Neal A. Knapp, Making Machines of Animals: The International Livestock Exposition Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. Pp. 216. ISBN 978-1-4214-4655-4. $60.00 (hardcover).
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: This study joins recent efforts to reinterpret the rise and consolidation of the meatpacking industry and offers a novel explanation for the expansion of the 'industrial ideology' to agricultural farms across the United States.To understand the profound shifts in the intellectual and material conception of animality that underwrote the rise of agro-industrial production in meat, Knapp attends to an unlikely alliance between two sets of actors: professors at land-grant universities and Chicago's meatpacking companies.The crux of the book focuses on the International Livestock Exposition in Chicago, a hub around which meatpackers, livestock experts, farmers and agricultural scientists of various veins gathered annually between 1900 and 1975.In the book, the exposition appears less as an event and more as an institution that occupied 'a position between farm and the table' (p.24), and mediated intellectual and economic relations through which the industrial models of livestock production were made commonsensical to commercial breeders and ordinary farmers.Knapp argues that intermediary actors mobilized the exposition towards different but interlinked goals and, in the process, normalized the moral and economic vision of animals as machines.Knapp builds this argument in five concise chapters.The first introduces key sites and figures behind the establishment of the International Livestock Exposition.Knapp shows that professors at state-supported 'land-grant' universities, especially in the initial years, linked livestock improvement with rural income generation and stability, and simultaneously argued that keeping livestock on American farms was essential for maintaining soil health and fertility.The meatpackers, on the other hand, emphasized standardization and specialization in the form and function of animals to increase efficiency, reduce wastage in logistical operations and capture value generated by assembly line dismemberment.The irregularity and seasonality of animal life, which were critically linked with the vagaries of farm life itself, emerged as a problem to be solved for the industry.For the meatpackers, the overall weight of live animals, or even of post-slaughter carcasses, was far less important than the ultimate retail value of specialized meat cuts.This orientation, Chapter 2 shows, necessitated transformation in the physiology of livestock and reoriented scientific breeding and feeding practices towards producing animals with shorter horns and compact square frames.Figures associated with the exposition linked pure breeds imported from Britain with higher productivity and efficiency.Intriguingly, pure-breeding associations were often financially underwritten by Chicago's meatpackers.Here, the book also nuances our understanding of the role that eugenics played in shaping the national livestock improvement movement in the
Author: Koyna Tomar
Institution: University of Pennsylvania
Language: English
Subfield: Food Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4404155020