A bit of historical background…
Modern production methods and hygiene standards, reliable packaging and the cold chain have brought down the cost of perishable food in real terms, allowing the consumer an ever widening choice of meat products, well packaged and presented.
But of course it wasn’t always so.
Below are some excellent pictures in poster form of pork slaughtering in Cincinnati towards the end of the 19th century. The four pictures are titled “Killing, “Cutting”, “Rendering” and “Salting”. They were exhibited by the Cincinnati Packers’ Association at the International Exposition in Vienna in 1873.
These depict pretty good standards for their day. About 30 % of pork was produced in the Midwest around that time.
However the industry generally was unregulated in the USA. The turning point came with the work of a young man named Upton Sinclair (1878 – 1988) who, in time, became the prolific author of over 90 books.
He researched the conditions in the Chicago stockyards, immersing himself in life there and when he published The Jungle in 1906 it became a bestseller. The book exposed the unsavoury, unhygienic and often inhuman conditions in graphic detail, as seen through the eyes of an immigrant Lithuanian worker named Jurgis Rudkus.
It directly caused President Theodore Roosevelt to order the setting up of the Food & Drug Administration (the FDA) and the introduction of federal inspection standards for the meat industry.
The picture is published on Wikipedia and if customers contact us we will be happy to send on an A4 laser print.
“The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair
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