Rio de Janeiro in the Global Meat Market, c. 1850 to c. 1930: How Fresh and Salted Meat Arrived at the Carioca Table

Abstract

In Rio de Janeiro in the Global Meat Market, Maria-Aparecida Lopes uses Rio de Janeiro city as a case study to investigate global, regional, and local factors that shaped access to fresh and salted meat between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These factors included technological transformations, international market exchanges, regional commerce, medical knowledge, private investments, and municipal regulations. Lopes ultimately argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century Rio de Janeiro was well supplied with meat and that by the early twentieth century carne verde (fresh meat) had replaced charque (salted meat) in the urban marketplace, having become more abundant and affordable.Together with traditional primary sources such as newspapers, administrative records, travel accounts, and medical publications, the book relies on cookbooks and 300 postmortem inventories that allow the author to take a closer look at the eating habits of Rio de Janeiro's residents. Lopes also applies geographic information system tools and builds on spatial location theory to show how meat offerings were distributed across the city. To locate the addresses of butcher shops and slaughterhouses in the second half of the nineteenth century, the author mobilized Fresno State's Geospatial Information Center, student researchers funded by Fresno State's Undergraduate Research Grants, and the support of other US- and Brazil-based scholars. The result of this effort is a spatial analysis that illuminates how the arrival of railroads and refrigerators allowed the municipality to gain more control over the meat market, leading to the disappearance of intermediaries.The state's control over this market was justified by medical-scientific knowledge that portrayed meat as “a nutritious food per se” (p. 35). Proponents of state regulation argued that widespread access to meat promoted public welfare and therefore was a matter of public policy. As politicians, butchers, intermediaries, and the press discussed this “special” and “public” good, they articulated different ideas about state interventionism and the free market (p. 188). Yet, Lopes warns us that this cannot be reduced to a “struggle of public versus private interests” because officials also defended the interests of cattle raisers, fatteners, merchants, and butchers (p. 57). The book's most important contribution to our understanding of ideas and practices that made up the functioning of state power in Rio de Janeiro is to factor in the crucial role of technological advancements in this changing urban political landscape.When Lopes brings us to the regional and international levels, she shows that technological improvements in the livestock and refrigeration industries in Argentina and Uruguay compromised the flow of cattle to the production of salted meat. The late nineteenth-century transition from slave to wage labor, urbanization, and industrialization also contributed to the “disappearance” of salted meat from Rio de Janeiro's market, because these factors meant that consumers could buy a better product: fresh meat (p. 162). Lopes nonetheless emphasizes that Rio Grande do Sul's producers continued to sell charque to northeast Brazil. More importantly, the author reveals how local political and cultural factors transformed this larger market. The book shows that the capital's press, physicians, and politicians engaged in a campaign that portrayed fresh meat as the “ideal commodity” and charque as an “outdated, unhygienic food” (p. 162).Rio de Janeiro in the Global Meat Market rarely provides character-centered narratives of production, regulation, and consumption. The analysis focuses on groups of politicians, consumers, cattle ranchers, and intermediaries such as charqueadores (owners of salted-meat factories) and slaughterhouse owners and workers. However, the combination of multiple sources and methods has produced a study that should attract both historians of food and urban historians. The former will get a local and global picture of transformations in food consumption driven by both culture and technology. The latter will get a better understanding of how the distribution of goods in the city changed during a period of major social and economic transitions. Historians focused on how municipal power functions will be particularly interested in this change because of how the author details the state's role in regulating the meat market. Finally, environmental historians might be interested in a case study of how meat, a product that has significantly contributed to environmental degradation, became a “symbol of progress” (p. 212).