The Spanish conquistadors brought the first sheep to North America in the 16th century, when they arrived in present-day New Mexico. Later in the early 17th century, English, Dutch, and Swedish settlers brought sheep to the East Coast, and from there spread to other areas in North America. Initially, sheep met the settlers’ daily and immediate needs for wool to weave into fabric for cold-weather wear, as well as for meat. Sheep were eaten seasonally in the spring and summer on the farms where they were raised. Beyond that there was little or no market for mutton in the United States.

In the early 19th century, sheep farming developed into a larger industry because of an increased demand for wool in both national and international markets. By 1830 the growing wool manufacturing industry became increasingly important for the American economy, which demanded more domestic wool. This consequently resulted in increased meat output, as sheep were slaughtered at the end of their wool-productive life. At that time, the meat industry was locally concentrated where farmers sold these animals seasonally to nearby local butcher shops that supplied the local demand. For many more years, however, meat became a secondary product.

From the 1860s on, as the nation industrialized, urbanized, and grew wealthier amidst a wave of European immigration, demand for mutton rose. Midwestern meatpackers turned this meat into a buffer against periods of meat scarcity. When other meats ran short, meatpackers sent buyers to the western states—including California, Texas, and New Mexico—to secure castrated male sheep for slaughter.

Sheep meat markets developed in major cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. Sheep meat was more expensive than other meats and more appealing to the upper classes, so for much of the 19th century mutton or lamb was a rich person’s meal.

In the 1880s and 1890s, young lamb meat gained some popularity as a festive food with upper classes. A young lamb industry, known as a “hothouse,” developed in the East Coast and Midwest. These lambs reached the market by Christmas, and most of them were slaughtered by early spring. It was a prosperous business that remained seasonal.

Greater production reduced some costs and lowered prices, making sheep meat more affordable for low-income households. But beef and pork production also ramped up, and those meats became cheaper, too. Beef sold the best, and large meatpackers who had come to dominate the industry after the development of refrigerated railcars focused on that business.

Americans came to see mutton as an alternative meat, an inferior substitute in times of shortages and disruptions in the beef cattle and pork industries—you ate sheep only when there was nothing else. In popular culture and media, sheep meat was described as unpalatable animal waste. In 1897, a Ranche and Range article stated, “many people settled down to the belief that mutton was poor food.”

Sheep also came to be seen as a meat for immigrants, particularly those from southern and eastern Europe, who were America’s most reliable lamb eaters. American Indian tribes, particularly in Navajo country, also embraced lamb. These social and ethnic associations with sheep meat cemented its outsider status. Meanwhile, the meatpacking industry promoted beef as quintessentially American.

Not all bias against sheep meat was grounded in social prejudice. Some American consumers lost confidence in sheep meat after reports of meatpackers marketing lower-grade mutton and old ewes. Early in the 20th century it also became known that some retail butcher shops sold goat meat as lamb and mutton. Several sheep disease outbreaks made national news during the 1890s and early 1900s, deepening fears about the safety of eating sheep meat.

Americans soon lost not just their taste for sheep meat, but their talent for producing and preparing it. Local butchers did not dress (or gut) the sheep carcasses properly, or use proper mutton-cutting techniques. They did not always remove the red membrane that lines the inner surface of the lamb before cooking it. The waxy, lanolin flavor of this skin—the so-called “caul” or “fell”—may well have been why sheep acquired a reputation for being gamy and having a disagreeable taste.

Prejudice against sheep meat grew so great that it became too hard to change most Americans’ minds. World War I didn’t help. A 1917 “eat-no-lamb” campaign discouraged eating sheep that were needed to make wool. Then, with meat running low, Americans temporarily turned to eating sheep, and they remembered why they hadn’t liked it. Older, mature sheep being slaughtered during the war had a strong flavor and a tough texture.

After the Great War, mutton consumption remained low despite big price drops. Sheep raising became unprofitable for many operators in the West due to both excess supply and very weak demand. By then, the average per capita consumption of sheep meat in the United States was only five pounds per year, versus 67 pounds of beef or 71 pounds of pork.

Woolgrowers, meatpackers, and wholesalers didn’t give up. They started developing campaigns to encourage lamb and mutton consumption. In 1919, the National Woolgrowers Association launched a nationwide campaign to boost sheep meat consumption in the United States (which still persists in some ways) with the slogan “EAT MORE LAMB.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration attempted to help encourage the consumption of lamb and mutton as a means of conserving the available supply of pork and beef.

But 100 years later, none of these efforts have stuck. Since then, throughout the 20th century and into the present, production of sheep meat showed a significant decrease. Such decrease in production has been accompanied by higher prices of this meat responsible for the greater production costs. Overall profitability has been decreasing gradually due to higher production costs. Both high prices and short supply have diminished its consumption and prevented its increase. But also, there is a social sense of rejection toward sheep meat.

Today, sheep consumption tends to be seasonal—with lamb (and occasionally mutton) on American tables during Easter, Christmas, and other significant religious holidays. As the holiday season begins, sheep may be part of your celebrations—perhaps with a roast leg of lamb on your table but just as likely with a pair of wool socks in your pile of gifts.

The post Why Ewe Eat Lamb on Holidays (but Not the Rest of the Year) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Americans have always been distinguished by their love of meat. Where does that love come from?

One short answer: our ethnic heritage. Among whites, the English and Germans were two of the greatest meat-eating cultures in Europe.

But that answer is about as satisfying as an overcooked steak. So there is a longer and tastier explanation: Americans’ relationship to meat production and consumption is long-standing, and built on core beliefs that meat is not only tasty but essential to good health and an indicator of economic well-being. Indeed, Americans and much of the rest of the world by the mid-20th century believed meat eating was a defining characteristic of civilization. Meat, and lots of it, has stayed a constant throughout our history—though our preferences for particular kinds of meat have changed as the country, people, technologies, and health concerns have shifted.

Today, the United States’ identity is tied up with beef. But the country started out devoted to pork and remained that way for more than half of its history. This originally made sense—pork was the most popular meat among Germans, the second most common ethnic background of white Americans for most of our history. But our pork preference also reflected livestock practices and regional tastes. In the North and South, pork was popular, especially among rural folk who allowed their pigs to forage. In fact, pigs foraged even in New York City until the municipal government banned the practice in 1849.

Pork’s enduring advantage was its price. Americans shared with many other meat-eating people around the globe a preference for cheap meats. But, unlike the Europeans who settled in the Caribbean and South America, North Americans did not eat salted or jerked beef. In 18th- and 19th-century America, urban and rural residents alike typically consumed wet-cured pork.

This preparation style required hogs to be cut into pieces that were placed in barrels filled with a brine solution of salt, saltpeter, and sugar or molasses. Barrel salt pork was ubiquitous in American cooking. For instance, it was an ingredient and flavoring in Boston baked beans and navy bean soup. Fried salt pork was a garnish in recipes for chops and stews. Strips of salt pork, called “lardoons,” were threaded into beef, veal, and poultry to add flavor. Likewise, bacon started the 19th century as a poor person’s food but over time became an item that all Americans ate.

Americans loved beef, too, but it was a luxury item since it spoiled quickly and refrigeration was not cheap. When they could afford fresh beef, they bought it, usually for special occasions. This was a nod to many Americans’ roots in 19th-century England, where eating roast beef on Sunday symbolized affluence and good health.

America would switch to beef as its meat of choice slowly and only once it became cheap. The Great Depression brought change. While meatpackers tried to convince Americans to eat expensive ham and dry-cured pork products, consumers began to devour newer and cheaper forms of meat, especially hot dogs and hamburgers. A descendant of much older European sausage traditions, hot dogs were usually made from finely processed pork or beef trimmings—i.e., byproducts like hearts, cheeks, tongues, lungs, kidneys—and generally encased in sheep intestines cleaned in packing plants’ offal departments.

World War II accelerated the transformation, boosting overall meat consumption in the process. The Army provided ground beef, and so American GIs ate much more of it than Americans back home. When millions of soldiers returned to the states, they wanted to continue to eat hamburgers. Growing affluence made higher-quality beef more affordable, and the rise of the fast food and restaurant sectors propelled meat sales. By 1990, 45 percent of all beef that Americans ate was hamburger.

This doesn’t sound healthy to modern ears. But for most of our history, Americans assumed that eating any meat was essential for good health. German chemist Justus von Liebig was particularly responsible for stressing animal protein’s significance for human health. Like many 19th-century physicians and scientists, Liebig believed beef juices and teas were nutritious and powerful restoratives for sick people. He supported the industrial production of beef extracts as a means to encourage meat sales among those who could not otherwise afford to eat it. Specifically, Liebig promoted a thick, syrupy, dark brown spreadable form of condensed beef, with his Extract of Meat Company, established in 1865 with production facilities in Fray Bentos, Uruguay.

Although beef extract was not popular in meat-rich America, Liebig’s work on animal protein influenced many American scientists. One of these was Wesleyan University chemistry professor Wilbur O. Atwater, who stressed the importance of cost-efficiency in human diets in his work, which included service as the first director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Experiment Stations from 1888 to 1891. He advised working people, who needed more energy than wealthier Americans, to eat meat, but in cheaper cuts, including salted and canned meats. The USDA published Atwater’s Food and Diet in 1895, and home economists and others taught his moral economy of meat and nutrition.

But the science around meat and health changed—so the dominance of beef in America was relatively short-lived, only a half-century or so. The U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs’ Dietary Goals for the United States, published in 1977, warned that diets rich in meats and other sources of saturated fats and cholesterol were associated with killer diseases like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity. After the livestock and meat industry protested the blunt language about meat’s dangers in the Dietary Goals’ first edition, the government issued a second edition in the same year moderating some of the language. But Americans took heed.

In the 1970s, beef’s fall, due in large part to Americans’ health concerns, led to our shift to being a nation of chicken-eaters. In 1961, almost half of Americans’ meat consumption was beef and less than 20 percent poultry. Fifty years later, less than one-third of Americans’ meat consumption was beef and almost half was poultry.

Americans—concerned about health and the dangers of meat-borne diseases, including those caused by bacteria, viruses, and parasites, but especially bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or “mad cow” disease—began eating less red meat, i.e., beef and pork. Our fat intake also declined over the rest of the 20th century. However, concerns about eating red meat did not translate into a great upsurge in vegetarianism or veganism. Most affluent nations’ citizens, including Americans, have increasingly turned to poultry, ostensibly because it is less fatty than beef or pork.

Although poultry production creates less greenhouse gas than cattle production, chickens and turkeys produce a great deal of dangerous waste materials, and chicken nuggets—one of the most popular types of poultry consumption—are quite high in saturated fat and calories. Americans may believe their poultry choices are healthier than red meat, but eating chicken and turkey may be more symbolic than real in achieving greater health.

All of this American meat-switching has had an outsized impact on the world, because our love of meat has been one of the country’s great cultural exports, especially to China, which is fast becoming a significant meat consumer.

But will Americans ever give up their meat eating entirely? Maybe Americans will rethink their meat habits again when the alarming health and environmental consequences of China’s desire for meat become more apparent. Or maybe Americans’ love of meat—of bacon, hamburgers, hot dogs, and chicken nuggets—will endure, a legacy of the meaty history of the land of the free, and the home of a people brave enough to eat meat, despite its risks and costs.

The post What Our Gargantuan Appetite for Meat Says About America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So every year we harvest about 950 animals raised to our criteria—100 of our own buffalo, 150 from conservation groups, about 300 belonging to Native American tribes, and about 400 from private ranchers. Our small, independent meat company, Wild Idea Buffalo Company, turns them into steaks, ribs, jerky, and ground products that we send all over the United States.

You’ll notice that I said “harvest” rather than kill or slaughter. This is partly out of respect for the animals and partly a delicate way of differentiating our intimate operation from the large industrial slaughterhouses. But the term is not really a euphemism because, more like a gardener than most modern livestock growers, we go to the field where the buffalo live and pluck them from the grasslands while they are completely at ease. For us killing is a sacred act—not only for the animals but also for the humans who perform the act—and thus for the people who eventually eat the meat.

During the 1980s and most of the 1990s I raised cattle in the standard industrial model. I had calves every year, separated them from their mothers at about six months of age, and sent them off on trucks to feedlots in Nebraska, where they were fed corn in confinement. The whole process put them through months of panic and stress, causing them to excrete stress hormones like cortisol, which changed the flavor of their meat, and also made them lose weight. The industry views this as an economic problem. I came to view these terrified calves as a moral problem.

After a 15-year stint as a biologist and then meeting Jill, I began to reject the economic paradigm of feedlots and industrial slaughter. My work as a biologist led me to understand that converting healthy grasslands to sterile corn fields was an irresponsible insanity. Hanging around with Jill—a chef who makes Sunday meals in the old tradition and insists on finding sustainably grown food—made me realize that our food system was similarly problematic. Now I cringe to think of all the calves I loaded into semi-trailers and shipped off to ignoble deaths at the industrial slaughterhouses. After fattening on corn, they’d proceed through a production line of chutes and hydraulic conveyors until they reached the stun guns that knocked them out. They were hoisted upside down, bled to death, and immediately disassembled. A Detroit car plant in reverse. Treated like so much rubber and steel rather than living beings.

Slaughter wasn’t always like this. In my youth in rural Ohio it was a community event. I remember somber men splitting carcasses with a hand saw and pigs being butchered on a door laid across the tailgate of a pickup truck. We children would take our turns squatting beside the gut piles, learning the basics of life by poking them with a stick.

Sometime in the 1960s and 70s the process of killing changed. The butchers who work for us say that in the big, efficient, industrial plants, the job becomes monotonous and the workers become callous.

But what was the alternative to industrial slaughterhouses for our buffalo? Once Jill and I decided to change, we had to find a realistic alternative. Government regulations define how we treat, kill, and process animals. Most of these well-intended regulations have to do with cleanliness.

As I combed through the mountain of regulations I found an obscure but promising paragraph that referred to field harvest—killing animals on farms where they were comfortable and unstressed. When I asked our state meat inspectors about this they were willing to listen.

We found a co-op in Washington state that had read the same obscure paragraph in the Meat Inspection Act that I had. They had set up a trailer that satisfied all of the regulations. Jill and I flew out to look at this mobile abattoir and found that the co-op members had already done the hard work of making it regulation compliant. We watched as the customized truck and trailer pulled up at the farm at about the same time the federal meat inspector arrived and the humane slaughter of cows, sheep, and pigs commenced. The next day we were talking to the company that had made the trailer.

Our hopes were soon tempered by the reality of cost: a cool $250,000 for a custom truck and trailer that would meet our needs. That was far beyond our budget but word spread about our nascent plan and a like-minded investor stepped up.

Our version of the mobile harvester was a semi with trailer fitted out for cold Great Plains winters with large tires and heated water lines. Our winches had to be heavy-duty enough to bring a 1,500 pound buffalo into the trailer and get it up onto the skinning cradle. We worked out a low-velocity copper bullet that would just hit hard enough to stun the buffalo without passing through and endangering other buffalo in the herd.

But the mechanics of the slaughter was only half the process: We wanted to make sure that the buffalo never panicked. Before we did our first harvest, we spent thousands of hours learning to move through the herd in a pickup truck, gently, slowly, moving at oblique angles—never rushing. Taking advantage of the naturally docile nature of buffalo, we had to learn to take our time, training ourselves as much as them.

We were coached by an old friend by the name of Rocke Afraid of Hawk. Rocke and I had worked on a ranch together as young men and even then he saw meaning in everything and believed in all sorts of supernatural events. I have never been much for religion and spiritualism but Rocke could make a guy a believer. For the next 40 years we did not see much of each other but we came back together just in time for him to help me understand what the relationship between buffalo and men could be.

On the first day of the buffalo harvest Rocke told me that if he sang and beat on a small buffalo hide drum the buffalo would become even more at ease. I humored Rocke by letting him drum softly from the bed of the pickup. A very skeptical meat inspector rolled his eyes as he sat in the cab beside me. But, when we stopped 30 yards from the herd, a two-year-old bull stepped away from the rest. He turned his head to me and presented an easy, perfect target. He went down with a single shot and none of the other buffalo moved. Rocke was still singing in the back. When the inspector’s eyes caught mine, they were full of surprise. All I could do was shrug and shake my head.

After I backed the pickup into place, we bled the unconscious bull, and then picked the body up with an old hay bale lifter that we’d rebuilt to do the job. “Well,” Rocke said, “I told you.” He spoke matter-of-factly as he pinched a bit of tobacco from his cigarette and sprinkled it into one of the buffalo’s nostrils. “You just got to respect them.”

And then we drove the buffalo over to the mobile harvester where our butchers got to work.

So respect them we do. The men we hired to do the harvesting understood what Rocke was talking about. They turned the job of killing back into the solemn celebration it has been for 99.9% of human history. We’ve been killing that way for 12 years now. We’ve worked out how to run an operation that doesn’t stress the buffalo or the humans, and along the way the buffalo have reconnected us to the sacred. Our harvest crew smudges the rifle, the knives, and themselves with the smoke from a smoldering sage bundle every day before they begin their work. Our meat cutters, office staff, and the folks who make the jerky and smoked meats thank the buffalo for the honest work they have given us. We rest easy knowing we’ve treated our meat like the sacrament that it is.

The post Do You Know How Your Steak Was Killed? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This isn’t the rural economy we picture, said Leonard. This “felt like a feudal system where one company”—the biggest meat company in America—had power “over all the people.” How did the farmers we think of as small business owners and entrepreneurs essentially become janitors beholden to corporate titans?

In the 1940s, a farmer named John Tyson started shipping chickens. Tyson and others like him discovered that producing birds in bigger volume, mixing their own feed, and delivering the feed to contracted farmers gave their businesses an unprecedented level of “nimbleness and efficiency.” At the time, chicken was a specialty meat, similar to lobster today. Over the next few decades, thanks to further industrialization, and a partnership with McDonald’s that began in the 1980s, Tyson turned chicken into America’s cheapest and most popular meat.

As big companies like Tyson integrated vertically—taking over more and more aspects of the business, from feed and hatching to slaughtering and packing—they also bought up competitors and market share. Horizontal integration came hand in hand with vertical integration. This lack of competition, said Leonard, has created a lack of “economic sovereignty” in rural America and monopolies at the grocery store. Today, just three companies produce almost half the chicken in the U.S., and Tyson controls 4,000 American farms.

It’s not just chicken, however: The hog business was once highly profitable for mid-sized, independent producers. That changed in the 1990s, when Tyson decided to “chickenize” the business and raise hogs on a larger scale. Thanks to new technology—enormous waste dumps to store toxic feces, small gestation stalls to keep mother hogs from killing their young and one another other, and widespread antibiotics—deep-pocketed firms created a network of factory hog farms across the country. For every 1 percent increase in factory farms, the market price for hogs decreased by 1 percent. By the end of the 1990s, 90 percent of all U.S. hog farms were gone.

Today, “four companies have control over our meat system,” said Leonard. “They’re determining how animals are raised. They’re determining what drugs are fed to cattle. They’re determining what drugs are fed to chicken.”

In 2009, President Obama attempted to enact sweeping antitrust reforms to the meat industry. But, said Leonard, he was “rolled over” by lobbyists, reforms fell apart, and with no cop on guard, the industry today is more powerful than ever.

In the question-and-answer session, an audience member asked Leonard why farmers have remained independent, and why all the risk of producing meat falls to them.

Leonard said that big corporations systematically pushed risk and volatility to the farm level. Tyson knows that “farms are a crappy business,” he said. And big companies realized that people with debt hanging over their heads work harder than those put on salary. Farmers have no choice but to do business with the few companies in control—and to take whatever “abuse” these companies heap on them.

Another audience member asked if factory farming is indeed destroying rural America.

There are no comprehensive academic studies on the effects of vertical integration on communities, said Leonard. But in his own study of income data throughout Arkansas, Leonard found that 90 percent of the counties where Tyson operates fared worse than the rest of the state throughout the years when Tyson boomed. And anecdotally, Leonard said, he’s seen how companies like Tyson “seek out economically marginal communities” and “keep them economically marginal.”

While people aren’t going to up and quit eating meat, Leonard said that it’s heartening that local meat production is on the rise. But what, asked an audience member, can regular citizens and consumers do besides buying this type of meat?

You can’t vote at the grocery store, he said: Tyson makes a wide range of products packaged under other names. Plus, when companies grow too big, they render the market incapable of solving its own problems. However, antitrust law can reshape the economy to the benefit of consumers as well as smaller producers. Leonard believes a public policy approach to the meat industry is necessary—even though a solution that relies on government intervention remains unpopular in rural parts of the country that might need regulation the most.

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Nobody ever visits the stranded little community of Waldron, Arkansas. But even if they did, a tourist would never see the place for what it really is. Most outsiders would be fooled into thinking it was an actual small town.

On any given morning, the residents awaken and begin their routines along Main Street. Old men park their pickup trucks by the curb in front of the Rock Café, which opens early for breakfast. As the café’s booths and tables fill up, a congregation of old-timers in cowboy hats gathers in a loose ring of aluminum chairs out front, smoking and talking and stubbing out their cigarette butts in a bucket full of sand. Later in the morning, Chambers Bank on the south end of town opens up and the tellers cheerfully greet customers by name. On Thursday at noon, the livestock auction opens in a cavernous barn on the north side of town, drawing crowds of ranchers who haul steel trailers behind their trucks, with cows staring out between the horizontal slats. In the late afternoon, teenagers park their cars by the gazebo south of the auction barn, proudly displaying their Mustangs and Broncos like big game trophies.

These events have a rhythm of their own, the clockwork functioning of a small-town economy. But it’s just window dressing. All of it could cease to exist in a moment and have no impact whatsoever on the true Waldron, or its true economic reason for being. The real tempo of the town’s economic pulse is measured by the coming and going of semitrucks that roll down Main Street at periodic intervals, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In the middle of the night tanker trucks full of animal feed rumble past the empty stores and out onto country roads that lead into the hilly terrain that surrounds town. At dawn, other trucks trundle in from the hills, heaped high with battered metal crates full of chickens that exude clouds of white feathers along the highway. The tempo can be measured in the regular arrival of train cars full of grains and oilseeds that dump their loads at a feed mill that clanks and hums and churns all night, and in the parade of refrigerated trucks that pull up to a slaughterhouse near the feed mill and get loaded with pallets of frozen meat. This is the real functioning of Waldron, Arkansas, and its true reason for being. This is the heartbeat of Tyson Foods, the nation’s biggest meat company.

The Tyson plant on the north end of Waldron is the only thing that keeps the town on the map. Appropriately, many residents simply refer to it as “the complex.” That’s because the Tyson plant isn’t just a factory; it’s more like an entire small-town economy consolidated into one property. The complex contains its own feed mill and hatchery, its own trucking line, and a slaughterhouse that covers several acres of land and processes about 1 million dead chickens a week. The complex is like an economic dark star that has drawn into itself all the independent businesses that used to define a small town like Waldron, the kinds of businesses that were once the economic pillars of rural America.

Of course, tourists to Waldron would never see the Tyson plant, and not just because it sits on the northern fringe of town and away from Main Street. Visitors are stopped at its front gate and forbidden from exploring the grounds. So a tourist would have to be content to stroll along the sidewalks downtown, observing the fake Main Street, the deceptive array of little businesses that make it seem like a community.

This illusory appearance cloaks Tyson’s existence all the way from its roots in rural America to the grocery store shelves and restaurant menus where its products finally reach consumers. The average shopper is usually fooled when he or she peruses the meat aisle, seeing what appears to be an abundance of choices and products. The Tyson brand name wouldn’t necessarily stand out, with its logo gracing just a handful of products. But the rotisserie chicken slowly turning in its oven, the Bonici brand pepperoni, the Lady Aster brand chicken cordon bleu, the frozen chicken pot pie, and the Wright Brand bacon all come from the same company: Tyson. And then there is all the unlabeled meat that Tyson floods into the U.S. food system every day: the meat served in cafeterias, nursing homes, fast-food restaurants, and suburban eateries where more and more Americans eat their meals. There is a very good chance any of the meat purchased in these places was made by Tyson. Even if Tyson did not produce a given piece of meat, the consumer is really only picking between different versions of the same commoditized beef, chicken, and pork that is produced through a system Tyson pioneered. Tyson’s few competitors have resorted to imitating the company’s business model just to survive.

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