Most Americans come to know meat only through the grocery store and the restaurant. But meat must be made, and it can only be made by the slaughter of animals. In fact, the Judeo-Christian tradition forbids the eating of animals that die by other than human hands. The slaughter and dismemberment that transform ‘animal to edible’, to borrow Noëlie Vialles's telling phrase, may be essential in the making of animals into meat, but most of us prefer to remain ignorant of where our meat comes from.

The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's damning expose of the packing-houses of Chicago, is now more than a century old. But for all the years and all the progress touted by industry spokesmen, knockers still start the killing. And, today's stickers and gutters, tail rippers and head droppers, chuckboners and short ribbers, still use steels to hone the edges of their knives as they turn hundreds of cattle or hogs by the hour into meat.

Packing-houses remain, as they were a century ago, massive factories, employing thousands of workers. But instead of the Serbian and Polish workers of Sinclair's day, today's meatpacking plants are crowded with immigrants and refugees from Mexico and Guatemala, Somalia and Sudan.