Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse

by Paula Young Lee (Editor)

Over the course of the nineteenth century, factory slaughterhouses replaced the hand-slaughter of livestock by individual butchers, who often performed this task in back rooms, letting blood run through streets. A wholly modern invention, the centralized municipal slaughterhouse was a political response to the public’s increasing lack of tolerance for “dirty” butchering practices, corresponding to changing norms of social hygiene and fear of meat-borne disease. The slaughterhouse, in Europe and the Americas, rationalized animal slaughter according to capitalist imperatives. What is lost and what is gained when meat becomes a commodity? What do the sites of animal slaughter reveal about our relationship to animals and nature? Essays by the best international scholars come together in this cutting-edge interdisciplinary volume to examine the cultural significance of the slaughterhouse and its impact on modernity.

Contributors Dorothee Brantz, Kyri Claflin, Jared Day, Roger Horowitz, Lindgren Johnson, Ian MacLachlan, Christopher Otter, Dominic Pacyga, Richard Perren, Jeffrey Pilcher, and Sydney Watts.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published July 31, 2008

Reviews

[amyleigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

The chapters in this book were very thorough but a little dry. The ones about New York in the 1800s were just fascinating. I also really like this image of the skyscraper and the slaughterhouse that Lee conjures in the conclusion- the vertical reach upward and the sprawling feedlots of modernity.