Upon the arrival of cattle, sheep, pigs and goats, literally on the heels of the first Spaniards to enter Mexico, one of the prime responsibilities of good government was to assure a proper supply of mammalian meat to the European settlers and to insure, as best they could, decent quality and honest measure. While the native population at first stuck essentially to its traditional vegetable and cereal diet supplemented with a wide range of exotic fauna and the imported and welcome chicken, the carnivorous newcomers insisted on meat – red meat, mostly, in all its sawn off, sliced up, blood dripping forms, along with cured ham and bacon, sausage stuffed into scrapped intestines. It may be that even a meat-eater like myself, reading in this book about all the red-meat carcasses, guts spilling out on the slaughterhouse floor, as well as the fly-infested markets, will feel the urge to reach for a cucumber sandwich or tofu salad. But this should not obscure the originality and usefulness of this serious work.
In time, meat of Old World provenance came to be accepted throughout the class and ethnic layers of Mexico (and of Latin America); consequently, adequate supply remained a vital issue. While they might be tucked out of sight in our squeamish era, in colonial Latin America slaughterhouses, like cemeteries, were close to the village or city centre and, especially for the more Hispanic population, a meal without red meat was, well, like a day without sun. This is also true in modern times. A tariff on imported Argentine cattle, for example, led to the fierce ‘Red Week’ riot in Santiago, Chile, in 1910 and, later, the unbearable scarcity of filete and lomo vetado added to the unpopularity of Eduardo Frei's Christian Democrats in the 1960s.
Jeffrey Pilcher, already known for two lively books, one dealing with Mexican food regimes and the other on the immortal Mexican actor, Cantinflas, now takes up the important subject of the economic and social history of meat in an ill-titled but informative book focused on the high tide of the first liberalism when North American culinary imperialism, in the form of a Chicago-style packing house, refrigerated steaks, and chops collided with the very different cultural tastes of meat-eaters in Mexico City.
Just why there should be such an avalanche of interest these days in food and drink is an interesting question. In the United States, side-by-side with our national obsession of obesity and weight loss, we have mouth-watering Sunday supplements devoted entirely to food, round-the-clock TV cooking programmes, and popular histories of cod fish, chocolate, oysters, turkeys, even salt – you name it – not to mention the all-too-precious language used among the wine cultists. The Mexicans themselves have put out the lavishly-illustrated several volumes of La cocina mexicana and many other scholarly works on food and diet. Perhaps the explanation for all this interest is simply abundance and the accompanying skewed income distribution during these recent heady years of a new round of liberal capitalism that encourages consumers, especially in the higher income brackets, to indulge the terrestrial delights of food and drink. Or maybe it is the never-ending search by scholars and popular writers for ever more original research topics.
Pilcher's work is, in any case, more fundamental than faddish. There is an original chapter on the ‘Terrazas Trust’, the powerful cattlemen from Chihuahua; the arrival of the first modern refrigerated meat packing plant in Uruapan put in place by one John W. DeKay, ‘whose shady past in Chicago's packinghouses was matched only by the balance-sheet fictions of his Canadian banker, George I. Ham’ (Great names for the meat business, no doubt). In a deft chapter on social history, we are taken right into the unsanitary ‘Porfirian Jungle’ of the new (1897) Peralvilla abattoir. In another we see the aproned, knife-wielding butchers in their street-side stands, who organised to provide a ‘significant example of local business and labor triumphing over foreign capital’. Their relatively few numbers, Pilcher remarks, ‘caused butchers to be overlooked’ in the gathering storm of the Mexican Revolution, but nevertheless their militancy ‘demonstrates the success of a developing country's labor movement in defying the power of an early multinational corporation’. Pilcher frames his study with an interesting discussion of the ambivalence of Don Porfirio and his technocratic elite (the famous científicos) who were both enchanted and wary of North American capital. In this other, political, ‘Porfirian Jungle’, Mr DeKay and Mr Ham were clearly out-gunned.
Finally, we have a cultural history of consumption. Consumer preference, in Pilcher's view, ultimately explains the failure of Mexico's first modern packing house. Mexicans high and low preferred lean, freshly slaughtered meat sliced off the hook right before their eyes in local markets to the unfamiliar, dry-aged, refrigerated cuts offered to the retail market by DeKay and Ham from their Mexican National (sic) Packing Company in Uruapan. This gradually changed with globalisation and NAFTA. By the early 1990s, North American supermarket tastes prevailed among those Mexicans who could afford to buy meat.
Jeffrey Pilcher has taken a little studied but vital subject and in doing so shown us its significance in labour history, provided a case history of early industrialisation, illuminated some shady corners of Porfirian politics, and demonstrated the importance of cultural preferences in economic processes. The prose may not be quite up to the standard of his earlier books; but then chorizos and slaughterhouse floors slick with blood do not always lend themselves to poetic expression.
