Meat Makes People Powerful

How is it that the fate of an Iowa soybean farm rests so deeply on Chinese economic policy? Why and how did the world food system become so interlocked? How have state policies and cultural values maintained unique food cultures? How have these same policies and values promoted a unified global food system? Wilson J. Warren's Meat Makes People Powerful addresses these questions by tracing meat consumption in Europe, North and South America, Oceania, and East Asia over the past two centuries. The book's global scope and fleshy focus comes naturally for Warren, a historian who has written about meat-packing in the United States, and studied in Japan as a Fulbright scholar. The slim synthetic work begins by depicting a world of nineteenth-century contrasts. Citizens of England, Germany, Argentina, and the United States consumed increasing amounts of meat, while China and Japan's citizens largely spurned meat eating, even after Japan's emperor Meiji lifted the ban on its consumption in 1882, and promoted its production. Then Warren traces how nutritional scientists and concerns about livestock disease informed state efforts to produce and promote meat in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Finally, the author considers how free trade policies, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947) and Europe's Common Agricultural Policy (1962), American feed grain exports, and worldwide adoption of confined animal feeding, drove global meat consumption ever skyward. He also looks at the social and ecological consequences of its meteoric rise

Agriculture · Archaeology · China · Consumption (sociology · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Geography · Livestock · Meiji period · Political science · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science · American Environmental and Regional History · Culinary Culture and Tourism · History · Law