A Brief History Of Steak In America

By Ned Hepburn on June 8th, 2009

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Manolith likes to keep you on your toes and make you learn things once in a while.

Imagine taking a time machine back to 1840, or even 1920, walking up to a little restaurant/saloon, and ordering a steak, and being told “STEAK? WHAT ARE YOU, THE PRESIDENT?”. Amazingly, the meat that we all take for granted was not readily available to the immediate masses until after WWII.

Indeed. You’d be a lucky guy to get steak unless you a) lived on or near a farm or b) lived in bible belt or c) were the President, because it was incredibly hard to come by.

When settlers started arriving in America around 1625 they bought some of their livestock with them. Yup, those cows you see driving through the fly-over states are in no way indigenous to this country. Wall Street got its name from the cows: from a wall that was built to apparently keep their livestock away from the Native American Indians. Kinda cruel, huh?

It wasn’t until 1871 that a meat packer from Detroit (now that’s a job title if there ever was one) called G. H. Hanharmand started sending refrigeration railway cars out west to the slaughterhouses in the mid-western states that beef was suddenly more and more available. This progressed until it was possible to send the cars even further, all the way to California, where cows found a natural home in the great weather and tons of plant life. Even up until WWII, beef was somewhat of a luxury for most people, but post WWII it’s been a symbol of American prosperity; as readily available as milk and bread, thanks to the railways and the forward thinking of G. H. Hanharmand.

So now you know…. the rest of the story.

(Photo Courtesy of: Historic Commons)