Cruz, 1998.

———.
Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System
. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

Allen, Patricia, ed.
Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability
. John Wiley & Sons, 1993.

Amstutz, David Lee. “Nebraska’s Live Stock Sanitary Commission and the Rise of American Progressivism.”
Great Plains Quarterly
28, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 259–75.

Anderson, E. N.
Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture
. New York University Press, 2005.

Anderson, Jay Allan. “‘A Solid Sufficiency’: An Ethnography of Yeoman Foodways in Stuart England.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1971.

———.
Industrializing the Corn Belt: Agriculture, Technology, and Environment, 1945–1972
. Northern Illinois University Press, 2009.

———. “Lard to Lean: Making the Meat-Type Hog in Post-World War II America.” In
Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart
, edited by Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz, 29–46. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Anderson, Molly D., and John T. Cook. “Community Food Security: Practice in Need of Theory?”
Agriculture and Human Values
16, no. 2 (June 1999): 141–50.

Anderson, Virginia DeJohn.
Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America
. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Apple, Rima D.
Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture
. Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Appleby, Joyce. “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic.”
Journal of American History
68 (March 1982): 833–49.

Arnould, Richard J. “Changing Patterns of Concentration in American Meat Packing, 1880–1963.”
Business History Review
45, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 18–34.

Aronson, Naomi. “Nutrition as a Social Problem: A Case Study of Entrepreneurial Strategy in Science.”
Social Problems
29, no. 5 (June 1982): 474–87.

———. “Social Definitions of Entitlement: Food Needs, 1885–1920.”
Media, Culture and Society
4 (1982): 51–61.

Arthur, Anthony.
Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair
. Random House, 2006.

Atkinson, Eva Lash. “Kansas City’s Livestock Trade and Packing Industry, 1870–1914: A Study in Regional Growth.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas, 1971.

Backer, Kellen. “World War II and the Triumph of Industrialized Food.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2012.

Baker, Andrew H., and Holly V. Izard. “New England Farmers and the Marketplace, 1780–1865: A Case Study.”
Agricultural History
65 (Summer 1991): 29–52.