Red Meat Republic
Summary
Red Meat Republic does the heavy work of grounding the abstract idea of a cut of meat into a material historical analysis of how the Cattle-Beef Complex came to be and how capitalism, genocide and the cowboy mythology played a pivotal role in its proliferation across the country.
Introduction
The expansion of cattle ranches across Turtle Island was anything but an inevitable result of technology and progress and was not a restoration of the natural way of things. The expansion of industrial meat production was driven by the self-interest of meatpacking plant owners, cattle ranchers, and other corporate owners who would benefit from industrial food production.
Before the industrialization of meat production, a different transformation first took place, a transformation of genocidal proportions. Cattle ranching in the west would serve as a justification to steal even more Indigenous land and cattle ranchers would directly collaborate with the US military supplying them food, accompanying the military on raids, and organizing army expeditions.
The profits that accompanied cattle ranching encouraged further settlement on Indigenous land and replaced the natural system of relations between Indigenous persons and Bison with uniform monoculture cattle ranches.
Cow's Labor
Part of the reason cows have become industrialized is their ability to perform labor: "It was their ability to feed themselves ont he range that was the origin of much of their value, meaning they were even performing a kind of labor."
Chapter one
Cattle-Beef Complex
... Western ranching was about scattering cattle far and wide on marginal land, and this required remaking the Great Plains as an ecosystem as well as a political space... I argue that the cattle-beef complex depended on land expropriation through both deliberate government policy and independent rancher effort. This expropriation was part of a wrenching process of transforming the Great Plains ecosystem from a grass-bison-nomad system to a grass-cattle-rancher one. The violence of Indian War-- Romanticized and re-imagined as the against-all-odds struggles of early ranchers-- created teh cattle-beef complex's foundational myths.[1]