Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (14 page)

THIRTEEN

“The Republic of Porkdom”

F
rances Trollope, wife of a struggling English barrister, moved to America with her young children in 1827. They spent some time in a utopian community in Tennessee, which soon failed, and then moved to Cincinnati, where she undertook business ventures that fared no better. In 1831 she moved back to England, became a writer, and found success with her first book,
Domestic Manners of the Americans
.
Americans, she thought, were overconfident and undereducated, overly fond of spitting, and hypocritical: “You will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves.”

Though she did find a few things to like in Cincinnati—the lovely hills, a twin-spired brick church, a school for girls—she never adjusted to the city’s principal industry.
“I am sure I should have liked Cincinnati much better if the people had
not dealt so very largely in hogs,” she wrote.
As she was on a stroll one day, her feet “literally got entangled in pigs’ tails and jawbones.” Seeking an escape, she rented a cottage outside the city but soon noticed new buildings being constructed nearby.
“’Tis to be a slaughter-house for hogs,” a man told her. Since there were nice homes nearby, Trollope asked if a slaughterhouse might be legally prohibited as a nuisance.

“A what?”

“A nuisance,” I repeated, and explained what I meant.

“No, no,” was the reply, “that may do very well for your tyrannical country, where a rich man’s nose is more thought of than a poor man’s mouth; but hogs be profitable produce here, and we be too free for such a law as that.”

Trollope had the ill fortune to live in Cincinnati at the start of a slaughterhouse boom. Hogs were indeed “profitable produce” in the Corn Belt, so much so that pork packing became one of America’s most innovative industries. To deal with the enormous volume of hogs, packers pioneered the factory assembly line that Henry Ford later adapted for automobiles. To squeeze every bit of value from pig carcasses, new industries sprang up to transform by-products into soap and chemicals. Above all, the industry produced a great deal of meat.

Pork had been a favored food for millennia in part because it cured well. For the same reason, it became the key meat of global trade in the years before artificial refrigeration: unlike fresh beef, salted pork could be stored at room temperature for months as it was transported thousands of miles. By producing so much meat, Corn Belt packers transformed diets in America and around the world.

T
he conversion of pigs to pork began each fall. Hogs, fattened on the latest corn crop, traveled by foot, barge, or railcar to a packinghouse, almost always located on a river. The packers bought and slaughtered the hogs, cured the meat in salt, then in the spring, when the rivers thawed, floated the pork downriver to market. The packers invested in pigs, salt, barrels, and labor in November and sold their product in March or April, which meant that they saw no return on investment for five or six months. There was good money to be made in pork, but the risks and capital requirements were considerable and the competition stiff.
Dozens of midsized packers were scattered along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and their tributaries, each slaughtering about 8,000 hogs annually.

In the 1820s the pigs and the money started to concentrate in Cincinnati, which became known as “Porkopolis.” The most important port on the Ohio River, the city lay south of Ohio’s Miami Valley, the first great center of Corn Belt hog raising and within droving distance of the corn-growing regions of Kentucky and Indiana. As the biggest city in the Corn Belt, Cincinnati offered enough skilled workers to fill the seasonal jobs of killing, cutting, and packing the swine that flooded the city each fall.

Cincinnati’s fortunes rose and fell alongside those of New Orleans, another great port city. Nearly all of the Corn Belt’s output made its way down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans; from there it was shipped to plantations in the lower South or loaded onto oceangoing ships bound for Europe or America’s eastern seaboard.
Just as importantly, the rivers allowed salt to be brought north by steamboat, supplementing the meager local supplies. With the transportation infrastructure in place, eastern merchants brought their money to Cincinnati, and pork packing exploded. Between 1832 and 1841—the decade
just after Frances Trollope left town—Cincinnati packed about 500,000 hogs. During the 1850s, that figure rose to 2.3 million.
By the 1870s, it had reached 6 million.

By then, however, Cincinnati had been displaced: Chicago had become the new
“hog butcher for the world,”
slaughtering as many as 4 million hogs in a single season. Chicago benefited from the westward shift of the Corn Belt into Illinois and Iowa. Just as important were trains. By the early 1850s, good railroads linked the Corn Belt to eastern cities, and Chicago lay at the terminus of multiple rail lines.
With the coming of the Civil War, Chicago’s triumph was complete: the city offered reliable transportation by rail just as fighting shut down river traffic and as the US Army began buying salt pork in quantity.

Though Chicago dominated the US pork market, it was not the only game in town. Cincinnati remained important, and the packing industry grew in St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Omaha. The telegraph lines that ran alongside railroad tracks gave farmers the most valuable of business commodities: information. Now farmers could drive or ship their pigs to the packinghouse offering the highest price per pound.

In order to attract farmers with high prices while still turning a large profit, packinghouses strove for efficiency.
In 1838, after a visit to Cincinnati, English writer Harriet Martineau observed, “The division of labour is brought to as much perfection in these slaughter-houses as in the pin-manufactories of Birmingham,”
a reference to a famous passage in
The Wealth of Nations
in which Adam Smith explains that productivity rose enormously when the making of the simple pin was “divided into eighteen distinct operations.”
Twenty years later Frederick Law Olmsted described “a sort of human chopping-machine” at a Cincinnati plant. “No iron cog-wheels could work with more regular motion,” he wrote. “
Plump
falls the hog upon the table,
chop, chop; chop, chop; chop, chop
, fall the cleavers. All is over. But, before you can say so,
plump, chop, chop; chop, chop; chop, chop
, sounds again. There is no pause for admiration. . . . We took out our watches and counted thirty-five seconds, from the moment when one hog touched the table until the next occupied its place.”

Martineau and Olmsted observed efficient division of labor, but the dead hogs were still being carried by hand to the chopping block. Soon that would change, as the process became automated.

The modern pork-packing line, fully developed by the 1860s, started with pigs being driven up a ramp—known as the “Bridge of Sighs” in Chicago—to the top floor of a two- or three-story plant. A worker attached a chain to a rear leg of each pig and hooked the other end of the chain to an overhead rail, which hoisted the animal, kicking and squealing, into the air. The “sticker” plunged a knife into the pig’s neck, and blood poured out of the wound and through a latticed floor, to be collected in barrels below. Now dead, the pig was plunged into a tank twenty feet long and six feet wide, filled with water kept near boiling by a continuous flow of steam. Men standing alongside used short poles to keep the line of hogs bobbing along the trough, rolling them over to ensure an even scald that would loosen the hair.

At the end of the tank a rake-like device lifted the carcass and dumped it onto an inclined table with eight or nine men on each side. Their job was to scrape off the hog’s hair and bristles: cattle were skinned, but pork was sold skin-on because the skin was tender enough to eat. The first two men took off only the bristles—valuable for use in brushes—along the spine. The carcass then slid or rolled down to the next men in line, who used short-handled hoes or sharp knives to scrape and shave the hair from every bit of the pig. (By the 1890s, most of these
hair-removing jobs had disappeared, taken over by automated scrapers.)

At the end of the table, two men attached a stick called a gambrel that stretched the rear legs apart, then hooked the gambrel to an overhead track—known as “the railroad”—so that the pig swung free of the table, hanging from its splayed feet. Propelled by gravity or a steam-driven chain, the pig carcass started down the line. At the first station, two men sprayed it with cold water to wash away loose hair and filth; then the railroad made a series of stops at four foot intervals: the “dry shaver” removed stray hairs; the gut man slashed the belly open with a single stroke, allowing the intestines to pour out; the organ man removed the heart, liver, and other innards; finally, another man with a hose sprayed out the interior of the carcass.
Each worker had just twelve seconds to perform his task. The hog then rolled off to the cooling room to await butchery the next day.

The technology of this line was not complex. The idea was what mattered, and it was inspired by the nature of packing hogs, a messy job not easily mechanized. Pigs have complex shapes, and each is slightly different, so the work of killing, bleeding, gutting, cleaning, and cutting required the practiced eye of a human worker.
There were two ways to make it more efficient: reduce the effort expended by workers in hoisting slippery carcasses and shorten the interval between each operation. The pork industry found ingenious ways of doing both.

The overhead rail marked an epochal moment in the history of factory work. The Ford Motor Company holds the credit for inventing the modern assembly line to make the Model T in 1913. An assembly line entails a number of features, including the subdivision of labor (at least as old as Adam Smith’s pin factory in the 1770s) and interchangeable parts (developed by
clock and gun makers even earlier). Pigs, of course, are living creatures that (at least before the era of genetic modification) lack the sort of anatomical consistency that would allow for this sort of processing. But pork packers in the nineteenth century did make one key innovation that set the stage for Ford’s assembly lines: they remained in place while the item of manufacture—in this case, a hog—came to them.

Assembling cars and disassembling pigs had much in common. In most factories the worker “spends more of his time walking about [looking] for materials and tools than he does in working,” Henry Ford noted drily in his autobiography. “He gets small pay because pedestrianism is not a highly paid line.” Ford explained that his company found a solution in what he called the “overhead trolley” used by pork packers to carry dead hogs to a succession of workstations. A moving line—of pigs or cars—not only cut down on heavy lifting but also set the pace of the work. Each slaughterhouse worker had just seconds to perform his task before another pig arrived. It was rough on the workers, but the rate of production soared.
The genius of the packers’ disassembly line and of the Model T assembly line, Ford explained, lay in their bringing “the work to the men instead of the men to the work.”

The pig disassembly line became a standard stop for journalists and tourists visiting Chicago.
“Great as this wonderful city is in everything,” a British traveler said, “the first place among its strong points must be given to the celerity and comprehensiveness of the Chicago style of killing hogs.”

T
he “comprehensiveness” of Chicago’s pork producers extended to their use of the carcass.
In Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
, a slaughterhouse employee says, “They use everything
about the hog except the squeal,” and the novel’s narrator mocks him for using a stale “witticism.” Though the expression had already become a cliché by 1906, it was nonetheless true. Snout-to-tail eating may have been the frugal tradition of peasants, but no one could squeeze all the value from a pig like a profit-hungry pork packer.

Workers in Chicago chain live hogs to a wheel that hoists them into the air for slaughter, just one part of a sophisticated system invented to process the enormous hog crop of the Corn Belt. Henry Ford said that the idea of the assembly line was inspired by a visit to a slaughterhouse. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

Packers preferred pigs to be about two hundred pounds and fattened on corn. Acorn-fed pigs, though prized today, were considered second-rate in nineteenth-century America. Corn produced firm, shelf-stable pork fat. An acorn diet, heavy in unsaturated fats, made for soft, oily pork fat, which improves
the flavor of dry-cured hams but makes barreled pork—the most marketable type at the time—mushy and prone to rancidity.
In 1837 corn-fed hogs sold for $5 per hundred pounds of live weight, while mast-fed brought only $3.

Most Corn Belt meat was placed in barrels and covered with a brine of salt, sugar, and saltpeter (potassium nitrate, a preservative that also imparted a pinkish color to otherwise grey meat). Known as “barreled pork,” “pickled pork,” or simply “pork,” it appealed to buyers because of its cheapness and long shelf life. Pickled pork was divided into three classes. The highest quality, “clear pork,” was sold mostly in New England, where cod and mackerel fishermen demanded the best as their shipboard provisions. The military and other large institutions primarily purchased “mess,” the second-best quality. Slaves in the United States and the Caribbean ate the lowest quality, known as “prime.”