Slaughterhouse Blues: Book Review Essay

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ANTH 3330
S. Metress
ANTH 3330
S. Metress
Slaughterhouse Blues: Book Review
Michael Farhoud
Slaughterhouse Blues: Book Review
Michael Farhoud

In Slaughterhouse Blues, anthropologist Donald Stull and social geographer Michael Broadway explore the advent, history, and implications of modern food production. The industrialized system behind what we eat is one of the most controversial points of political interest in our society today. Progressions in productive, logistical, retail, and even biological technologies have made mass produced foods more available and more affordable than ever before. This being said, the vague mass production of ever-available cheap “food” carries with it several hidden …show more content…
Made visible to the public eye through the work of Upton Sinclair, the conditions that meatpacking workers were faced with were horrendous. Extreme division of labor led to more employment of women (who occupied the lowest pay-grade). Despite the differences in gender though, differences in nationality and language were the true lines of division. Low wages and unsafe conditions led such workers to form the first meatpacking union in 1878. Workers were exposed to contamination, bacteria, long hours, and strenuous labor. Through unionization, meatpacking workers attained significant benefits and better wages while fighting against the loss of their jobs to mechanized methods of production. While conditions are better and workers work alongside helpful machines, jobs on the line remain boring and monotonous. The author uses as an example his experience at Running Iron Beef (an unnamed meatpacking plant), where he found major problems to be racial division (between the white, native-born Americans and those of multicultural backgrounds such as immigrants), language barriers, disregard of the workforce by those higher up, and the touting of core values that are core only in name.
The effects of an industry moving into a community are demonstrated in chapters seven and eight. Such effects found in a study of Garden City were a boom in population, a fluctuation of the crime rate from low to high then to an

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