Red Meat Republic is a wonderfully thorough history of the rise of industrial beef production. According to one standard narrative, it was almost inevitable that the industry took the shape it did: as people moved to urban centers, there were fewer people left in rural areas to raise and slaughter cattle, and as refrigeration technology improved, it became easier to centralize aspects of production and then distribute meat across the country. The rise of big beef, on this view, was a bit like the rise of the factory line in any other industry: the method was so efficient, and fit so well with the lives that an increasing number of people wanted to live, that it essentially had to take over.

Joshua Specht helps us see that these demographic and technological forces were hardly the only ones at work, and perhaps not even the most important ones. As he points out, the story really begins with systematic eradication of the Plains Indians in the western parts of the US, freeing up huge tracts of land, coupled with incredible global investment in beef. This created a situation where it was possible, and very profitable, to raise ever-larger herds for a meat-hungry population. At the same time, the Chicago meatpackers worked hard to bankrupt local wholesalers across the country, ensuring that their products would be featured by local retailers. And consumers loved the result: cheap, fresh, and consistently-available meat, which forced regulators to accept this emerging system as the new normal.

Red Meat Republic is a work of history, of course, but it’s also much more than that. It’s a glimpse into the ways that various powerful forces — ethnonationalism, consumer preference, seemingly-benign technologies, capital, and many others — have been manifested over the last 150 years. It’s a reminder that the food system we have today is, in fact, a product of particular people at particular times wanting particular things, all of which could have been otherwise. Specht’s aim is not to provide a roadmap to the future, a plan for how to reform our food system in ways that are less harmful to animals, less destructive of the environment, and more humane toward those involved in food-related work. Nevertheless, it does provide some guidance. Once we are in a position to appreciate the way that people’s values have shaped contemporary meat production, we can ask much better questions about the way that different values might allow it to evolve. This book is an invaluable step along that path.

© 2019 Bob Fischer

Bob Fischer teaches philosophy at Texas State University. He’s the editor of The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat (Oxford, 2015; with Ben Bramble) and College Ethics: A Reader on Moral Issues That Affect You(Oxford, 2017). He’s also the author of several essays on animal ethics, moral psychology, and the epistemology of modality.