Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 149

Trade, taste and technology is a compilation and analysis of a substantial amount of historical information on the important business of the international meat trade. Moving from the 1840s into the early twenty-first century, Richard Perren has skilfully organized an examination of colonial and post-colonial trade between Europe, especially the United Kingdom, and English and Hispanic speaking nations in newly settling lands. Drawing on his own extensive research, on contemporary and recent monographs and articles, and a range of government documents, publications of Non-Governmental Organisations and internet sources, he examines what happened to the meat carcass after slaughter. A complex web emerges in which individual entrepreneurs, large and multinational corporations, government bodies and consumers interacted to direct meat to feed millions of Europeans who were unable to supply themselves. While mainly welcomed, this meat trade at times was challenged on account of health and safety issues.

As with many agricultural industries, meat distribution has been subject to major technological changes as well as having to respond to economic fluctuations, natural hazards and consumer tastes. In the nineteenth century, which here spans the years from 1840 to 1914, it became possible to transport meat thousands of miles from the Americas, Australia and New Zealand to European markets initially because of salting and then canning techniques. But the development of refrigerated freight trains and ships from the 1870s extended not only the amount of meat carried either in chilled or frozen form, but shifted the emphasis to beef rather than pork or lamb. By this time big business was organizing the North American industry and soon its modernizing impact was felt in Argentina and Uruguay. Investment in South American operations meant that when the North American market absorbed more of its domestic product, North American firms could still dominate the transatlantic trade, primarily to the United Kingdom. Australia and New Zealand remained apart in international trading patterns in terms of their product, lamb and mutton, and their smaller corporate enterprises.

Two world wars interspersed with a major world depression disrupted market and trading patterns between 1914 and 1945. During these years governments intervened more actively to shape and manage the international meat business. In both world wars the British government, facing the need to import meat at higher cost, prioritized feeding military forces adequately while the civilian population faced rationing. In all European countries at war, livestock production was given a lower priority than arable production and grain was given the most assistance as cereals were perceived as being the most efficient use of resources under wartime conditions. During the inter-war years when there was a general overall growth in the meat industry, despite periodic fluctuations and downturns, the British government both supported home production at the same time as establishing an imperial preference system after 1930. The latter policy created some dilemmas as the government still wanted to sell manufactured goods to Argentina, one of its main beef suppliers.

In the late twentieth century, changes in consumption patterns, the marketing of new varieties and cuts of meat and new arrangements for processing meat intersected with government policies and economic fluctuations to suggest different directions for the meat trade. The long-term decline in red meat consumption, especially beef, and the rising popularity of fat free poultry, especially chickens, only partly explains recent developments. The meat industry, already under scrutiny from government regulations, shifted its emphasis from large urban packing units to rural areas where labour was non-unionized, innovative technologies could be more easily introduced and road transport was the main means of domestic shipment. Higher standards of living and the spread of the two wage-earner families in most western mature economies stimulated the demand for ready-prepared cuts of meat, convenience foods and an increase in eating out, often in fast food and restaurant chains. These new cuts of meat were increasingly supplied to supermarkets and fast food chains with a concomitant decline in butchers whether as chains, such as Dewhursts in the United Kingdom, or independents. Such a low-cost philosophy of sales did not, however, prevent the rise of new large processing firms such as Tyson Foods in the United States and Bernard Matthews in the United Kingdom. Though consumers have continued to eat meat, the industry has frequently been criticized, partly because of the intensive and inhumane methods of factory livestock farming, the appearance of animal diseases like foot and mouth and BSE and the perception that the agricultural sector has been given special governmental assistance.

Trade, taste and technology is a major contribution to economic history in general and to agricultural and commercial history in particular. It is a masterful synthesis of interdisciplinary research and could only have been written by someone with a deep and clear understanding of both the history of meat processing and the workings of the international economy. Agricultural historians may find the chapters focusing on public policies, and regulating the meat industry to be of most direct interest to their own research, but there is something for any historian who wants to find out how industrializing and post-industrial nations managed to satisfy demands for meat when domestic supplies were inadequate. Certainly this in an anglocentric volume, but the United Kingdom was the main market for imported meat in Europe in the late nineteenth century and continued to import meat in bulk into the 1970s when entry into the European Economic Community marked some more changes of direction.