Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat (2015)
Chapter 8
HOW DO YOU WANT THAT CHUNKED AND FORMED RESTRUCTURED STEAK?
LUNCH BOX ITEM #2: PACKAGED DELI MEAT
The ritual is unvarying. Around 6:00 p.m., I halt what I’m doing—reading 1940s chemical industry journals, making the umpteenth pass over a mumble in an interview, laboriously wringing out a sentence while steeling myself against the urge to check the news—and swing open the refrigerator door. I stand there for a long moment, staring, asking myself that eternal question, “What should I make for dinner?”
There are the traditional meals on the days I’ve had the foresight to set a package of frozen meat, poultry, or seafood to defrost in the morning: toaster-grilled marinated steak; shrimp sautéed with garlic, strips of lemon zest, and fresh thyme; ajiaco bogateño, a hearty Colombian chicken, caper, and potato stew. But more often than not, I stand there weighing the last-minute options: raid the freezer for a box of chicken or fish nuggets, patties, or cutlets, or hit the cheese drawer, which my husband keeps stocked with presliced hams, hot dogs, chicken sausages, and other prepared meats?
It’s a choice that makes me uneasy, although it pleases my children, in whom I’ve failed to inculcate a taste for traditional animal flesh. But as the long ingredient list reveals, these bland, symmetrical substitutes are less healthy, maybe not healthy at all. When Jorge and I met, we discovered a startling coincidence: both of our fathers were statisticians. Later, our serious, upright fathers provided us with another: they both suddenly developed and died of pancreatic cancer. Jorge’s father was a heavy smoker, a risk factor. But my dad, a runner, without an ounce of fat on him? I see him now, getting his lunch ready at bedtime so that when he left for work at 6:00 a.m. he could just slip into the darkness: two slapped-together sandwiches—bread, cheese, and packaged deli meat (turkey, ham, or roast beef). One of the few known risk factors for this most deadly cancer is a diet high in red and processed meat.1 I push down the thought and reach for the hot dogs.
THE AMERICAN CARNIVORE—whether hypo, meso, or hyper in her habits—can go an entire week, month, or even year without confronting the animal origins of her favorite food. If she’s hard-core, maybe the morning begins with bacon, once a hunk of pork belly but now an almost Art Deco assemblage of crispy, striped strips, or, something even further removed from its beginnings, the breakfast sausage. Lunch, whether packed in a brown paper bag from home or takeout from her favorite fast-food outlet, inevitably includes restructured protein, which quietly overtook all other forms of fauna-based products in the 1990s. Dinner is the closest she gets to the real deal—ground beef; boneless, skinless chicken breast; pork tenders.
Most people attribute the U.S. consumer’s divorce from the realities of slaughtering, butchering, and preparing meat to a ridiculous squeamishness; we are chided for our reluctance to embrace the nose-to-tail gusto still prevalent in most of the world. (In this they are dead wrong: what, I ask you, is a better example of everything-but-the-squeal-or-moo than the humble hot dog?) This public relations jujitsu suits the powers that be just fine. The real reason for our apparent fondness for food made from refashioned animal tissue has nothing to do with our puerile taste buds—it has to do with the relentless quest by the U.S. Army to reduce the cost of the meat it uses to feed soldiers and, once it has found a way to do so, industry’s giddy embrace of the same to lower the expense of producing, transporting, and storing the meat it sells you.
For centuries, having a bone in our dinner was an insurance policy. For those with a passing familiarity with the beasts, birds, and crawling creatures God so thoughtfully delivered into our dominion—a group that included everyone until well into the twentieth century—a length of calcium-fortified connective tissue was an indispensable feature for quick and easy identification of the animal and body part in question. It also made it that much harder for a butcher to disguise some of the disturbing things that can happen to meat—sickly source, decay, and forays by vermin. (Of course, these inroads didn’t need to be an obstacle. An early nineteenth-century butchery how-to gives lessons in entomology, training fleischmeisters to distinguish no less than four species of flies, and provides this appetizing suggestion for dealing with Musca-egg-laden “blown meat”: “The part should be taken out, and some pepper put upon the place.”) Visual inspection happened both at the butcher stand or shop, where meat merchandising consisted of a spiked rack draped with gory carcasses and severed limbs, and at the table, where guests invited to dine with the local lords could be assured their dinner was of primo material by its appearance practically intact on a platter. The poor, in contrast, supped on the unrecognizable remnants of the brutes, mostly in stews and soups.
As in most passionate relationships, our feelings about meat are complicated. Nothing makes us feel quite like it does—the high protein content, the perfectly matched amino acids, the rich soup of elusive B vitamins and minerals. But it is also among the most fragile—and dangerous—of foodstuffs: if not brimming with spoilers and pathogens from the outset, then attracting and breeding a whole favela of unwelcome guests over time. Far worse, to partake of it, we must kill. Meat straddles the border between sacred and profane; every pork chop questions how much we value life; every hamburger reminds us of how frail it is. Is it any wonder the stuff makes us very, very nervous? This ambivalence extends to our societally sanctioned animal death professionals, butchers (as well as to the human ones, soldiers and executioners).
Our distaste for butchers and distrust of their wares wasn’t helped by their work environments, which were traditionally a filthy mess. They were, in fact, a shambles, a word that originally meant butcher’s digs. The occupational specialty appeared with the founding of cities, which, with their huddled masses, did not allow for the keeping of large grazing livestock (they did, however, allow for the small and garbage-consuming: backyard chickens and pigs were the original urbanites). The first butchers operated stands in open-air markets: farmers would arrive with their herds, most often goats and sheep but occasionally cattle, which would be slaughtered on the spot in a display of blood-spattering virtuosity. The gory by-products were left to fester in the already ordure-strewn street and ditches, giving rise to the sort of geographical nomenclature—Stinking Lane, Blowbladder Street—that discouraged company on daily errands.
Efforts to regulate the noisome trade, which by now was organized into powerful guilds—some butchers’ guilds even had their own police forces—were regular and ongoing. Starting in the late fourteenth century, laws were passed banishing slaughter to outside city walls, mandating disposal of waste in pits, and forbidding the sale of “roten Schep”2 and other sickly or rotting flesh. Slowly, the members of the Worshipful Company of Butchers began to move back downtown, transacting their business through large curved windows and finally, after it was invented in the 1800s, retreating behind plate glass (compressed air allowed glassmakers to partially cool large cylinders that could then be sliced opened and flattened). The only public evidence of their guilt-inducing activities was the rack hung with artfully composed swags made from their victims’ bodies, a practice that was finally expunged toward the end of the nineteenth century, when cities and towns got to work sanitizing the streetscape. Still, the old hierarchy of cuts based on proximity to the bone remained, with the best being the primals and the worst the odds and ends left behind after all the cutting was done.
Meat, or rather the muscles from which it comes, defines us and the taxonomic kingdom to which we belong, Animalia. Its name is derived from the Latin word for the huffing and puffing done by its members, which, at least in mammals, is powered by the diaphragm, a round, flat muscle that buckles back and forth creating air flow by continually changing the volume of the lungs. Cardiac fibers play percussion through the long days of our (hopefully) long lives. Smooth muscles push blood, lymph, food, urine, excrement, semen, and babies through the various channels, chutes, tubes, and tunnels that riddle our bodies. But it is the skeletal muscles lining our bones and padding our forms that truly liberate us. Able to go wherever and do whatever we please, we animals, more than any other beings in the great tree of life, are the agents of our own destinies.
There are two basic kinds of muscle cells. Fast-twitch or white fibers specialize in quick movements—lunges, darts, jabs, and feints; they are run on casual hookups with stored or blood glucose and, like most sugar addicts, rapidly need another fix. Slow-twitch or red fibers are long-haul plodders; their metabolic relationships are much more serious. Myoglobin, an overdeveloped molecular bodyguard composed of more than 150 amino acids, escorts an oxygen molecule from the blood to the mitochondria, private chambers where, in a really, really long chain reaction, the cell combusts it with fat. The souped-up security is for a reason: oxygen and fat produce thirty-six energy-giving ATP molecules compared with sugar’s measly two.
Of course, all the intricate cellular machinery goes straight to hell once an animal’s heart has been stopped and its body hacked into pieces. After oxygen transportation ceases, the mitochondria are shuttered for good, leaving the slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am enzymes to wander disconsolately, gobbling up any remaining sugar—and excreting lactic acid, which slowly lowers the pH and imparts a slightly sour, though not unpleasant, taste to the flesh. When the energy-generating enzymes have sputtered to a stop, the muscle fibers, without ATP to release them, are mortared together by calcium and left in one final, agonized contraction: rigor mortis has set in.
At that point, enzymes that break apart proteins, including calpains, begin to dismantle the muscle’s structural elements—ligaments, tendons, cartilage, and tension-maintaining elastin. (The harder a muscle works, the more connective tissue it has; one of the tenderest muscles of any animal is the lazy longissimus, which runs along the spine and whose only job is to keep it straight.) Later, when the pH is lower still, the reinforcements arrive, including cathepsins, acid-loving enzymes housed in a special organelle now burst open by the low pH. These enzymes tenderize the meat, a process that requires about a day for poultry, a week for pork, and anywhere from two weeks to a month for beef. The different aging rates may be because fast-twitch fibers have a higher proportion of stored glucose, so tend to go through the chemical breakdown faster than slow-twitch fibers, as well as offer a better-supplied larder to marauding decomposers.
The usual suspects are most often several varieties of Pseudomonas, a hearty little spoilage bacterium that thrives equally well not only in cold and warm temperatures but also in acid, neutral, and alkaline environments. It is happy to dine on whatever happens to be available, although glucose is always its first choice. When that’s exhausted, Pseudomonas keeps on digging, downing debris from amino acids for its energy source. Unfortunately, the digestion of these can engender noxious fumes, as anyone who has ordered the eighteen-ounce porterhouse at Sizzler can vouch, due to their breakdown into the malodorous amines. Our raw pork chop starts to stink.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, locally raised and slaughtered fresh meat wasn’t a nicety—it was a necessity. Long-distance transport of unpreserved animal flesh was potentially lethal for the end user. There was an exception: since time immemorial, humankind has known that cold delays decay, even without knowing why (it makes the bacteria that share our taste in comestibles very, very sluggish). For this reason, unless sacrificing the requisite ruminant or monogastric for a feast, the eating of fresh meat had always been a seasonal activity in temperate zones. Slaughter was done during early winter, and the carcass divested of its drapery in the frigid months that followed. Once the earth’s axis pointed toward the sun again, however, January’s gifts disappeared, except for occasional pockets left in caves or root cellars.
In the early nineteenth century, the renegade son of a prominent Boston family, Frederic Tudor, teamed up with a Cambridge, Massachusetts, townie, Nathaniel Wyeth, to found one of the most lucrative industries of the time: frozen water. Using Wyeth’s invention, blades strapped on a plow, they carved up winter lakes into blocks, stacked the blocks with sawdust mortar in special icehouses and insulated ship holds, and sent them from New England to the south and the Caribbean. The ships’ crews quickly noticed the cargo’s ability to keep tipples and nibbles chilled en route, and the concept of the cold chain was born. By the 1870s, ice-cooled reefers, the industry term for refrigerated cargo ships, were making their maiden voyages carrying “dead meat.” Within the next quarter century, consumer and commercial demand—particularly in the meat-packing, dairy, and brewing trades—for solid-state H2O mushroomed, as did fortunes founded on the stuff. Later, the ice was swapped for modern refrigeration machines rigged together from compressors, condensers, coils, and coolants made of volatile, and flammable, chemicals. By 1905 millions of globe-trotting beef quarters from Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States were crisscrossing the Atlantic in freighters kept cold by an ammonia solution (the principal ingredient was made from dung- and guano-based nitrate, an ingredient in gunpowder) that was put through its phase-changing paces—first a vapor, then a liquid, again a vapor, again a liquid—alternately absorbing and dumping excess heat.
THE SINGLE MOST EXPENSIVE ITEM on the military menu has always been meat, generally accounting for more than half the bill. For starters, as most vegetarians, animal activists, and environmentalists have pointed out at one time or another, animal flesh takes a flabbergasting amount of land, water, and plant food to produce. “Harvesting” it is a full-scale event, until the twentieth century requiring the labor of highly trained professionals, as is processing the “crop” into edible group- or individual-size portions. And finally, because meat is so alluring to itsy-bitsy life-forms, and so biologically complex that even after death it undergoes all sorts of still little-understood changes, it must be stored and transported with great care—and expense.
During the Civil War, the flesh in the regulation tin bowls of the 2.1 million Union army recruits arrived the old-fashioned way, “on the hoof,” a transportation method that had its demerits. Some animals inconsiderately died en route. Others took the opportunity to crash-diet, losing up to sixty pounds during the trek. All had the inconvenient habit of requiring large amounts of water and forage along the way. By the Spanish-American War in 1898, refrigerated railcars and steamship holds enabled the shipping of carcasses, which, for a force of about 300,000 men, didn’t unduly tax the infrastructure. But when the United States reluctantly joined World War I in 1917, it faced a more than tenfold increase in the demand for chow. How to keep 4.7 million recruits in their promised pound o’ protein a day? Suddenly the lifestyle to which future tenderloins had grown accustomed—ceiling hooks in a refrigerated hold placed so they could swing, jiggle, and sway without disturbing their similarly situated neighbors—was too luxurious. Desperate to keep supplies running, the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, led by Chief of Subsistence Colonel William Grove, put on its thinking cap: Could it go against humankind’s age-old antipathy to barrels of unidentifiable chunks and scraps, long disdained as containing tainted meat? Could we send our boys boneless beef?
In 1918, under the expansionist eye of Lieutenant Jay Hormel, the army set up the very first boxed-beef processing plant and distribution system, centered in Chicago. The results caused army bigwigs to do a little jig: a quarter carcass weighed 25 percent less without its bones, fat, and cartilage and, when frozen into a rectangular solid, wrapped in burlap and waxed paper, and stacked, occupied 60 percent less space on crowded trains and ships. Soon hundred-pound boxes were shipping out to France; in all, about 8 percent of the 449 million pounds of beef consumed during the war arrived this way. There were, however, a few kinks. It turns out that dumping everything together and freezing it created a god-awful mess. Individual cuts were difficult to thaw, which engendered mutinous mess hall grumbling—how come he gets a porterhouse and I get a burger?—and just plain didn’t look good (slowly freezing meat busts open its cells and intracellular structures, turning its surface dark brown). Army cooks took to hacking the blocks apart with axes, resulting in, as the official historians tactfully put it, “unattractive and often unpalatable” fare.
The first attempt at a boneless beef product hadn’t gone very well, but the army is nothing if not persistent. Based in Chicago, where the Big Five meatpackers—Armour, Swift, Morris, Wilson, and Cudahy—were located, the Quartermaster Corps Subsistence School (and, after 1936, its descendant, the Subsistence Research Laboratory) plugged away at the problem during the 1920s and 1930s. But they didn’t make progress until Jesse White from the Navy Veterinary Department, who spearheaded the project, enlisted the help of Armour and Swift in 1938. A new boning technique was developed that got almost all the edible meat off the carcass. Meat was sorted into different classes instead of a single frozen block of undifferentiated animal parts: each container held packages of roasts and steaks (40 percent), chunks for soups and stews (30 percent), and—don’t look too closely—grinding grade (30 percent). Additionally, rather than deep-freeze the box of meat and let the cold penetrate the flesh over hours or days, they flash froze it. (The frozen boxes could also be used to keep other perishables cool.) The technique, which uses extremely low temperatures, was invented by Clarence Birdseye, the “father” of frozen food; the method doesn’t rupture cell walls and produces smaller ice crystals, resulting in meat or plant tissue that’s almost like fresh in appearance and texture.
The Quartermaster Corps’ innovations came just in time for the Greatest Generation, who laced up their boots and tromped off across the continents, while their Rosies riveted fighter planes and grew victory gardens. By the end of World War II, there were casualties on an unimaginable scale—the United States alone lost almost 400,000 troops. Although not generally recognized, the humble American cow also made staggering sacrifices: 29 million gave their lives to feed enlisted men and women from 1941 to 1945. They arrived to overseas battle theaters boneless, frozen, and boxed. This preparation cut in half the number of cargo ships needed to navigate hostile waters and allowed an irregularly shaped product to be neatly piled and palletized (fastened to a flat carrier), an innovation that didn’t originate with the military but got a critical bump in its dissemination by the war.
But that was just the beginning. Boxed boneless beef offered a whole panoply of value-added propositions that the army magnanimously bestowed on its associates in the meatpacking industry—they could charge more, because the product required additional time and labor, and they could keep and sell the hides (leather), fat (soap and margarine), bones (stock, fertilizer, and tankage, or protein supplements for animal feed), and trimmings. (It’s probably no coincidence that the first packaged hot dog—Oscar Mayer’s Kartridg-Pak, a product later encased in Saran—appeared in Chicago at about the same time.) For the military, the new product also had additional benefits. Cooking and serving the new cuts took fewer personnel and less time, leaving more leisure for important things like gossiping and ribbing your fellow soldiers, who were in a much better mood now that dining didn’t involve dueling for T-bones. And, joy of joys, the streamlined slices of meat eliminated the smelly piles of viscera that had for eons added a down-market vibe to the mess hall landscaping. The Defense Department, convinced it had a hit on its hands, crowed, “Military advances in beef processing have made the beef ration a reality almost everywhere that our present global Army may be. The Army has put boneless beef—frozen fresh and packed so that there can be no mistakes in cooking and serving—on a basis where further experimentation is not necessary. It is now ready for civilian use.”3
Not quite.
It turned out American housewives had their own ideas about how fresh meat should be sold, and it didn’t involve removing the internal scaffolding or subjecting it to temperatures below 32°F. Earnest attempts in the late 1940s and 1950s by Chicago meatpackers, already rubbing their hands over visions of fortunes to be made with the new more convenient meats, were a bust. Swift, which had helped develop and then supplied the military with frozen boxed beef during World War II, produced a frozen rectangular roast that flopped. At a special 1959 conference on the future of beef, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, advertising executives, the food industry, agricultural businesses, and academia mulled over how to persuade the recalcitrant consumer to accept boneless beef, even if it was, by their own estimation, inferior: “Tastes can be changed. This is [a challenge] … you have to face, particularly as we enter into the area of consumer convenience foods, because obviously here you have to make certain kinds of compromises to prepare these products.”
It took almost fifty years, and happened in phases, but over time the economic and practical benefits of boxed boneless meat (sometimes frozen and sometimes even seasoned—hello, Trader Joe’s) were too great to ignore. By the 1960s the former Big Four meatpackers (two merged), weakened by the government’s 1948 antitrust attacks on their vertically integrated business model (own the stockyards, own the packinghouse, own the railroad, own the truck, own the storage depot, own the wholesale center) as well as the inadequacy of that model for the postwar era, had been acquired, merged, or gone out of business. A new Big Four—Iowa Beef Packers, now Iowa Beef Processors (IBP); Cargill; Tyson Foods; and JBS (together responsible for 85 percent of all beef slaughter in 2010)—arose phoenixlike to take their place. Chief among these was IBP, which had put into practice several innovative (and cost-saving) ideas: buy cheap real estate near large feedlots and set up shop there (the federal highway system freed them from the railroads); jettison the old-guard system of hooks, tables, and skilled butchers and institute one of conveyor belts and low-skilled labor with a few simple tasks to do as the carcass drifted by; and, most important, do the final “boning and breaking” of the animal into retail cuts on-site, which meant they could sell boxes full of a single item, be it choice rib-eye steaks, select boneless rounds, chuck, or ungraded ground beef.
This time the lady of the house—and, yes, most groceries were, and still are, bought by women—was in the mood. In fact, what with her Frigidaire and new job as a typist, she was verging on desperate for quick ways to get dinner on the table. Between 1963 and 2002, the percentage of boxed beef shipped from the nation’s largest slaughter houses increased from less than 10 percent to 60 percent of their total sales, and now accounts for more than 90 percent of the beef sold in supermarkets.
In the modestly titled Iowa Beef Processors, Inc.: An Entire Industry Revolutionized!, the former IBP president Dale Tinstman lays stake to the breakthrough idea behind their success: “It was a natural progression from the efficiencies of shipping carcasses to shipping boxed beef. There is a lot of wasted space in a modern truck or rail car filled with chilled sides of beef. A side of beef has an awkward shape—it can’t be neatly packed, and a side has a lot of bone and trim that will never go into the meat case. It was logical to move to boxed beef.”
Nary a word about the ossa-free meat he surely refueled on during his days of navigating B-29 bombers during World War II, or saw riffling through Life magazine in the mid-1940s, where full-page ads by the American Meat Institute trumpeted boxed boneless meat developed for the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps as one of its industry’s “most noteworthy war developments.”
TO PARAPHRASE JFK PARAPHRASING MUSSOLINI’S SON-IN-LAW, failure is an orphan, but success has a thousand fathers. These are usually smiling jovially as they viciously elbow one another out of the family photo. Such is the case of McDonald’s (in)famous McRib, a washboard-shaped cutlet composed of porcine oddments, soaked in treacly barbecue sauce, strewn with pickles and onions, and stuffed in an oblong bun.
The iconic sandwich debuted in 1981 in sixty-five stores in six cities as a way to contain costs during a recession when overall sales were slack. “McDonald’s is ‘doing the best we can’ to keep from raising prices, a company spokesman says,” reported the Christian Science Monitor. At first interest was so low, the fast-food company gave the item away for breakfast; even then, “consumers simply turned up their noses,” but eventually (a good twenty years later), the pig meat-stuffed roll became a hit. Appreciation may have been fanned by scarcity; in the early days, the pork product appeared and disappeared several times from the McDonald’s menu, and is now only available for a short time once a year in the United States. By the early aughts, promoted by social media frenzies worth their weight in broadcast media buys, the McRib had gained a permanent foothold in the market and an ardent following. And suddenly everyone claimed to have invented it.
We can quickly eliminate contender #1, Rene Arend, McDonald’s French-trained chief chef, whose inspiration was the ersatz baby back shape and secret spices and toppings. But delve deeper than the finishing flourishes to the actual process for creating the restructured pork patty, and the story gets complicated—and competitive.
Contender #2, Dr. Roger Mandigo, an academic eager beaver, a Meat Industry Hall of Famer, and a professor emeritus from the University of Nebraska, says the following:
In about 1970 we started working on restructured meat… . It came about because the National Pork Council was looking for ways to get more pork into fast-food menus. We proposed the idea of restructuring pork; it could be in any shape or form. The project was funded by the National Pork Council with the pork producers’ check-off fund—a nickel for every hog… . Our original restructured pork was shaped like chops; McDonald’s adapted them for their McRibs.
Or perhaps we should credit contender #3, Dr. Dale Huffman, a laid-back and low-key researcher, famous for his 91 percent fat-free burger, retired from a forty-year stint at Alabama’s Auburn University?
The genesis goes back to my one-year industrial fellowship at Armour in 1969-70. I had interaction with people there who were making a restructured product, flaked and formed, which was good, but it didn’t have the characteristics of a muscle meat. When I got back to the university, Bettcher [a food- and meat-processing equipment company in Ohio] made equipment available which we moved into our pilot plant at Auburn University. Our greatest success was with the pork chop. [Joe Cordray, my partner, and I] took a truckload of product to [the] National Pork Council annual meeting in St. Louis… . Burger King was interested in using our restructured pork chop, but the parent company in Great Britain vetoed it. The only product in the marketplace today that you can trace back is the McDonald’s McRib.
But wait. Another candidate has appeared. Now retired, contender #4, John Secrist, a humble but devoted food technologist at the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, once turned down a promotion so he could spend more time in the lab.
The Armed Forces Product Evaluation Committee asked us what we could do to reduce the price of steaks and chops and things like that… . So we started a flaking project with this company from Ohio, Bettcher Industries, which was interested in getting more business from their flaking machines… . We could make it look like anything—pork chops, lamb chops… . Almost all of the meatpackers did trial production runs for us at no cost because … if it was satisfactory to the military, they’d leapfrog over the rest of the industry because they’d be the ones who did it first. Denny’s used our restructured beefsteak in their restaurant; still do. And McDonald’s McRib is as close to our product as you can get.
Americans have always taken pride in the fact that military messes served nothing but the finest to our boys and girls in uniform. After all, the mostly young Americans who risk their lives defending our country deserve that delicious, nutritious, ne plus ultra of warrior foods: meat. Pink and unctuous steak, seared and steaming chops, hearty stews, grill-charred patties, all cut from choice nine-hundred-pound steers. That ideal changed in the 1960s, when supermarkets finally saw the light and embraced the armed forces’ world-war innovation of butchering, sorting, and packaging beef at the point of slaughter. The growing demand for boxed beef tipped the balance away from carcass beef, and meatpackers, through their advocacy organization, the American Meat Institute, let it be known that Uncle Sam better get with its new program and buy its meat by cut and grade like everybody else. (Until then, because it purchased in such large quantities at relatively short notice, the army had bought whole carcasses.)
It was a golden opportunity. Now, thanks to the military’s mammoth purchasing power, it could finally upgrade the offering, negotiating rock-bottom prices for millions of pounds of steak and standing ribs. Top brass considered the possibility for a millisecond and then they shook their heads. “Now that we can finally buy just the cuts we want, how about we get the cheapest stuff there is and figure out a way to get the grunts to eat it?” Armed forces executives set the goal of reducing the meat bill by 60 percent with the as-yet undiscovered way to turn a sow’s ear into a cute little pork steakette. The challenge was on.
Natick Center food scientists went into the laboratory and began to fiddle, as well as to contract with universities and industry for outside research. There was, after all, a long history of turning trimmings and less desirable cuts into something tasty—la charcuterie, or, in good old American English, cold cuts. Four basic techniques, in use for centuries in practically every place people partake of animal flesh, went into making these foodstuffs: chopping or grinding, binding, shaping, and, finally, cooking or curing. The difference between humankind’s mouthwatering grab bag of salami, sausage, bologna, and frankfurters and what the Natick Center was doing was one of intent: traditional meat products don’t pretend to be anything but what they are, a scraps-to-scrumptious redemption story. The army’s invention, on the other hand, was meant to fool; the closer scientists got to getting your eye, nose, tongue, and teeth to believe their creation was the real thing, the happier they were.
It wasn’t easy. And it didn’t happen in one big eureka moment, but in piecing together a series of discoveries that occurred over a decade or so. The first, in a late 1950s patent assigned to Oscar Mayer—by then one of the nation’s largest and most successful meat products companies—was that tumbling or massaging large chunks of meat with salt caused them to ooze a sticky fluid that, upon cooking, would cohere them. The second significant advance came from equipment suppliers. During the early 1960s, Bettcher Industries of Ohio, came up with a new design for a flaking machine. Instead of pushing the meat against a guillotine, a process that also squeezed out the water, a circular head spun it toward fixed blades on the perimeter. This shaved the meat paper-thin, maximizing surface area while conserving the juices. Third, a new understanding of how muscles work in living and dead animals allowed food technologists to begin to manipulate and control these processes. Using the electron microscope, scientists observed that muscle fibers are composed of smaller fibers called myofibrils, which in turn are composed of strands of the proteins myosin and actin. By momentarily binding together in a sort of rowing motion, these two proteins contract the muscle. They ooze out of the ruptured meat cells and, under the conditions described in the Oscar Mayer patent, dissolve into the surrounding fluid to create a “meat glue.” The final important finding—by Natick researchers in the early 1970s—was that adding a small amount of phosphate to the salt shifted the pH of the meat, which allowed its molecules to spread out and retain more water, improving juiciness, texture, and flavor.
By the mid-1960s, army scientists working on the restructured meat project were giving glowing internal reports to higher-ups. In a 1966 presentation, Natick food technologists announced that they had developed a “highly acceptable fabricated ‘beef steak’ which is among the meat items heat stabilized in flexible pouches. This ‘steak’ is prepared by a proprietary process involving adding a small amount of salt to trimmings, treating in a manner to cover all surfaces with heat coagulatable protein, pressing into a mold or casing, heating to a temperature sufficient to ‘set’ the protein, and eventually cutting to serving size… . The process is presumably applicable to pork, veal and poultry.” The Advisory Board on Military Personnel Supplies’ subcommittee on meat products all but jumped up and down with enthusiasm, proclaiming in italics: “The future of fabricated modules of meat [is] excellent and that studies in this area should be continued.” By 1972 the army’s fake-muscle-cuts project had progressed sufficiently to contract out several pilot production runs, including mechanically formed grill steaks, Swiss steaks, minute steaks, and breakfast steaks. It started serving the troops restructured veal cutlets in 1976, followed by lamb and pork chops, and, somewhat later, beefsteaks. The idea had legs. Speculated a 1980 New York Times News Service article about the Natick Center invention, “Restructured meats could trim the food budget for the average consumer as well since these products may become increasingly available in restaurants, cafeterias and the frozen foods departments of supermarkets all over the country.” Such as, say, McDonald’s.
By the early 1980s, the military’s role in developing and promoting interest in restructured meat was winding down. The private sector’s, on the other hand, was ramping up, its appetite whetted by the value-added proposition of making something from practically nothing. University and industry food-science departments soon found ways to further reduce manufacturing costs by stripping every little last bit of protein from carcasses, including hot deboning (you got it: while the corpse is still steaming), desinewing, mechanical separation (pushing a carcass through a sieve), blending fat and trim into protein “sludge,” and collection of plasma for use as a plumper. To expand the product line from the frozen foods section to the refrigerator case, new binders that didn’t require heat to set were created in a variety of fun flavors, such as cow’s blood and pig’s blood clotting factor, bacterial enzymes, algae, and chemicals. Consumption of restructured meat products exploded during the 1990s and early years of the 2000s—so much so that in 1997 the Census Bureau had to add a new industry code. That year, (nonpoultry) meat processing, which manufactures products, generated $2.4 billion in sales, almost half of the $5.4 billion generated by the meatpacking industry itself, which slaughters, butchers, and distributes. By 2007 processing accounted for $3.7 billion and meatpacking $6.9 billion—together an astounding $10.6 billion in flesh-prep sales. Is it any surprise that by the twenty-first century Americans were eating more animal protein than ever before—close to 200 pounds, up from about 140 pounds in 1950?
The public, however, didn’t seem to notice the sea change in its eating habits—entranced as it was by blogging and tweeting about the cyclical appearance and disappearance of its new favorite fast food, the threescore and ten-ingredient McRib (the item is only available when pork trim is affordable). Journalists, ever eager to put a human face on a story, dubbed Professor Mandigo—who, although he did not bring this up during our interview, contracted his services to Natick on other meat projects—the proud father not only of the McRib but, almost as an afterthought, of restructured meat, and while he’s careful not to make this claim himself, he’s never disavowed it either. At least until now. When I asked him point-blank if the U.S. Army had come up with the concept, he hemmed and hawed, then mumbled, “Natick’s influence was through the literature and through technology transfer. Government doesn’t patent their intellectual property, so anyone can use it. They presented material at technical meetings. People would say, I can use that, but had slight variations on the technology. The military allowed us to use the processes they’d developed.”
Exactly.
It took the U.S. Army almost a century to pry the bone-in steak from the public grip, but now our feelings about meat are reversed. Emboldened by science (microbiology) and technology (refrigeration), we no longer demand bodily evidence as to the origins and wholesomeness of our dinner and have even learned to prefer our animal in the forms pioneered by the military: boneless, which halves its shipping volume, and restructured, which allows cheaper cuts to be substituted for more expensive ones. By far most of the animal protein we eat has been reassembled from bits and pieces by machines and is purchased everywhere but the meat department—deli case, frozen foods section, vending machine, cafeteria, drive-through. Only on rare occasions do we approach the gleaming counter with its ruby jewels of flesh. The once almighty butcher is now just a jocular salesperson whose job it is to weigh, wrap, and spout cooking tips. The magnificent crown of lamb, the burly standing rib, the succulent pork leg, with their osseous flourishes, have been relegated to ceremonial occasions—Passover, Easter, or birthdays ending in zero—when we light candles, gather around the table, and remember, ever so fleetingly, our fraught and violent relationship to the rest of the animal world.