Greater Midwest Foodways symposium to cover meaty topics
Panels will discuss beef industry’s growth in Midwest
When I was a kid in the late 1960s, my father would offer this hearty pronouncement at the dinner table: “Meat makes the meal.”
Today, that would be like me telling my family, “Print is the big deal.”
Or is meat making a comeback?
“People are more interested in meat and we’re consuming more today,” said John Huston, executive vice president emeritus of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and speaker at the Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance’s third annual symposium, “Beef: From Plains to Plate.” The event opens Friday at Kendall College with a 4 p.m. cutting of beef donated by the association.
My father worked for Swift & Co. at the Union Stockyards on the South Side. He began as a messenger boy in 1937 and moved up to purchasing agent at the Swift offices in the Loop before retiring in 1981.
He has lived through the vegetarian movement, the National Meat Boycott of 1973 in response to rising meat prices and hormone-free “designer” beef from newsguy Bill Kurtis’ ranch in Kansas.
Dad, now 88, would get his juices going at the symposium. The main course goes down from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at Kendall College, with panels on cattle production, beef processing and marketing. There will be discussions and tastings of certified Angus beef and grass-fed beef.
At 11:15 a.m. Saturday, Russell Lewis of the Chicago History Museum will present “Everything But the Squeal: Chicago’s Union Stockyards,” a look at the rise of the Stockyards and its place in Chicago’s history.
The 320-acre Stockyards — which had its own bank, radio station and, yes, newspaper — represented one of the greatest industrial innovations of the 19th century. It closed in 1971. You still can smell the faint processing odors of bacon and sausage among the vacant lots and industrial warehouses.
At 1:55 p.m. Saturday, Andrew F. Smith will lead the talk, “How Ground Beef on a Bun Conquered the World.” Smith teaches food studies at the New School University in New York City. His latest book is Hamburger: A Global History and Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine.
That’s a far cry from the simply named, 291-page hardcover The Story of Meat, published in 1939 by Swift & Co. The book was used by my father at the Stockyards.
The Story of Meat reports that in the United States in 1938, approximately 14.7 million cattle, 9.1 million calves, 22.5 million lambs and sheep and 59 million hogs were used to furnish food products for use at home and abroad. Farmers shipped their animals to the Chicago Stockyards. There also were stockyards in Omaha, Neb.; St. Paul, Minn.; St. Louis and other beefy ports.
“The last central public market closed this year in Sioux Falls, [S.D.],” ending a 92-year run, says Huston, 65. “They closed for the same reason as the others. People are going to direct marketing and auction markets. It became more logical to move to where the cattle are.”
My dad says, “When they made bacon and ham at the Stockyards, they’d put them in a [salt-based] curer and stack it up in the curing rooms for a month. That’s where you got the real pure meat. They actually flavored the ham in an oven with hickory wood burning.
“Now they shoot the [quick-curing] stuff in the bacon bellies and hams, and it goes out the window in 24 hours. They had a tremendous amount of money tied up in all this meat that was being cured. So the quality of Swift Premium bacon and hams were . . . .” His voice drifts off. “There’s nothing like it today.”
All that remains today of the Stockyards is the old stone gate at 42nd and Exchange. The gate is a national historic landmark. The limestone head at the highest point of the 30-foot-high arch is of “Sherman,” the first national Grand Champion steer at the Stockyards.