Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America (review)

longer was a term reserved for cured pork in a barrel; it was now a type of fresh meat, as well as ham and bacon. Likewise, Horowitz explains how chicken shifted from being a type of fowl or poultry into a generic category of meat, in addition to how automation transformed hot dogs into a meat rather then a form of sausage. Horowitz’s research points out that although producers sought more efficient and profitable ways to produce meat and consumers demanded a variety of wholesome meats at inexpensive prices, the very nature of meat itself has led to a provisioning system that is vulnerable to outbreaks of Salmonella and Escherichia coli, environmental degradation, and controversies over the widespread use of subclinical antibiotics. Although there has never been an unproblematic solution to supplying the vast quantity of meat Americans eat, the circumstances surrounding the mass production of meat has resulted in an uneasy compromise between production and consumption. Finally, it is refreshing to see a book that utilizes consumer data in conjunction with business records to examine the history of consumer products. In using this approach, Horowitz writes a more balanced history of production that identifies the constraints both producers and consumers faced, and continue to face, when selling or buying meat. The book also begins to fill a deficiency in the historiography of the food system, allowing historians of business, consumption, technology, science, and food to begin to understand the economic and technological factors in addition to the cultural boundaries that have influenced and constrained food production and consumption. For anyone interested in food production or consumption, this book is indispensable because Horowitz considers meat in all of its complexity rather than simply asserting that yet another food changed the world.