Most Americans recognize prime and choice, with their characteristic white fat marbling, as the best grades of beef. This is no surprise. A century of advertising has made these grades ubiquitous. Yet, public acceptance of government beef grades as innocuous measures of quality has prevented scrutiny into their origin, purpose, and effect. A study of the advent of government beef grading, however, reveals a network of public and private sector actors intent on protecting the feedlot system of production. In fact, according to the original United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) definition of good beef, the top grades could only be derived from confined, grain-fed cattle. Put another way, the government grades censored grass-finished cattle by prohibiting their beef from receiving the top grades. This bias, combined with a ruthless pursuit of efficiency, has contributed to the rise of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) that dominate the cattle industry today as well as the negative consequences that follow from this type of production. By protecting a production process, government grading also condones the air, soil, and water contamination, public health threats, and poor animal treatment associated with CAFOs.Footnote ¹

To understand the link between these ill effects and government grades requires a different way of thinking about quality grading. To be sure, commodity grading in general provides economic advantages to producers, merchants, and consumers by offering a third-party guarantee of information and by reducing transaction costs. In this way, grading facilitates throughput, allowing for a more efficient and cheaper flow of goods from production to final sale.Footnote ² Grades, however, when based on “quality,” become more than mere economic aids; they become moral concerns. Ironically, the notion of quality in taste, which can be highly subjective, is often taken for granted.Footnote ³ Taste, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu illustrated, is largely a product of culture, especially influenced by elites, and is not value-neutral.Footnote ⁴ Yet when it comes to taste, governments define “what (who) is good and what is bad,” and “discipline[e] those people and things that do not conform to the accepted definitions of good and bad.” In the case of beef grades, the federal government legitimized a hierarchy of beef types centered on grain finishing, and in doing so established a standard for consumers of what is good beef and what is bad beef.Footnote ⁵ In effect, the grade served as an imprimatur, an official approval signifying ideological consistency with the beliefs of the granting body. Rather than simple standards of “quality,” beef grades safeguarded a method of production as well as the stakeholders invested in that method.

The question naturally arises whether the advent of a grading system that privileged the feedlot steer indicates business cooptation of government. Indeed, cooptation would not be out of the ordinary. In the 1970s, Jim Hightower identified a revolving door between agricultural corporations, USDA regulators, and agricultural science professors, and later Marion Nestle showed the almost complete cooptation of nutrition science by big business.Footnote ⁶ At the same time, scholars have also portrayed the USDA as strong and independent. Some studies have highlighted the independent work of public sector scientists with little reference to the private sector.Footnote ⁷ Historians Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode even described a USDA agency as consisting of “rent seeking federal bureaucrats who sought to expand their budgets and power.”Footnote ⁸ Additionally, the theory of cooptation, of business imposing its will on public sector scientists, fits well within the American tradition for villainizing “the interests.” Yet, it exculpates, to a degree, public sector scientists. A growing number of historians have complicated the notion of cooptation by showing a shared vision between public scientists and business, even if tensions also existed.Footnote ⁹ Similarly, my research reveals cooperation rather than cooptation and highlights the role of associationalism in formalizing and strengthening the relationship between industry and the public sector through its emphasis on public-private partnerships.

Associationalism, a political idea in which private associations share in governance, emerged out of World War I when business leaders learned through their experience with the War Industries Board (WIB) the benefits of industry-wide cooperation with government through trade associations.Footnote ¹⁰ Meat and livestock industry leaders created the National Live Stock and Meat Board, a cooperative marketing association that acted as a liaison between the private and public sectors and promoted meat eating. The Board, consisting of livestock industry leaders, obtained relatively free research and assistance from public sector scientists while these scientists gained recognition, legitimacy, and a demand for their professional work. Under this long-term relationship, each group, the Meat Board and public sector scientists, worked toward the same end—more efficient feedlot production of beef and greater industry and public acceptance of this type of beef. While this essay focuses on the private sector side of the relationship, further research on the public sector side could shed more light on the motivations of individual scientists.Footnote ¹¹

Cooperation to promote the feedlot system of production dates back to the late nineteenth century. Farmers, packers, and public sector agricultural scientists all fostered the process of confined, grain-finished cattle and helped spread the practice in the Midwest. Later, however, the United States Food Administration (USFA) wreaked havoc on this system through social engineering and economic manipulation, yet it also spurred the creation of the Meat Board. The USFA cast feedlots as wasteful and promoted meat substitutes, curtailing consumption of the top grades of beef. The USFA also promoted retailer modernization, which included grading. With the abrupt end of the USFA, the packers and subsequently the Meat Board carried on the work of retailer modernization through the 1920s. The campaign to modernize the meat retail sector fostered closer cooperation between the private and public sectors in the cattle industry. In the mid-1920s, breeders, feeders, and western ranchers latched onto government beef grading as a panacea in response to the lemon problem and to another economic downturn.Footnote ¹² At the same time, the Meat Board worked with agricultural scientists in coordinating research through the Cooperative Meat Investigations to boost feedlot-derived beef. These investigations illustrate the mutual benefits to the private and public sectors. Amidst political and economic threats to the feedlot system of production, private and public sectors used grading and research to ensure its survival.

The feedlot system of production reshaped cattle production in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Producers in the Midwest, especially Iowa and Illinois, initially raised cattle on grass, but forces outside of their control made this method untenable. After the Civil War, Iowa and Illinois cattle raisers came into direct competition with western ranchers, who fed cattle on cheap and abundant grass, as whites settled in the Midwest, driving up the cost of land and property taxes. Midwestern cattle raisers could not make a profit feeding a limited number of cattle on grass with rising fixed costs, so they adapted by using an input that allowed cattle to put on weight quicker: corn. With this input, midwestern stock raisers abandoned the less profitable practice of raising calves from birth and instead came to rely on western ranchers for supplying weaned cattle. Midwestern stock raisers then fed them for months on corn that they purchased cheaply from surrounding farms or that they grew themselves. This process required significantly less land to raise many more animals. The cattle raised in small, fenced-in enclosures called feedlots as well as the men who fed them became known as “feeders.” What began as competition between western and midwestern cattle raisers became a symbiotic relationship, whereby western ranchers raised calves on grass and sold them to Midwestern “feeders” who finished them on corn and other grains.Footnote ¹³

Professional feeders and agricultural scientists began plumbing the depths of efficiency in feedlot production. This led to their quest to find the best cattle for the system, the ones biologically disposed to gain weight on grain. They found that purebred animals, strains originally derived from England, fared best, which led to a boon for another group of cattle raisers known as breeders. Soon, breeders who specialized in improving strains like Hereford, Angus, and Shorthorn found ready markets throughout the country. Public agricultural scientists and breed associations called on western ranchers to introduce purebreds into their herds to meet the demand of midwestern feedlot operators. Due to their control of this requisite input, elite breeders and breed associations gained immense market power.Footnote ¹⁴ Heeding the call, western ranchers mixed purebreds into their herds, creating hybrids, or improved cattle. Whether purebred or hybrid, these cattle put on weight quicker than unimproved “scrub” cattle and could be marketed at a younger age. This trend toward early-maturing cattle continued for decades and became one of the markers of the top grades of beef. For a sense of the shift, consider that in the 1870s, a prime steer at the time of slaughter averaged from 4 to 6 years old and weighed approximately 1600 pounds. By the turn of the century, a prime steer could be slaughtered at two years of age and at a weight of between 800 and 1000 pounds.Footnote ¹⁵

Public sector agricultural scientists aided feeders in particular by issuing bulletins on increasing efficiency. While individual scientists may have had their own reasons for promoting feedlot cattle, the USDA in general promoted any means that provided cheap beef for American consumers.Footnote ¹⁶ Along these lines, the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), along with agricultural experiment stations, produced a myriad of bulletins and circulars for feeders. Some explained how to raise baby beef, an extreme form of early maturing beeve that required both capital and technical skill. Others described the ideal feeding rations and gave advice on improved breeds. In a brief span of thirty years, grain feeding transformed the structure of the cattle industry, whereby western ranchers conformed their operations to the demands of midwestern feeders, securing purebred cattle that they could sell at a younger age than before. This is part of what geographer Nathan Sayre refers to as the cattle-grain-beef complex.Footnote ¹⁷

In further support of this complex, the big packers developed their own internal grading system that privileged feedlot steers. This nonpublic grading system facilitated trade between packers and wholesalers, but it lacked uniformity. Each packing company maintained its own system with different names for grades and different lines of demarcation between grades. All packing firms, however, grouped cattle according to the place they spent their final months, whether on the range, prairie, or feed lot. Knowledge of its final feeding location informed traders about cattle’s internal characteristics, that is, about the meat inside. The packers further divided these classes into quality grades such as choice, good, and medium. Because the packers controlled the grading system, they could use a sliding scale. If the supply of one grade ran low, they could make up for it with beef from another.Footnote ¹⁸

Agricultural scientists accepted the supremacy of packer grades. In fact, they urged feeders to work more deliberately toward meeting the packer grade standards for prime and choice, the two highest, because they fetched a premium price. Herbert Mumford, a professor of agriculture at the University of Illinois, wrote one of the first bulletins aimed at educating feeders on packer grades. Packers, he explained, graded cattle based on their nearness to the prime standard. This top grade depended on fat: its location on the animal, the amount, and its feel. Cattle with large thighs and loins, for instance, ensured that the expensive retail cuts they yielded would be large, symmetrical, and smooth, with highly developed areas all around. Evenly distributed fat on the animal, rather than large uneven fat deposits, signified well-marbled beef to the packer buyer. Mumford explained that for the proper deposition of fat, feeders must select the right purebred animals and know how long to feed them. The next two grades, choice and good, did not deviate too much from prime and so rounded out what was known as the “high class” beef trade. Laborers and the lower classes ate mostly medium and common beef, the next two grades after good.Footnote ¹⁹

On the eve of the US entry into World War I, the feedlot played a central role in the cattle industry, in part, at least, due to government support. So, cattle raisers, especially feeders, received a shock when a new, though short-lived, federal agency called the US Food Administration aimed to curtail the long-term demand for high-class beef, and attempted to end the system of cattle feeding entirely. Despite its negative effects on feeders, the USFA experience also led to the creation of a cooperative marketing association called the National Live Stock and Meat Board that facilitated public-private cooperation and promoted beef consumption.

In August 1917, soon after the United States entered the Great War, Congress created the USFA, giving it the monumental task of “encouraging the production, conserving the supply, and controlling the distribution of food products.”Footnote ²⁰ President Woodrow Wilson appointed Herbert Hoover, a highly successful engineer and apostle of efficiency, as the head of the USFA. Hoover, intent on social engineering, loaded this agency with people who ascribed to a scientific view of food, generally referred to as the “new nutrition.” For several decades before the war, experts such as home economists promoted a new understanding of food based on emerging knowledge of micronutrients like proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and vitamins. These experts taught that the consumption of nutrients mattered more than the actual food containing them. The new nutrition posed a threat to the beef industry because it meant that consumers could get protein from, say, beans just as well as from beef. The new nutrition message found expression in USFA admonitions to eat less meat and to use meat substitutes. Indeed, many new nutritionists viewed the war emergency as a way to influence American eating habits for the long term. For instance, a USFA cookbook called Foods that will Win the War and how to Cook them advised Americans to reduce permanently their meat intake. Its authors announced that “the time has come for Americans to learn the use of meat for flavor and to utilize more skillfully the protein of other foods.”Footnote ²¹

If cattlemen ever expected sympathetic treatment from the USFA meat division, they quickly met sincere disappointment. Hoover chose his friend Joseph Cotton, a Harvard College graduate who practiced law in New York City and Washington, D.C., as head of the USFA’s meat division. In a speech delivered at the American National Live Stock Association (ANLSA) convention, Cotton said that American people “eat more meat than is good for them,” and that “this large meat eating is a luxury.” In saying this, Cotton ignored the pleas of cattle industry insiders who warned him of a cattle surplus and the need to encourage domestic consumption rather than curtail it. In the face of this contrary evidence, Cotton doubled down on advocating meatless days. He did not justify these abstentions on economic grounds, but rather as “the visible symbols by which the people pledge themselves to help win the war.”Footnote ²²

No one could deny the effects of these “symbols” on the cattle industry. The upper and middle classes took the USFA message of abstention and substitution to heart. These classes, the primary consumers of high-class beef, dramatically reduced their meat intake during and even after the war, which hurt feeders more than other producers. By 1920, beef-eating demographics had shifted dramatically. Prime, choice, and good lost much of their market, but, on the other hand, more of the lower classes had access to and taste for beef, and increased their consumption of the middle grades.Footnote ²³ Increasing demand for high-class beef became a key concern for breeders and feeders during and after the war.

During the war, feeders had begged for help from their state food administrators and from Cotton but received none. The federal food administrator for Missouri even warned Hoover of “widespread unrest and dissatisfaction” among cattle feeders. In a private letter, Cotton bluntly told Hoover that “the business of highly finished cattle must stop,” and that even if they fixed prices, it would not “save the industry [from] producing highly finished cattle.”Footnote ²⁴ From Cotton’s perspective, feeding corn to cattle was an extravagant waste because it could be more efficiently used as human food. Fifteen years later, the executive secretary of the ANLSA recalled that the livestock industry had “never entirely recovered from the meatless days prescribed during war times.”Footnote ²⁵

Deflation after the war devastated cattle and feeder markets. In fact, historian Charles Ball referred to the 1920s and 30s as the “worst in cattle history.” Toward war’s end, cattle prices reached as high as $18 per hundredweight, but by mid-1919, prices plummeted as outlets for the increased wartime production dried up. Europe, still recovering, offered no market for beef imports, and neither could American consumers afford beef. Tough times led to a recession in the summer of 1920, in which feeders lost $50 to $80 per head. Livestock prices fell again by late 1921. While cattlemen initially blamed Hoover and the USFA, they soon found a new scapegoat in meat retailers. A meat retailer at the time meant anyone who sold meat to consumers: restaurants and hotels, as well as meat markets, butchers, and grocery stores. Cattlemen now singled out this sector as responsible for the industry’s ills, claiming that retailers never lowered their high wartime meat prices.Footnote ²⁶ Cattlemen saw no end to what they considered retailer profiteering.

In desperation, a large group of cattlemen, including feeders, from the Kansas Livestock Association (KLA) took matters into their own hands and met with the power brokers themselves, charting trains to Chicago and Washington, D.C. The Kansas delegation “discovered” from the big packers “that the majority of retail butchers [were] profiteers.” The packers, often recipients of cattlemen’s ire, happily shifted the blame, informing them that “many butchers add 100 percent to the cost of the carcass.”Footnote ²⁷ Moving on to D.C., they met with Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who at the time was building a case against the packers that would culminate in a crippling consent decree. Palmer listened to the delegates as he casually filed his nails. Theatrically brushing aside his nail dust, fixing his tie and his hair, he told the KLA delegates of a 700 percent price difference between live cattle and the retail price of beef. He vowed to equalize it and ensure that “those guilty of such profiteering [were] punished.”Footnote ²⁸

Claims of profiteering, however, were not so easily proven. Back in February 1918, the USFA meat division explored the issue, looking into the feasibility of stabilizing meat retail prices. The division found that stabilization looked promising for pork because of its uniform quality, but beef presented many barriers. Beef quality varied widely due to things like cattle breed, feed, sex, and age at slaughter. All of these factors affected price, as additionally did the local variations in demand for beef types and local preferences for certain cuts over others. For these reasons, the division found it impossible even to estimate the discrepancy between wholesale and retail prices.Footnote ²⁹ Faced with cattlemen’s growing animosity toward retailers, the federal government took definite steps to modernize the retail meat sector. The USFA gathered data from a survey and from the USFA packer’s committee, but in the end realized that it would need the input of actual retailers to gain a true picture of that sector. Therefore, under Herbert Hoover’s guidance, the USFA appointed a small committee of butchers and meat dealers, as well as officials from the USDA Bureau of Markets, and tasked them with making recommendations for meat conservation. They met and discussed a number of topics for two days in March 1918.Footnote ³⁰

While meat grading may seem like an easy answer in hindsight, the butchers and meat dealers viewed it as only one element of broader efforts at modernization. The committee identified many areas for retailer improvement, including poor record keeping, improper meat storage, and near total ignorance of proper pricing. These incompetencies hindered the meat supply chain. The committee called for licensing retailers, restrictions on hours of operation, forcing retailers to charge for bones, suet, and fat, and ending the delivery system, but, eventually, only recommended better salesmanship and display methods, that retailers and butchers make cutting tests to determine quality, and that they keep records. The committee also urged them to join local or national associations. The committee’s recommendations also aligned with Hoover’s desire for increasing national efficiency. Meat processors came to similar conclusions in their own USFA meetings and concurred with the butcher’s committee.Footnote ³¹

After the USFA ended abruptly in 1919, meat retail modernization lost its centralized driving force until the packer trade association filled the void. The Institute of American Meat Packers (IAMP) created decentralized cooperative associations called “meat councils” that essentially carried on the work of the USFA butcher and meat dealers committee. In the closing months of 1920, the IAMP inaugurated its first meat council in New York City, aided by the public relations guru, Pendleton Dudley. Packers and retailers hoped that meat councils would develop greater efficiency for the benefit of consumers and foster better relations between packers and retailers.Footnote ³²

Meat councils brought two sectors of the meat and livestock industry together, but Thomas E. Wilson, head of Wilson and Co., one of the largest meat packers in the country, wanted one that brought all sectors together to promote meat. Wilson exuded confidence, a tall man with a big chin, strong jaw, and welcoming smile, with a record of success to justify it. He conceived of such an association while serving in the USFA. In January 1919, at the urging of the packers committee, the USFA held a joint meeting between producers and packers. Though nothing tangible sprang from it, Wilson still proclaimed that “I see here marks of things in the distant future,” that “great good” will come from plenary meetings of this sort. He conceived of the idea for the Meat Board at this meeting when he mused that “I think we are overlooking a great opportunity in this great big industry if we don’t get together in some form or other.” Wilson showed no trace of preference for public versus private led when he mused, “whether it will be under the department of agriculture, or through some organization of our own” is inconsequential. Within two months, Wilson announced his idea to cattlemen at the annual meeting of the KLA. Some men who later served on the Meat Board wanted a superstructure to the industry as well, but they envisioned it as a continuation of the USFA.Footnote ³³

Many western cattlemen did not oppose retail modernization, but they favored a different solution. They wanted the big packers to open retail markets. Though cattlemen often viewed the big processors as enemies, they believed that their interests coincided in retail. The packers, cattlemen reasoned, could easily adjust retail prices to live cattle prices and apply their methods of efficiency to retail markets. Packer ownership would also ensure that butchers properly identify retail beef cuts. Unfortunately for these cattlemen, packer meat retailing proved unworkable for two reasons: the packers seemed not to want to enter the retail sector, and the consent decree explicitly prevented them from doing so. For this reason, cattle producers almost immediately called for modification of the consent decree after its passage in February 1920. The big processors, however, showed no desire to enter retail, despite growing frustration among cattlemen that they do so. The rumor circulating among cattle raisers claimed that the packers had a secret agreement with butchers’ associations. This may be the case, but packers also may have had an economic incentive for not pursuing vertical integration into retail. Keeping track of the roughly 310,000 retail outlets in the United States would be unworkable. Plus, under the decentralized structure, retailers lacked market power, making them price takers. Throughout the 1920s, the big packers remained coy about their intentions in retail to the frustration of many cattlemen.Footnote ³⁴

Congress also tried to help agriculture in the dark days of the recession by passing a flurry of bills. One of them, the Capper-Volstead Act, grew out of a proposal made during Hoover’s 1922 farm conference. This act paved the way for the Meat Board by granting antitrust immunity to cooperative marketing associations, allowing them to “pool resources and eliminate competition to improve marketing.”Footnote ³⁵ In anticipation, representatives from all sectors of the meat and livestock industry met several times to discuss the formation of just such an association. On March 10, 1922, less than a month after the passage of the Capper-Volstead Act, industry leaders formed the National Live Stock and Meat Board, which consisted of eleven representatives from producer associations, two from the packers, two from commission men, and two from retailers. The Meat Board acted as an association of associations. Organizations with representatives included the ANLSA, KLA, Corn Belt Meat Producers, national swine and wool growers’ associations, the Farm Bureau, the IAMP, and national associations for commission men and retailers. The Meat Board aimed to counteract the “insidious propaganda against the food value of meat,” furnish the consumer with “a maximum amount of the products of livestock at the lowest cost consistent with a fair return to those producers, manufacturers, and distributors who perform essential services by efficient methods economically sound.” Though the USDA did not have a representative on the Meat Board, both parties desired close cooperation.Footnote ³⁶

President of the national meat councils, and of the national retailers, John T. Russell, and president of the IAMP, Thomas Wilson, represented their respective groups on the Meat Board, and lobbied for the Meat Board to support meat councils. The Meat Board’s programme committee at first wanted to supplement rather than duplicate work already being done by other associations. For this reason, the Meat Board gave $20,000, which was one-fifth of the annual budget, to them.Footnote ³⁷ At the next meeting, Russell and Wilson asked the Meat Board to create new meat councils and set aside $7,500 for “promotion and organization.”Footnote ³⁸ By the mid-1920s, the Meat Board had taken over the meat councils and greatly expanded efforts at retailer modernization.Footnote ³⁹ The 1924 Meat Board report explained that the board “became vitally interested in the manner in which this enormous trade [meat retail] is carried on.” On its own initiative, the Meat Board sent some of its members to lobby House and Senate Committees to fund a survey of meat retailers. For this survey, as outlined by the Meat Board, Congress appropriated $50,000. The chief of the USDA Bureau of Agricultural Economics led the two-year study that covered twenty-seven cities and resulted in the USDA Bulletin called “Methods and Practices of Retailing Meat.”Footnote ⁴⁰

The Meat Board also created “short courses” for training retailers in effective meat marketing. These took place at local land grant colleges throughout the country and showed retailers how to model their businesses on high volume and small margins. Speakers usually included the general manager of the Meat Board, a professor from a local agricultural college, and the senior marketing specialist from the BAE.Footnote ⁴¹ Soon, the Meat Board began training public sector actors to carry on these initiatives independently. The Meat Board offered this training through what it called “meat schools,” in which its personnel trained mostly public sector scientists “in handling and presenting meat.” By 1931, meat schools had become cooperative efforts conducted jointly by the Meat Board, state agricultural colleges, and the USDA. One USDA researcher even applauded the fact that the public sector carried on the work of the Meat Board. Speaking before a small group of Meat Board executives, he said that “every man who attended one of those schools is now working for the National Live Stock and Meat Board, although he isn’t on their payroll or their expense account.”Footnote ⁴²

As the Meat Board focused on retail modernization, and the BAE conducted its retail survey, agriculture faced another economic downturn. While retail modernization aligned with Commerce Secretary Hoover’s associational solution of improving efficiency through cooperatives, it took time to implement. Financially unable to wait, many farmers supported direct federal intervention in the form of the McNary-Haugen plan, first considered by Congress in 1924. The big packers, and no doubt many producers, feared the effect of price supports on the feeder sector. In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, Thomas Wilson and others explained the difficulty of tying the price of one commodity like corn to another like cattle because 90 percent of corn went to feed livestock.Footnote ⁴³ Former president of the ANLSA, and a sitting US senator from Wyoming, John Kendrick, opposed the McNary-Haugen plan for cattle because it would “inject” an “additional complication” into the “intricate machinery” of the livestock distribution system and “would result in impossible confusion and derangement to the whole system.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Historians disagree on cattlemen’s view of the bill, wavering between full and half-hearted support. Either way, the McNary-Haugen plan did not generate as much debate or excitement in the cattle industry as did government beef grading.Footnote ⁴⁵

As Congress debated the McNary-Haugen bill, two groups of cattlemen called for government grading, though for different reasons. One group, the National Better Beef Association (BBA), grew from the efforts of Alvin Sanders, the editor of the nationally renowned Breeder’s Gazette. In March 1925, he began writing editorials in the Breeder’s Gazette calling for government grading of the top grades to increase demand, according to James Rhodes, for “well-bred and well-fed beef which would increase the derived demand for purebred beef cattle.” Unabashedly elitist, Sanders referred to any beef below prime as “cat meat” derived from “scrub” cattle. Sanders accused retailers of misrepresentation, selling inferior beef as good beef, and blamed them for low consumer demand for prime and choice. Feeders faced the classic “lemon problem.” Even a small number of dishonest merchants who pass inferior beef off as high-class can drive out all high-class beef from the market. So, dishonest merchants’ effect on the market far outweighed their actual numbers. Sanders argued that consumers would buy more of the best corn-fed beef if they only had a third-party guarantee of quality. Breeders and midwestern feeders supported his plan and formed the BBA in Spring 1926.Footnote ⁴⁶

Grading only the top two grades, as the BBA wanted, implicitly lumped all other beef together as inferior. This essentially placed the grade just below choice—also corn fed, purebred, and still considered superior beef—on the same level as the lowest quality beef derived from dairy cows that had outlived their milk-producing ability. Western cattlemen opposed this plan. They raised “range cattle from the region west of Missouri and north of the southern boundary of Kansas.” These cattle were graded as “medium” or “good” quality and were still rated as a “superior breed.” Bred in the West, raised on grass, they typically lacked the “flesh and finish” of “native beeves,” bred and raised in the Midwest and fattened on grain. Only the “native beeves” could produce “prime” or “choice” meat. Western cattlemen feared that if the government only graded prime and choice, then consumers would assume the inferiority of all other beef.Footnote ⁴⁷

Western cattlemen, then, fostered their own grading movement called Truth in Meats that called for government grading of all meat. Begun by Meat Board member O. M. Plummer of Oregon, Truth in Meats sought to acquaint the “housewife” with “standards and quality in meat.” Plummer most likely drew inspiration from the widespread “truth in advertising” movement that called for consumer education, industry self-regulation, and even criminalizing false claims. Similar to truth in advertising, Truth in Meats touted the benefits of grading for wholesalers, retailers, and consumers alike because it would provide reliable information as to the type of cattle, but it primarily aimed to benefit producers. Plummer thought the grade would allow cattlemen to realize a higher price for their western “well-bred stock.” He wanted the cooperation of the BAI in marking carcasses as coming from “a steer, a cow, a heifer, or a bull,” and according to grade. To pay for government grading, the Truth in Meats campaign would assess a five-cent per carload fee on producers. Many within the ANLSA supported the movement.Footnote ⁴⁸

The packers initially opposed government grading, fearing that “the grading and marking of beef would decrease the total amount of sales” because consumers would cease buying inferior grades. Government grading, however, would also give the public sector broad authority over the quality labeling of packers’ products. For instance, the packer buyer in the stockyards judged the appearance of an animal to estimate the grade of meat under the hide, but with government grading, a public employee rather than a packer employee determined the grade of beef after slaughter, meaning that packers would lose control of quality labeling. Wilson and Armor were more favorable to grading than the other big packers, but only with evidence of a demand for it. If implemented, though, they favored grading only the top two, rather than grading all classes of meat.Footnote ⁴⁹

Historians have noted that the big processors endorsed or even encouraged government regulation of beef. Gabriel Kolko and others showed how the big processors endorsed federal meat inspection laws in the late nineteenth century because it bolstered their export trade. Back then, federal meat inspection only applied to interstate businesses, and packers wanted to level the playing field by extending inspection to small competitors. Hence, they favored the meat inspection law of 1906. In the case of grading, packers opposed federal regulation for reasons detailed above, but some producers suspected that they opposed it because they would have trouble selling their most inferior meat.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, historian Mary Yeager noted that the big packers’ business model rested on ensuring quality without waiting for demand signals. So, government grading would be unnecessary from their perspective. Another consideration is that, at the time, packers did not carry private brands of beef as they did hams and bacon. Government grades would serve as, essentially, nationally recognized brands that would therefore allow smaller packers to compete on an equal footing with the big packers.Footnote ⁵¹ Perhaps not surprisingly, the big processors favored regulation when it suited their own interests.

Meanwhile, the Meat Board acted as a liaison between USDA agricultural scientists and the private sector. In June 1925, Meat Board members gathered at the brand-new Kansas City Club. In this posh, Beaux Arts building, board members created a committee of five, chaired by big packer Thomas Wilson, to study the question of government grading. The committee spoke of how it “secured” the services of K. F. Warner of the BAI to conduct a survey of the potential effect of grading on producers, marketing agents, packers, retailers, and consumers. After hearing his results, the board officially endorsed government grading and created another committee to work out a plan. Upon its advice, the Meat Board then obtained the services of Walter C. Davis of the BAE who spent ten days in the Meat Board offices devising a plan. He advised marking class and grade of all commercial grades, which would include “good,” “medium,” and “common,” in addition to the top two grades. In December 1926, after reviewing his report, the committee delayed action until it received the results of the meeting between the BBA and IAMP.Footnote ⁵²

In the same month, five representatives of the IAMP and five of the BBA met to work out a compromise on grading.Footnote ⁵³ By this time, the BBA had added western cattlemen to its board of directors in order to have a broader appeal among cattlemen and, therefore, a greater voice at the bargaining table. Meat Board member and Truth in Meats originator, O. M. Plummer, also joined the BBA. The discussion lasted for ten days. Ultimately, the IAMP agreed to give government grading “a fair trial.” The two groups then worked out the details for a trial run—voluntary government grading of only prime and choice with the possibility of expansion to other grades depending on the results. The packers also hoped their support for grading would usher in a “closer relationship between feeders and packers than now exists” in order to keep the cattlemen informed on high-class beef demand.Footnote ⁵⁴

The BBA and the big processors, as well as other leading cattlemen, hoped to coordinate the industry to prevent market gluts. Though this coordination failed to materialize, it shows that grading, even for the BBA, represented only one aspect of a larger strategy. Former Wall Street banker and champion Angus breeder Oakleigh Thorne, the BBA chairman, wanted the organization to stabilize the movement of top-grade beef. In a letter to Meat Board general manager Roscoe C. Pollock, Thorne explained that the BBA and the packers wanted the work of the BBA handled by the Meat Board, and he even donated $5000 to it to publicize meat grading. Within months, the Meat Board had created a “better beef department” to do just that.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thorne also wanted the Meat Board to establish contact with breeders and eventually bring “closer affiliation between the breeders and packers so that quality of beef demanded by the public could be produced by the breeders and to lessen as much as possible the production of the quality of beef.” With so many producers, agricultural commodities are notoriously difficult to coordinate. The tragedy of the commons usually prevents it. However, controlling prime and choice beef seemed much more feasible because prime only constituted half of a percent of all beef production, while choice made up only about five and a half percent. As a nationwide organization with support from so many sectors of the industry, the Meat Board seemed poised to carry out this coordination. Plus, it benefited from the Capper-Volstead Act’s exemption for cooperatives from Sherman and Clayton Act prohibitions of “combinations in restraint of trade.” Grade labeling combined with supply coordination would ensure monopoly rents to breeders and feeders.Footnote ⁵⁶

By spring 1927, all involved agreed to a trial run of voluntary government grading. The USDA had been developing beef carcass grades since 1916. In that year, it instituted a market news service for wholesalers in several cities, but, without uniform standards, price comparison between markets proved nearly impossible. As mentioned previously, the USFA encountered this same difficulty. The USDA then worked out tentative standards that were used in federal wartime beef purchases. Finally, in August 1924, two agricultural scientists issued a bulletin that defined standards in great depth. These standards received “overwhelming” support from all sectors of the industry. The final guidelines, issued in June 1926, addressed minor concerns from industry insiders about the bulletin.

These guidelines facilitated the ascendance of the industrial steer. Prime and choice steer carcasses reflected the characteristics of grain-finished cattle: “creamy white fat,” “cherry red” meat color, and an “abundance of marbling” in the thicker cuts. The guidelines supported feedlot production because they defined good beef as the result of a lack of exercise and “intensive feeding on grain.” The in-depth 1924 standards favored early maturing cattle by defining prime carcass weights of between 500 and 700 pounds and stating that steers must be below three years of age at the time of slaughter.Footnote ⁵⁷ Descending down the grades from good to medium to common to cutter and low cutter, the characteristics reflect more and more those of grass-fed, unimproved cattle: fat becomes more yellow, until it virtually disappears, and meat color becomes dark red.Footnote ⁵⁸

Packers and agricultural scientists stressed the need for early-maturing cattle because of consumer preference. Agricultural scientists Davis and Whalin wrote that modern consumers willingly paid a higher price for “relatively inferior grades of meat” because they wanted lighter cuts. Packers claimed that the growing class of urban housewives with small families eschewed the large cuts with excessive fat trimming that came from older, heavier cattle. Reflecting disagreements over whether older, heavier cattle produced better beef than early maturing, Davis and Whalin wrote that “arbitrary action is sometimes necessary to uproot certain evils and inconsistencies which creep into every industry.”Footnote ⁵⁹

In May 1927, the long-anticipated trial run of government grading began. The test sites, nine cities total, included large markets like New York City and small ones like St. Joseph, Missouri. Participants gauged the grading’s effect on “producers, consumers, and distributing agencies.” Packers in these cities could request to have a beef grader from the BAE mark carcasses free of charge. Technically, the packer employees assigned a grade to the meat and the government grader either approved or disapproved of the grade given. The graders used a roller with a “revolving rubber stamp” that left a colored mark indicating the grade from “neck to hind shank.” The mark—made of edible vegetable dyes—was visible on most retail cuts of meat so that customers could always see it.Footnote ⁶⁰ By December 1927, up to twenty-five thousand cattle had been stamped and graded. After almost a full year of the experiment, the packer’s producer-oriented newspaper, Meat and Live Stock Digest, stated that the grading system met with “widespread approval,” and reported that packers and retailers both wanted the BAE to add a third grade, “good” to the existing ones.Footnote ⁶¹

Seeing a demand for grading, and that grading did not hurt the sale of lower quality beef, the big packers approved but wanted more control. Soon, packers like Thomas Wilson complained of the government graders’ inaccuracy compared to packer graders. This is hard to believe since to become a government grader required a minimum of eight years’ experience in grading meat, and the most common place to gain this experience was in packing plants.Footnote ⁶² In response to disagreements over grades assigned by government graders, the big packers developed their own private brands of beef that mimicked government grades, such as “Swift’s Premium” and “Swift’s Choice,” which led to consumer confusion.Footnote ⁶³ The adoption of private brands ties in with Mary Yeager’s concept of “new competition.” Yeager explained how in the early twentieth century the big packers coordinated prices and refocused competition more heavily on product differentiation. Private beef grades proved a new ground for competition between packers. Producers and retailers criticized the packers for putting self-interest above the good of the industry.Footnote ⁶⁴

By December 1927, beef prices rose significantly, and East Coast consumers staged a beef boycott.Footnote ⁶⁵ The boycott began when the Boston Hotel Association encouraged its members to place placards at their restaurant tables urging consumers to avoid steaks and roasts “until price and quality return to normalcy.” As the boycott gained steam along the Atlantic coast, live cattle prices plummeted. Secretary of Agriculture William Jardine intervened with an open letter to retailers. He described how cattlemen had suffered from low prices since the end of the Great War and that the higher prices provided a fair return to cattlemen. He noted that “while cattle prices have advanced almost continuously during 1927, the sharp advance came after the middle of the year, particularly in the better grades of cattle and beef, which, however, makeup but a minor proportion of the total supply.” The USDA favored higher prices for prime and choice and defended the beef industry’s new system of grading against the interests of the restaurant trade. Shortly after Jardine’s letter, the secretary of the City of Boston Hotel Association backed down. The Producer complained that newspaper men on the East Coast wanted the free admission of South American beef “in the interest of cheaper food for ‘the masses.’”Footnote ⁶⁶

Despite the boycott, many retailers still preferred government grading. Head of the grading service, Walter Davis, told the Meat Board that chain stores and thousands of other retailers appreciated it. For one thing, they could order their meat over the phone and not have to worry about inspecting it at the packing plant, then transporting it themselves. Plus, the stamp, whether it be prime, choice, or good, generally commanded a higher price than the same quality meat without the stamp. By 1933, Davis claimed that retailers received a half cent to one cent more per pound for graded meat and—more importantly—consumers bought more beef because of the quality guarantee.Footnote ⁶⁷

Despite the success of grading, all was not well for a grading system that privileged the industrial steer. About six months before Alvin Sanders called for government grading, the Meat Board called for an immense interagency meat research effort. In September 1924, Meat Board general manager Pollock, a former county agent, called the initial conference of specialists from the USDA and the experiment stations to discuss the need for information regarding the “factors which influence the production and quality of meat.” They formed the Cooperative Meat Investigations, which coordinated research nationally between experiment stations and the USDA. Specifically, researchers considered factors directly related to grade, such as “feeding, slaughtering, curing, distribution, and cooking of meats” so “that the quality and palatability of meats might thus be improved.” Scientists presented their research to the Meat Board, and leaders of the Cooperative Meat Investigations reported regularly to it. Leadership of the Cooperative Meat Investigation, funded through the Purnell Act of 1925, consisted mostly of directors of experiment stations, USDA bureau chiefs, and a couple of Meat Board members.Footnote ⁶⁸

Even though the Cooperative Meat Investigations focused on “establish[ing] more uniform grades and standards of meat production which would place the distribution of meats upon a more satisfactory basis,” its participants primarily sought to uphold the cattle-grain-beef complex. Many of the participants, whether from the public or private sector, wanted the research to support early-maturing cattle. At the first conference, many participants stressed that the public wanted “light cuts of beef,” and that consumers considered the fat that can be “mechanically separa[ted]” from “heavy, highly finished cattle … as waste.” They regarded one of their most important jobs as determining the proper degree of finish, that is, feeding corn before slaughter, with the least amount of fat trimming.Footnote ⁶⁹

Over the next six years, studies suggested that the beef from early maturing, lighter weight cattle paled in taste comparisons to that of older, heavier cattle. Clearly, this challenged the grading system that placed a premium on early maturity and light weights. In 1930, BAI chief Earl W. Sheets confronted the Meat Board with this news, saying that “as the age of the beef animal increases, the intensity of the aroma and flavors and the juiciness increases noticeably,” although it did not seem to affect tenderness. He recalled that at the organizational meeting for the Cooperative Meat Investigations, some participants protested the marketing of younger cattle because “we would never have any more good beef.” Indeed, many on the Meat Board, including Thomas Wilson, agreed that beef from heavier cattle tasted better. Sheets added that “I think that is something for the meat people to think about.” After this observation, he nevertheless encouraged the Meat Board to “outline a program of having the state agricultural colleges and the Federal Department of Agriculture do the kind of research you think should be done.” In this case, the USDA looked for policy guidance from the Meat Board.Footnote ⁷⁰

The Cooperative Meat Investigations illustrate the mutual benefits to the private and public sectors. The Meat Board obtained relatively free research and development, while the public sector scientists gained a sense of purpose and legitimacy. At the Meat Board’s semiannual meetings, many researchers read their “drawn out, dry” reports from the Cooperative Meat Investigations to the often unenthused board members. Pollock reminded his confreres that “it is worth sitting to listen to that talk for twenty minutes when you think of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that is being spent [by the government] on that type of work.” He told the Meat Board that “we want those people to work for us … they will do anything we ask them to.” From the public scientist’s perspective, Earl W. Sheets, BAI Chief and a leader in the Cooperative Meat Investigations, told the Meat Board that “if there is any one thing that this Board has done that has been worthwhile, it has been to create in the minds of research people a meat consciousness.”Footnote ⁷¹ By meat consciousness, Sheets referred to the dearth of meat research prior to the Cooperative Meat Investigations and the new life given to it because of them.

Though this essay focuses on the initial campaign to gain acceptance of the new grade standard, the long-term effects of this shift are accentuated in the present. The new agrifood standard played a foundational role in leading to the industrial feedlot system of today by defining the best beef as derived from confined feeding on a grain diet. Since the introduction of government grading, the number of fed cattle in the United States has steadily increased from 3,113,000 in 1930, more than doubling by 1960, and nearly doubling again by 2000 to 14,276,000. Today, nearly all cattle, not just the top grades, spend their twilight days in a feedlot. This shift toward grain feeding, especially since World War II, has greatly altered the market structure. Feedlots have decreased in overall number but have grown tremendously in capacity and have concentrated operations geographically in the Great Plains. A greater reliance on scientifically derived inputs, such as antibiotics, growth hormones, and other chemicals, to allow more time on grain has strengthened the connection between industry and science. Packers, too, moved their plants closer to producing areas, leading to the closing of the great public stockyards in Chicago, Kansas City, and throughout the country.Footnote ⁷²

As cattle feeding proliferated, the USDA relaxed grading standards, making it easier for beef to garner a higher grade. Mandatory grading during World War II and the Korean War helped spread the practice. In fact, from 1941 to 1959, the percentage of beef receiving a government grade grew from 10 percent to 51 percent.Footnote ⁷³ During the same period, the USDA removed all references to fat color and reduced quality standards by one grade, meaning choice merged into prime, and good moved into choice. The removal of fat color in the standards may be explained by widespread consumer acceptance of white fat as the mark of good beef. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, processors and agricultural scientists assumed white fat as the industry standard.Footnote ⁷⁴ Between 1960 and 1980, the USDA reduced marbling requirements, allowing more steers to obtain the choice grade and removed maturity requirements for the higher grades. This redefinition came in response to nutritionists’ advice to reduce fat consumption, which led to consumer demand for leaner beef. Western ranchers approved of this shift, while feeders and packers opposed it because it meant less time feeding and less corn consumed.Footnote ⁷⁵ Because of new biotechnologies and low corn prices in the twenty-first century, however, feedlot operators have kept more cattle on feed for longer periods than anyone thought possible in the 1920s. Cattle can now feed for over one hundred eighty days as heavier, though not necessarily younger, cattle are becoming more prevalent. Currently, over 95 percent of cattle in the United States are finished on grain rather than forage.Footnote ⁷⁶ Though grade standards have changed, the notion that good beef derives from feedlot steers has only become more fixed within the industry and among the consuming public.

Though beset with internal disagreements, the public-private partnership in the meat and livestock industry has never wavered from its commitment to so-called conventional beef raising. Agricultural scientists as well as actors from the private sector have consistently supported grades, whether public or private, that privilege the beef of the feedlot steer. Their classification of feedlot-derived beef as the best represents a moral choice that supports the cattle-grain-beef complex. Today, many private agrifood labels offer alternatives based on the method of animal or crop production, such as organic, fair trade, or sustainably raised, but these only serve to reinforce the notion that quality grades protect a process. In labeling beef quality grades as an industry imprimatur, this essay draws attention to the process that the seemingly innocent concept of the quality grades defends.