The Shape of Meat

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century, animal flesh was subject to a range of treatments in an effort to preserve meat grown on the fringes of the British Empire (in Australia and New Zealand, South and North America) for consumption in urban centers in Britain. Focusing on the publications of the British Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Commerce and Manufacture, and allied sources such as the Lancet, this article demonstrates that the more a preservative technique transformed animal flesh, the more likely consumers—often presumed to hail from the poor and working classes—were to resist it. This resulted in frustration among elite “men of science and industry,” who held that tinned, canned, dried, or chemically treated meats were a “great boon” to precisely these classes. By refusing to consume industrial charqui, which was salted and dried, or by purchasing imported tinned Australian beef or mutton only unwillingly, the lower classes frustrated the ambitions of would-be tastemakers in the Society of Arts, who interpreted consumer resistance in their articles and published reports as the lower orders’ refusal to act in their own best interest. Importantly, it was the very changeability of meat—its figurative malleability as well as its material inconstancy—that enabled industrial transformations, consumer resistance, and its cultural symbolisms, making it a particularly rich object of study for historians of science.