Meag history

Credit must be given to British researchers J.B. Lawes and J.H. Gilbert who were perhaps the first to report (in 1860) on the influence of “fattening” on the composition of oxen, sheep and pigs.

The Chicago stockyards, established in 1865, soon became the nation’s leading livestock market.

The first widespread public attention to the unsafe practices of the meatpacking industry came in 1898, when the press reported that Armour & Co., had supplied tons of rotten canned beef to the United States Army in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

These shows were the forerunners of the International Livestock Exposition in Chicago and the American Royal in Kansas City in about 1900, as well as in other cities with public stockyards.

George A. Hormel & Co. became officially incorporated by 1901, processing whole hogs, beef, and sausage casings from its facilities in Austin.

In 1904 Sinclair covered a labour strike at Chicago’s Union Stockyards for the socialist magazine Appeal to Reason and proposed that he spend a year in Chicago to write an exposé of the Beef Trust’s exploitation of workers.

Of those journalists, American writer Charles Edward Russell is perhaps best known, for his series of articles about the Beef Trust that were published as The Greatest Trust in the World (1905).

The need for meat grading was emphasized in these discussions and resulted in a USDA bulletin entitled “Market Classes and Grades of Dressed Beef” which led Congress to passing an act setting up the federal Meat Grading Service in 1925.

Thomas E. Wilson and Company provided the support to initiate the first contest in 1927 at the International Livestock Exposition in Chicago.

By 1929, George's son, Jay Hormel, took over as president (after serving in World War I), but the product that would best effect Hormel's bottom line wouldn't be invented until eight years later.

The portion of the mine under I-264 was quarried before the highway was built in the early 1930's.

More than eight billion cans have been sold since the Hormel Corporation unleashed the product in 1937; it's currently available in 44 countries throughout the world.

Typically, animal husbandry departments in the late 1940’s had no more (and usually less) than one full-time equivalent in meat instruction and research.

In his 1945 New Yorker interview, Hormel revealed to Gill that he kept a "Scurrilous File" collecting hate mail from American GIs, in which "he dumps the letters of abuse that are sent to him by soldiers everywhere in the world. 'If they think Spam is terrible,' Mr.

In the 1950’s, meat packers sold beef in carcass form (fore and hind quarters) and some in the form of wholesale cuts.

The Reciprocal Meat Conference was highly guarded by meats men from colleges and the USDA and was essentially a closed organization until 1953.

The Reciprocal Meat Conference was highly guarded by meats men from colleges and the USDA and was essentially a closed organization until 1953. It is of note that the Meat Board provided all of the costs of the conference until 1955, when it was decided to charge a registration fee to defray part of the expenses.

First-generation meat scientists began to be recognized for their contributions in 1956, when the Reciprocal Meat Conference started recognizing individuals’ contributions to meat science through Signal Service Awards.

Newsletters, first edited by L.E. Kunkle (Ohio State University), were published from 1957 under the auspices of the Reciprocal Meat Conference and later by the AMSA, have been routinely sent to the membership.

A very important development leading to the better education of meats men was the offer by the American Meat Institute Foundation to sponsor a “Conference on Research” which continued annually under this name until 1959 when it was titled the American Meat Institute Conference.

In 1964, the American Meat Institute Foundation invited the American Meat Science Association to jointly sponsor the conference.

The law was substantially amended by the Wholesome Meat Act of 1967.

These clinics and meat judging contests led to the development of Meat Animal Evaluation Contests by R.G. Kauffman in 1969.

Microbiological research expanded in the 1970’s and 80’s with greater public concern about food safety and the increase in meat scientists with microbiological training.

In The 25th Anniversary History of the Reciprocal Meat Conference, (1972), there is a section entitled “The Past is Prologue” written by committee chairman D.M. Kinsman, that warrants reading.

Beginning with Project One in 1977, MEAG Power has acquired ownership interest in a generation fleet that now includes co-ownership of two nuclear and two coal-fired generating plants and sole ownership of a natural gas combined cycle facility.

It was created by a massive limestone quarry—with miners blasting out a mind-boggling amount of rock for over 42 years during the middle of the 20th century. It was acquired in 1989 by private investors who saw the potential to develop a portion of the cavern into an environmentally-conscious high security commercial storage facility.

Since the early 1990's, a massive amount of recycled concrete, brick, block, rock and dirt were (and continue to be) off-loaded at the cavern to fill in the holes and create floors and internal roads.

In 1995, the 41st International Congress of Meat Science and Technology (IcoMST) was held in San Antonio, Texas (the EMMRW was the predecessor to the ICoMST).

Donald Kinsman, at the 1996 Reciprocal Meat Conference, in his AMSA International Award Lecture provided an excellent history of the association.

That recipe, using pork shoulder (once considered an undesirable byproduct of hog butchery), water, salt, sugar, and sodium nitrate (for coloring) remained unchanged until 2009, when Hormel began adding potato starch to sop up the infamous gelatin "layer" that naturally forms when meat is cooked.