“It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics.”*…
In the mid-to-late 1800s, the meat industry — from the cowboys and cattle drives to the Chicago slaughterhouses to the refrigerated railcars delivering steaks to New York’s finest restaurants — was the largest industry in America. At the heart of this industry were entrepreneurs like Philip Danforth Armour and Gustavus Franklin Swift, who pioneered business practices later adopted by the automobile industry and whose company names survive to this day:
“[In the meat industry in the mid-1800s], automation was the secret ingredient. Overhead wheels were introduced to carry the hog or the steer from one fixed workstation to the next. Before long, this approach evolved into an overhead trolley system driven by steam engines and industrial belts. Specific repetitive tasks were assigned to each worker along what became, in effect, the first assembly line, although the actual work was disassembly. It was from studying this process in the Chicago slaughterhouses that Henry Ford came up with his own method for assembling automobiles — a development that would revolutionize mass manufacturing…
More at “The American Meat Colossus,” an excerpt from Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West, by Christopher Knowlton.
* “It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests – and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without pretence at apology, without the homage of a tear.” – Upton Sinclair (author of The Jungle)
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As we ponder protein, we might recall that it was on this date in 1921 that Canadians Sir Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best isolated insulin (from canine subjects). Later that year, working with a University of Toronto colleague, J.J.R. MacLeod, Banting developed a diabetes treatment for humans– for which he and MacLeod shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Banting and Best (with whom he shared his Nobel Prize money) later improved both the sourcing process for insulin (discovering how to extract it from an intact pancreas) and the diabetes detection process.
Best (left) and Bantling with with one of the diabetic dogs used in their experiments with insulin