PROSPERITY, DEPRESSION, REFORM 185In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a
searing account of working conditions in Chicago’s
meatpacking industry. He hoped to generate
sympathy for labor, but found his readers far more
disturbed by the factories that processed their meat.
As he later commented, “I aimed at the public’s
heart, and by accident I hit in the stomach.” His
investigation caught the attention of President
Roosevelt and other leaders, and led to one of the
nation’s first attempts to regulate food safety. The
largest companies initially balked at the Federal
Meat Inspection Act, but soon these regulations
enabled them to consolidate their control over the
industry by putting smaller operators out of business.
Ten years later, producers such as Armour and
Swift had begun to resemble monopolies, drawing
criticism and regulatory scrutiny. Armour responded
by organizing one of the earliest corporate public
relations campaigns in history. In 1918 the company
established a “Bureau of Agricultural Research and
Economics” to address what it termed “misleading
headlines” about its practices and its size. Through
pamphlets and books, maps, and even lavishly
illustrated children’s literature, Armour framed
itself as less a meatpacking company than a selfless
organization that endured razor-thin margins in order
to feed a hungry world. Armour’s public relations
campaign continued after the war with this bright
pictorial map designed by the noted artist Joseph
Pennell. In the accompanying narrative, Armour
described its successful efforts to solve the “nation’s
ever-growing food problem.”
Armour’s national distribution capacity was just
one example of a much larger and more fundamental
shift in food production that would transform
American agriculture, ranching, dairying, and
ultimately eating habits. In the 1860s Americans
could not have imagined a future where beef raised
on the prairie would be consumed on the East Coast.
That process began soon after the Civil War, when
bison ranging from Texas to the High Plains were
replaced by cattle (page 160). With refrigeration and
THE MASS PRODUCTION OF FOOD
Joseph Pennell and Armour &
Company, “Armour’s Food Source
Map,” 1922
a growing rail network, cured, smoked, and pickled
pork gave way to fresh beef. Philip Armour led the
Midwestern effort to compete with eastern producers
by reorganizing meat processing and making the
most of his geographical location. Soon Chicago was
the hub of this new meatpacking industry.
Armour industrialized meat production in several
ways: he halved the time it took to fatten cows by
feeding them corn rather than grass; he built a
“disassembly line” to render the cattle and hogs,
thereby obviating the need for skilled and expensive
butchers; he used refrigerated railroad cars to
transport meat around the country. The company
even sold kosher beef by having a rabbi sever the
jugular of cattle. Armour also made use of every
part of the animal, not just for food but also for
wool, glue, glycerine, leather, and oils.
This revolution in meat processing paralleled
the rapid expansion of dairy farming in the Upper
Midwest, the spread of grain belts across the country,
and the cultivation of produce in California and
Florida. By the early twentieth century Americans
could eat cornflakes at breakfast, fresh beef at dinner,
and even oranges at Christmas. All of this would have
been unimaginable to their grandparents.
“Armour’s Food Source Map” was originally
designed as an advertisement. Yet it nicely captures
the degree to which the country was now linked by
commodities. By extension, individual producers
and consumers were enmeshed in this web of
food production. Armour advertised itself as the
benevolent architect of this new system. Its public
relations department published pamphlets and
juvenile literature to portray the company’s myriad
operations in a positive and even patriotic light.
It turned accusations of monopoly into an asset,
framing itself as the industry leader in progress,
productivity, efficiency, sanitation, and convenience.
As Armour explained, the millions it spent to
meet federal regulations supported the welfare of
thousands. By extension, the company’s distribution
system created “a cash market as broad as the world
is wide,” encompassing farmers in Iowa, ranchers
in Texas, dairymen in Wisconsin, and even miners
in Wales. It was the meatpacking industry, Armour
argued, that fed the world. True enough: Armour
continued to publish this map through the 1960s,
and the practices developed by the company still
shape the way the nation eats a century later.