The Price of Plenty

<p>Ever wondered how factory farms came to be why chicken nuggets were invented or where the idea of feeding hormones and antibiotics to livestock came from in the first place? </p><p></p><p><em>The Price of Plenty</em> offers answers that may surprise you in a compulsively readable and distinctly American tale of abundance invention and exceptionalism.  </p><p></p><p>Historian Maureen Ogle unfolds the good the bad and the ugly behind the nation's meat-making infrastructure from colonial cattle wars to the rise of Swift Armour and Tyson to today's alt-cuisine. Tracing consumer desires profit motives and policy imperatives this absorbing narrative shows how an insatiable appetite for meat carved America's landscape and identity.</p><p></p><p>When white Europeans arrived in North America the abundance of land enabled meat consumption on a scale unheard of in the Old World. There an average European was lucky to see meat once a week while even a poor American consumed about two hundred pounds a year.</p><p></p><p>The panoramic story of how we got from that meat-eater's paradise to the complexities and contradictions of today is told here through a wide range of sources and records - forming an indispensable guide to the American way of meat and its unexpected consequences.</p><p></p>