Meating the Demand

Carnality and pollution, historically meat's foremost negative connotations, have been represented in all forms – perhaps the most interesting of which is fine art (S. Twigg 1983). Take, for example, the carnal leitmotif of the butcher shop in Flemish and Italian paintings of the 16th century. Scholar Barry Wind writes that the burlesque characters of "these paintings exploit the meat stall as a metaphor for wantonness." In Bartolomeo Passarotti's "Butcher Shop," the licentious expressions of the butchers played on "vulgar colloquial connotations of the word butcher shop, 'beccheria,' which seems to have been used synonymously with sexual encounter." The implied pollution in these paintings is the moral and spiritual decrepitude of the leering, wayward butcher.

But pollution of another kind was on the horizon. The late 18th and early 19th centuries marked a period of rapid change for the West as the Industrial Revolution transformed the way people lived and ate. Innovations in industry were charged with notions of progress and prosperity – meat, formerly a rare luxury, would be available and affordable to all. This kind of ubiquity could only be made possible by a systematic overhaul of the process by which animals became meals. Engineering advances proferred machines that sped the preservation and dissemination of meat. These machines required the labors of hundreds of thousands of workers, and the entire apparatus ran on the vast capital investment of business organizations.

As Upton Sinclair's The Jungle showed, the sullied reality of packing houses was gruesome: "Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water—and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast."

The shock of Upton's novel did less to inspire aid for the oppressed working class (as he had hoped), than it horrified meat eaters around the country. The public uproar spurred the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, which were both signed on June 30, 1906. This cemented the Food and Drug Administration as a law enforcement institution in the name of consumer (read: citizen) health.

This is the system we've inherited. Industrial production has become industrial overproduction. Government subsidies keep the cycle going, driving prices continually up. South Korea gives proof that not everyone agrees with what the FDA pardons, that we are a world still concerned with the safety of its products. But many people are also concerned with contamination by the meat industry on an environmental level. Take one example of the industry's impact: vast quantities of water are used to irrigate cattle feedlots, then factory farm run-off returns to natural bodies of water or seeps into water supplies causing irreparable damage. The 2006 United Nations report called the meat industry "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."

Even as global demand for meat increases, consumers are more and more removed from the pollution that the meat industry generates. So many of us just don't know. That's why Mark W. Rosegrant, director of environment and production technology at the nonprofit International Food Policy Research Institute champions "a stronger public relations campaign in the reduction of meat consumption — one like that around cigarettes — emphasizing personal health, compassion for animals, and doing good for the poor and the planet." Because it's the remove, the lack of awareness, the total obscurity by which meat arrives on the dinner table, that carries us from Passarotti's colloquial and smutty (but personal) butcher shop to Roy Lichtenstein's 1962 piece, "Meat." Meat, an abstracted mass. A product. A profit.

Leah Campbell

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