Meatpacking Innovations
This system allowed animals to be processed into meat in an assembly-line fashion, increasing efficiency in Chicago's meatpacking industry.
What is the disassembly line?
Cronon argues that Chicago “annihilated space” by overcoming this physical barrier to fresh meat distribution.
What is distance?
Workers in Chicago's meatpacking plants often performed this type of labor, repeating a single task.
What is specialized or repetitive labor?
Cronon suggests that the urban consumer was increasingly disconnected from this process.
What is the slaughtering of animals?
This term refers to landscapes that have been reshaped to serve human economies, often erasing their natural complexity.
What is second nature?
Meatpacking innovations helped transform meat from a regional, seasonal product into this kind of commodity.
What is a national, year-round commodity?
The expansion of this infrastructure helped integrate rural livestock production into urban industrial systems.
What are railroads?
The labor in meatpacking plants was often described as this, due to the division of tasks and dehumanization of workers.
What is alienating?
The transformation of livestock into meat commodities often obscured this from the final product.
What is the animal’s origin or the violence of slaughter?
In Cronon's framework, turning living animals into standardized, market-ready goods is an example of this process.
What is commodification?
This invention allowed meat to be transported long distances without spoiling, transforming the industry.
What is the refrigerated railcar?
This key city became a hub that linked the Western range with Eastern markets.
What is Chicago?
This term describes the business strategy of controlling all stages of production, exemplified by meatpackers' control over rail transport, slaughter, and distribution.
What is vertical integration?
The massive processing of meat in Chicago contributed to this kind of urban problem.
What is pollution or environmental degradation?
By shipping only the dressed meat rather than live animals, Chicago meatpackers created a more efficient but also more abstract version of this.
What is Nature?
The ability to process meat year-round in Chicago was largely due to the introduction of this technology.
What is mechanical refrigeration?
Cronon argues that Chicago's meat industry redefined the spatial relationship between these two American regions.
What are the rural West and urban East?
The speed and scale of Chicago’s meatpacking operations were enabled by both industrial organization and the exploitation of this.
What is cheap labor?
Cronon discusses how the meatpacking industry blurred the line between this pair of perceived opposites.
What are nature and culture?
Cronon argues that the creation of second nature often hides these two critical elements behind a “veil of the market.”
What are labor and environmental cost?
Chicago’s meatpackers created this kind of byproduct economy by selling everything from hides to glue.
What is the “everything but the squeal” philosophy?
By annihilating space, the meatpackers transformed time and distance into this kind of economic abstraction.
What is cost or commodity value?
Innovations in this system allowed cattle to be brought from the rural West to urban centers quickly and cheaply.
What is the railroad network?
The disconnection between consumer and origin of food is an example of this concept, central to Cronon’s argument about capitalist systems.
What is commodity fetishism?
This concept, originally from Marxist theory, is used by Cronon to describe how consumers become disconnected from the origins of the products they buy.
What is commodity fetishism?