Butchery is in the blood even of the meat-free – Amanda Giracca – Aeon

Butchery is in the blood even of the meat-free – Amanda Giracca – Aeon: If the first step was removing animal slaughter from the backyards and barns of civilians, out of the public eye, the second was the rise of factory-style meat processing. Fitzgerald draws on Upton Sinclair’s famous novel The Jungle (1906), which portrays lives of immigrant meat packers in Chicago’s infamous Stock Yard. With the industrial revolution came assembly-line style employment. Animal slaughtering is said to be the first ‘mass-production industry’ in the US – Henry Ford partially adopted the mechanisms in his factories from meatpacking factories. With that came expendable employees and a culture of meat-factory ghettos on the city’s edges where immigrants lived in destitution, as Sinclair details. It was a public health and human rights disaster.