Meatpacking industry

“ The meat-packing industry affords an excellent example of the principle: The animal is surveyed and “laid off like a map”; and each workman as the carcass passes him has one operation to perform. One man sticks the pig, another scalds it, another pulls the hair from a particular portion of the body, one cuts the slits for the gambols, another inserts the sticks, still others hoist the body to the hanger, and so on as it proceeds along its course scores of persons are each doing a very limited portion of the work until the entire animal is prepared and packed for shipment. ”

“ But these restrictions of packer activities in no way affect the relations of mutual confidence and dependence between Armour and Company and the livestock producers.
The fundamental things remain, and they are these: The livestock industry must continue to exist and expand; producers must be rewarded with fair profits; livestock markets must be maintained and made more convenient; and the markets for meat products must be enlarged and extended. ”

“ In no department of the industry has the progress been so extensive as in pork packing. Only a few years ago, comparatively, it was impossible to kill hogs for packing purposes, except during the winter season, and the various packing plants located throughout the country worked during the winter months in their crude way, packing as many hogs as conditions would permit, turning out the cured meat in the spring, in inferior condition. ”

“ This foreign meat produced on cheap lands and with cheap labor is a constant menace to our own meat producing industry and will deter many from increasing their bands of cattle, so that we may see prices in the future advance instead of declining, because of the reduced home production. ”

“ But when the vast Western ranges were opened, and the great packing houses were established, the cheapness of range beef, refrigerated and delivered in Eastern cities, was used as a weapon to kill off the cattle industry of the East. ”

“ Five meat packers, Armour, Swift, Morris, Wilson, and Cudahy, and their subsidiary and affiliated companies, have monopolistic control of the meat industry and are reaching for like domination in other products. Their manipulations of the market embrace every device that is useful to them, without regard to law. Their reward, expressed in terms of profit, reveals that four of these concerns have pocketed in 1915, 1916, and 1917, $140,000,000. Comparisons between their present profits and those of the pre-war period are given below. ”

“ The grade of cattle was improved and great packing interests organized the industry on the basis of concentrated large scale production. About 1870 shipment of livestock from Chicago had become significant, and within a decade the refrigerator car revolutionized the packing industry by making possible the shipment of dressed beef not only to the markets of the Eastern United States but even to Europe. ”

“ To the general public, the meat-eating public, it ought to appeal as one of the most important features of any and all business in the whole country. It is the wall that stands between the meat-eating public and the sale of diseased meat. This Government inspection alone, if there were no other business or economic reasons, would be an all-sufficient reason for the existence of the packing and dressed-meat business on a mammoth scale. It should, if understood, make the general public a partizan supporter of the large packers. ”

“ I have seen cattle come into Armour's stock-yard so weak and exhausted that they expired in the corrals, where they lay for an hour or two, dead, until they were afterward hauled in, skinned, and put on the market for beef or into the canning department for cans. ”

“ Pseudo-scientific men are being put before the public as great authorities in human nutrition and these men are sending out plausible but most misleading eulogies of meat as a foodstuff possessing essential qualities for the lack of which the American people are suffering. The only possible reason for these frantic appeals to the American people to consume more meat is the depletion of the packers' profits by the steady decrease in meat consumption which has been going on for a number of years and which begins to threaten the future development of their industry. ”

“ The public has been told that meat animals and carcasses condemned as diseased are afterward secretly made use of by the packers and sold to the public for food in the form of both dressed meats and canned meats. Right here I desire to brand such statements as absolutely false as applied to the business of Armour & Co. I believe they are equally false as to all establishments in this country that are classed as packing-houses. ”

“ Armour, in an article in the "Saturday Evening Post," makes the flat-footed assertion that the Government inspection of the Beef Trust slaughter-houses is an impregnable wall protecting the public from impure meat, and that not an atom of diseased meat finds its way into the products of the Armours. ”

“ The industrial stomach cannot live without coal: industry is a carbonivorous animal, and must have its proper food. ”

“ The investment capital used in pork packing is much greater than for beef, for in slaughtering cattle there is comparatively little left that requires storage, but in slaughtering hogs fully seventy per cent of the carcass goes into the curing department, to stay from thirty to ninety days; consequently a much larger and more expensive set of buildings is required than for slaughtering cattle. ”

“ The cities and towns of this region are mainly receiving and collecting points for farm produce. Nearly every village is equipped with elevators and grain-handling machinery; the larger towns, as a rule, have stock-yards and the necessary facilities for cattle shipment; the large cities are usually centres of meat-packing. Most of the meat-packing is a necessity; for although cattle may be shipped alive and beef may be transported in refrigerator ships and cars, pork is not marketable unless pickled, salted, or smoked. ”

“ For the packer’s salesman is literally the salesman of the livestock producer at the final market, upon which all other markets depend. The advertising and educational activities conducted by the packer continuously broaden and intensify the ultimate market for the products which the livestock man produces. It devolves upon these agencies to keep the meat products moving towards final consumption, just as the man at the measuring spout of the old-fashioned threshing machine had to keep the grain out of the way and prevent congestion. ”

“ Packers have immense contracts, and if the war continues they must have lots of tinned beef. On the other hand, if the war stops the world must stock up again with tinned beef. We know that they expected to pay an average of at least one cent per pound more for their canners the past year, but that the great drought has forced so many cattle in, the owners were very thankful to take what they got and the packers were forced to their capacity to attempt to handle them in such quantities. ”

“ Practical butchers, who are also feeders, have proved by test that they can ship their beef cattle hundreds of miles to the big packer, have them slaughtered, dressed and returned at less cost than they can do their own killing. This is possible because the utilization of every scrap of the animals in valuable by-products, and the saving in labor by wholesale slaughtering and handling, pay all expenses, including the freight both ways, and leave a margin for the butcher besides. ”

“ Under present methods, fresh pork product is shipped to England and delivered in good condition to the consumer.
The important step in the evolution of “all-the-year packing” from “winter packing” was the introduction of the refrigerating machine, and in packing houses today little or no regard is paid to the outside temperature. Another great advantage is the transportation facilities now available. When killing hogs in large quantities the fresh pork product is sold [252] fresh and consumed as such, and a much greater revenue is derived than when salted as formerly, and sold as cured meats. ”

“ Progress has made such methods absurd, unprofitable and impracticable.
But the great machinery of economical production and distribution was not built in a day, or a year, or a decade. Armour and Company’s activities began more than fifty years ago. At first the packing house was only a butcher shop on an enlarged scale, preparing and handling pork products almost exclusively. Cattle were killed for local consumption only, as there was no such thing as cold storage, refrigerator car lines or branch houses for the distribution of fresh meats. ”

“ There is a type of beef carcass that is best and commands the best price, and it costs no more to produce than an inferior type. The same is true of mutton and pork. Any Armour branch manager will show you what these types are and the Armour Farm Bureau will furnish, without charge, information on improved methods of producing the sort of animals that are most in demand for meat purposes. ”

“ The arguments which would be levelled against the establishment of a central meat-packing plant in this country are many and obvious. In the first place full voice would be given to the apparent futility of sending a live animal from 20 to 600 or 700 miles merely to be killed, and to return the dressed carcase to be sold. ”

“ Trucks of cattle grunt through the noisy railway yards. There are huge killing establishments, and animals go to their death by the many thousand every day with a celerity which would awaken a Chicagoan. There are mighty avenues of chilled and frozen meat. Labour-saving machinery carries it on board the steamers which hasten across the Atlantic, carrying cheap beef to the London and Liverpool markets. Commerce is conducted on the latest scientific lines. The North Americans have nobbled the meat trade, and the Jews have control of the wheat market. ”

“ There is also the loss caused by the warble to the butcher—and through the butcher to the Army Service Corps. The presence of the fly-larva, which is quite a large creature, induces chronic inflammation in the tissues, and a state of things known to the trade as ‘licked beef,’ and unless the meat-salesman cuts away the affected parts the meat is unsaleable in the market, or greatly depreciated in value. ”

“ When meats are finished smoking the fire should be put out, the house opened up, giving it a free circulation of air, and the meats allowed to thoroughly dry and cool before being removed. Smoked meats should be handled as little as possible, for every time they are handled or piled on trucks, it detracts from their appearance. They become greasy and soon lose their bright, attractive appearance. After being cooled, the meat should not be handled until inspected [367] and packed for shipment, thereby preserving a very desirable appearance, as well as reducing the cost of labor in operation. ”

“ It is no easy trick to teach a man to cut meat properly; butchering is a skilled trade. As soon as it was apparent that the American Expeditionary Forces in France were to be greatly expanded in size, our officers overseas sent requests that several trained and experienced butchery companies be sent over to cut meats properly for the organizations abroad. In order to comply with this request there was added to the curriculum of the quartermaster training camp in Florida a butchery course in the cutting, boning, rolling, and tying of fresh and frozen beef. ”

“ Ultimately, our fresh Beef, Mutton and Pork, will come to us from the Prairies in refrigerating cars: each animal having been killed while in perfect health, unfevered and untortured by days of cramped, galled, and thirsty suffering, on the cars. This will leave their offal, including a large portion of their bones, to enrich the fields whence their sustenance was drawn and from which they should never be taken. The cost of transporting the meat, hides, and tallow, in such cars, would be less than that of bringing through the animals on their legs ”

“ The local butcher or livestock producer can little better afford to kill and prepare his own beef than he can afford to tan the hide and make his own shoes. There was a time, even in America, when the farmer himself actually did these things. ”

“ Pig breeders in the British Isles are more likely to find far stronger competition in the bacon manufactured in Canada and Denmark than in that produced in the United States. The pigs in the Dominion were of a mixed character, and more suitable for the production of mess or barrel pork, such as is used up country in the lumber districts of Canada; these barrels of fat pork and the other necessary, but not very varied, supplies of food are sent up into those parts where the lumbermen will work for some months entirely separated from the world. ”

“ Meat shortage is not a war problem only. We had begun to talk of it long before the war, and we shall find it with us after peace is declared. Great production of beef can take place only in sparse settlements. As the tide of increasing population flows over a country, the great cattle-ranges are crowded out, giving place to cultivated fields. More people means less room for cattle—a relative or even absolute decrease in the herds. ”

“ That we can find a market for an increased production of pork and bacon is certain. Last year, we paid the foreigner—and chiefly the Yankee—some three millions sterling for dead pig-meat, sent to us in the shape of hams, bacon, and pork. There is no reason why we should not this season increase our breeding-herds of swine and make some attempt to wrest from the foreigner this market. It lies at our doors; and the pig himself is perhaps the most profitable of all the meat-making machinery of the farm. The fecundity of the pig is such that the breeding-stock may be increased almost at will. ”