| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation. By Roger Horowitz. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. xvi, 170 pp. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-8018-8240-0. Paper, $19.00, ISBN 0-8018-8241-9.)

One hundred years ago Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle (1906) to arouse public opinion about the awful working conditions in the nation's slaughterhouses. Instead, it created a storm over the quality of the products that emerged from them and led to regulation of the plants' sanitary conditions. (He is reputed to have said, ruefully, "I aimed for America's heart, but I hit its stomach.") Roger Horowitz's interesting history of the meat processing industry in the United States echoes Sinclair's concern over the workers in the industry, but with a different twist. Although Horowitz too describes how difficult it was (and is) for people to work amidst the enormous amounts of blood, guts, and offal involved in the processes, he also recognizes, as Sinclair and other critics of the meat industries failed to do, that many of these repulsive jobs demanded levels of skill that forced employers to pay those workers decent wages. For several generations of white ethnics, women, and African Americans, these jobs provided rungs for climbing the ladder from poverty to decent lives.

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