In Meat We Trust (13 page)

American food prices had risen steadily since the beginning of the century thanks to a growing population—up by a third in the first decade or so of the century—and high demand for foodstuffs in the United States and around the world. American farmers, however, could not keep pace, and the chronic gap between supply and demand pushed prices for all foods up, ever up. In 1910, millions of Americans joined a meat boycott to protest what they regarded as exorbitant prices. But when war broke out in Europe in 1914, demand for American grains and meat soared, as did the prices and public fury. In 1916, Congress convened hearings on high food prices, but as had been the case in 1888 and 1902, Americans were not interested in relationships between and among food prices, war, weather, global demand, agricultural technology, and population size. They only knew they were paying more at the butcher shop, a fact to which an Armour vice president was resigned: when summoned to testify at the hearings, he commented that there were “a hundred and one million
people in this country” with no interest in the price farmers received for cattle. They cared only about “how cheap they [could] buy their beef steak.”

True enough. In early 1917, just weeks before the United States officially entered World War I, food riots erupted in several cities. “We shall have
in this country a political revolution, if not something worse,” warned one government official, “unless the question of the furnishing of foods to the people at the lowest possible price is taken up.” President Woodrow Wilson, then starting his second term in office, could not ignore the outrage. He ordered the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate the national food supply system, from farming and food processing to food storage and retail sales.

The commission’s analysts ignored Wilson’s orders. Most of them supported socialist ideals or were progressives who favored using federal authority to foster both economic efficiency and social justice. They were convinced that the Beef Trust was to blame for the nation’s food woes, and that the packers had escaped legal prosecution because they had bribed judges, jurors, or both. What was supposed to be a general analysis of American food production and distribution morphed into a microscopic analysis of the meatpacking industry. FTC researchers combed through packers’ company records, hoping to accomplish what courts had failed to do: find evidence that the meat men had violated interstate commerce and antitrust laws, or used cold storage to hoard food and thus control prices. The resulting six-volume report, which often oozed the biases of its authors and sometimes merged fact and fiction in order to score points, concluded that the sheer size of the “trust” rendered it so inefficient that it functioned as a drag on the nation’s food supply; that, analysts concluded, had caused rising food prices. They recommended that federal authorities seize the railroad and stockyard facilities used to transport, buy, and sell livestock, as well as the packers’ refrigerator railcars and cold-storage facilities, and combine all of it into a meat production system owned and operated by the federal government. Doing so, the analysts contended, would break the trust’s lock hold on the nation’s food supply, allow smaller packers to compete, and drive down food prices.

The idea was not as far-fetched as it sounds. The transition to an industrial economy had provoked a deep-rooted anxiety about capitalism and free markets, expressed in part by the middle-class embrace of socialism. Advocates of nationalization argued that government ownership and management would create a more efficient, productive economy and equalize the distribution of wealth and prosperity. When the United States entered World War I, the government had taken over the nation’s transportation and shipbuilding systems, and the American Federation of Labor, one of the nation’s most powerful unions (at a time when unions commanded attention), favored a plan to allow railroad workers to share management duties and profits with company owners.

In late 1918 and early 1919, the House of Representatives held weeks of hearings on legislation that would nationalize meatpacking and livestock trading. Fortunately for the packers, those hearings coincided with a “red scare” sparked by pitched battles between workers and employers. Many people blamed the violence on Bolsheviks who were believed to have infiltrated American factories and mills as part of a larger Russian plot to convert the world to communism. (The Russians had entered the war as a monarchy and departed as a communist state.) Socialism was one thing; in Americans’ hands it had become a comfortable middle-class belief. But the prospect of communists running amuck in the streets and on factory floors was too much to bear. When persons unknown bombed the homes of public officials around the country, opinion turned against anything and everything that smacked of socialism, nationalization, or communism. The Justice Department launched a crusade to root out infiltrators, and the Senate delved into alleged communist-sponsored activities. An Indiana senator demanded that the FTC analysts who had penned the meatpacking report be investigated for “sedition and criminal anarchy.”
The Senate obliged with an internal witch-hunt that included sifting through the trash at the homes of several FTC staff members.

That ended the effort to nationalize meatpacking, although the packers did not escape unscathed. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose political ambitions outweighed his scruples, seized the opportunity to have his reds and his packers, too. Although most of his attention was devoted to tracking down and deporting communist sympathizers, he let the packers know he was preparing a new criminal case against them. The companies’ leaders, weary of endless court battles, fended off what was sure to become a noisy and expensive contest by agreeing to divest their companies of most of their non-meat-related holdings: according to the consent decree they signed, they could no longer own shares of stockyards and newspapers, they could not function as retailers, and they could use their cold-storage facilities only for meat. In exchange, Palmer dropped his case.

The consent decree proved a mixed blessing for the packers. Louis Swift, who had taken control of the family business after his father’s death in 1903, shared the elder Swift’s eye for detail, cost cutting, and opportunity. In the wake of the decree, he and his colleagues streamlined operations and focused on extracting profit from what remained. Armour’s post-decree fortunes
proved more fragile. When Phil Armour died in 1901, leadership had passed to his son, J. Ogden, who expanded what his father had begun but committed the one sin the old man had warned against: he funded that growth with debt. Worse, he dumped company funds into firms that had nothing to do with meat or food and everything to do with his (mostly unwarranted) belief in his skills as a magician of profit. Burdened with a bewildering array of holdings and a mountain of debt, in 1923 the company went into receivership and ended up in the hands of its bankers. They nursed the money machine back to health; acquired Nelson Morris’s packing company, which was also teetering on the brink; and combined the assets, eliminating dead weight.

The consent decree wasn’t the only woe the packers faced. Per-capita meat consumption spiraled downward during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and for that, ironically, the packers had themselves to blame. They had built an efficient infrastructure for processing, transporting, and distributing an array of foodstuffs. As a result, Americans’ plates were filled with so much food and such a variety of it that meat no longer dominated the nation’s diet. But the kinds of food Americans wanted changed, too. Consider the breakfast cereal
mania that gripped the nation in the first decade of the century, as shoppers snapped up new products like Corn Flakes, Cream of Wheat, Malta Vita, and Granula. Critics complained that those cereals were no more nutritious than crackers or bread, and because they were highly processed, consumers paid anywhere from $5 to $12 for the privilege of eating a bushel of wheat that sold for a dollar. “It is not so much
that the new foods are better than the old,” argued the editors of a national weekly magazine, than that Americans had “been persuaded to eat them” thanks to advertising that featured “kindly old gentlemen, pretty maidens and chubby children” urging Americans to “partake of their diet and so to share in their health, beauty and benevolence.” But the critics missed the point. Urban Americans wanted what the cereals offered: convenience. Why waste time cooking and eating when there were so many other ways to spend it? The early-twentieth-century city offered a host of entertainments, from nickelodeons and vaudeville to beer gardens and amusement parks. The great wonder of the age, the automobile, of which Americans purchased some 9 million in the first twenty years of the century, allowed the nation to move faster and do more. The new breakfast foods may have been processed and (relatively) expensive, but they epitomized convenience. Open the package, pour some into a bowl, add a splash of milk, and eat. What could be simpler?

The national cornucopia wasn’t the only reason for the decline in meat eating. In the early years of the twentieth century, new ideas about diet and nutrition diminished the value of a meat-centric diet. The first blow arrived courtesy of Horace Fletcher, a wealthy businessman who devoted most of his time to exploring dietary fads and ideas. He conducted a series of self-experiments and concluded that eating less was better than eating more, and that one key to optimal health lay in chewing one’s food to a liquid state. Doing so, he claimed, amounted to a predigestive process that boosted stamina and endurance. (Upton Sinclair and his wife tried “Fletcherizing” but gave up on the diet because they lost so much weight.) Fletcher’s work attracted a surprising amount of attention from scientists, among them Yale University faculty member Russell H. Chittenden, who was intrigued by the small amount of protein that Fletcher consumed. For several months, Chittenden fed low-protein diets to a collection of soldiers and athletes, and his subjects demonstrated a marked increase in muscle tone, strength, and endurance. Chittenden concluded that Americans could and should eat less meat, certainly less than nutrition experts advised. The professor’s work, noted one admirer, “herald[ed] the collapse
of a fundamental fallacy in diet.”

Had Chittenden’s research remained closeted in his university ivory tower, it and he might not have mattered. But he was a skilled promoter, and news of his work reached deep into Americans’ daily lives. Those who ate meat at every meal courted disaster, one writer told readers of
Cosmopolitan
, at the time a national general-interest publication, because excessive meat consumption led to “proteid (meat) poisoning,”
and that, in turn, caused “brittle arteries.” A meat-rich diet was “utterly abnormal and must lead inevitably to disaster.” A professor at Columbia University explained to readers of
Good Housekeeping
that excessive meat consumption led to “gout, rheumatism
and other ‘uric acid disorders,’” and, worse, meat proteins putrefied in the intestines, spawning bacteria and “poisonous” byproducts. She advised women to feed their families less meat and more milk, eggs, and cheese. The advice, and its shaky science, earned an official seal of approval from C. F. Langworthy, the director of nutrition investigations at the federal Office of Experiment Stations: meat, he announced in a 1910 report, was “not essential
to a well-balanced diet,” and he advised Americans to eat more eggs and cheese, legumes and nuts.

The onset of World War I hastened the exit of meat from the center of the plate. Herbert Hoover, who served as the Wilson administration’s wartime food manager, asked citizens to support the Allies by changing their eating habits. Europeans needed food, he explained, and it was up to Americans to provide it. “We have a great surplus
of potatoes, vegetables, fish, and poultry,” he explained, but those foods were difficult to ship, and the government planned instead to export “concentrated foodstuffs—grain, beef, pork, fats, and sugar.” Fill up on eggs and cheese, he implored the nation, but leave beef and pork for the war. Americans complied (more or less) and learned they could live on less meat than they had once done.

But vitamins delivered meat its biggest blow. Scientists had long suspected that besides protein, carbohydrates, and fats, foodstuffs also contained a mystery substance that in some equally mysterious manner contributed to health. Scurvy, for example, was cured by eating certain fresh foods, especially citrus fruits. Why? What did those foods contain? In 1912, Polish chemist Casimir Funk offered an answer: a substance that he labeled “vitamines,” the “vita” for life and the “amine” because he believed they were amines. (Some are and some are not, and within a decade or so, the final
e
vanished from the word.) A year later, several American researchers working in different laboratories demonstrated that milk fat also contains a life-essential substance, what we now call vitamin A, “incontrovertible evidence,”
rejoiced one of the men, of a “hitherto unsuspected nutrient indispensable for health and . . . the maintenance of life.” Over the next few years, the vitamin publicity engine cranked into full gear as information once buried in scientific journals became fodder for the pages of newspapers and magazines eager to explain the virtues of spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, and other once-lowly foodstuffs. “Feed your body vitamines,”
urged a typical magazine essay published in 1919. The body demands these “Unknowns,” “mysterious substances that have defied chemical isolation and analysis, but which have a powerful and determining effect on growth.” Another writer warned readers by way of example, relating the tale of a mother and father determined to nourish their son, little Willie, with a diet “carefully balanced”
in proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Alas, little Willie “languish[ed]; he failed to grow; he whimpered and fell away.” A friend recommended that the parents feed the boy raw cabbage, advice “the father took for offensive humor and the mother for an insult.” Still, desperation knows no bounds and they piled Willie’s plate with cabbage. Lo and behold, he “began to grow and shout. . . . Little Willie is now nearly six years old, and he shows every promise of becoming a great football player.”