Imaging Animal Industry: American Meatpacking in Photography and Visual Culture

Those who are not vegans or vegetarians are familiar with meat in their diet. That slice of ham, sizzling steak, a lambchop, or chicken wing sits on the plate, in the minds of most having arrived from parts and processes unknown. Yet, as shown in this book by author Emily Kathryn Morgan, an associate professor of art history at Iowa State University, far more than appetites propel the meat to the table—not only slaughter and processing but how marketing moves it along from feed lot to the consumer.Morgan's goal is to demonstrate the “underrecognized role” played by “visual culture” in “the establishment and growth of industrial-scale meat production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (p. 2). Advertisements, texts, and photographs were essential in familiarizing American consumers with “large-scale meat production practices and products” (p. 2). Visual culture helped “sell” meat consumption and boosted not only the industry's self-image but the perceptions of their customers too.This volume is part of the Iowa and the Midwest Experience series published by the University of Iowa Press, an ongoing collection of books examining Iowa life and how it fits into the larger Midwest region. Previous volumes cover a multitude of activities ranging from archeology to sports to farm safety to marriage equality, the state's role in the Civil War along with other interesting and important topics.Given Iowa's increasing importance as a meat industry state, especially after the collapse a half century ago of the Chicago meatpacking industry, it deserves the attention Morgan provides in this mixture of illustrations and text. Her expertise in visual materials informs her analysis of these resources played and play in the process stretching from producer to consumer. Those interested in labor history as well as art history will find much to appreciate.One example provided by her is the early twentieth-century experience of the American public with large-scale meat production in the wake of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which spawned Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug acts. “The experience oriented the meat industry to the threat of negative public attention” and down the road, “images . . . constituted one important means of combating and deflecting” negative attention, allowing the industry to “control its public image and, by extension, its future” (p. 11).But Morgan does not confine her evidence and analysis to Teddy Roosevelt's era. She discusses the impact of COVID on the industry and, importantly, its workers, among whom “death tolls number in the hundreds” compounded by spread to the families and communities of these workers (p. 12).The struggles with workers’ rights, safety, and the toll of industrial processes were and are hidden by the industry's diffusion away from large population areas to small-town, rural America. “The industry is everywhere and nowhere,” she writes (p. 12). Images of this new reality, she notes, are carefully managed. Most often, illustrations focus on areas outside a plant or anonymous pictures of unnamed facilities during the COVID years. What was happening on the production floors, the assembly lines of meat packing?Reaching far back to the earliest illustrations of meat processing in past centuries, Morgan helps a reader understand how consumers have accepted a violent industrial process filled even in current times with significant issues of health and worker safety.