Settler colonialism, bison slaughter: How beef came to mark American identity

Beef is one of America’s most beloved foods. In fact, today’s average American eats three hamburgers per week.

American diets have long revolved around beef. On an 1861 trip to the United States, the English novelist Anthony Trollope marveled that Americans consumed twice as much beef as Englishmen. Through war, industry, development and settlement, America’s love of beef continued. In 2022, the U.S. as a whole consumed almost 30 billion pounds (13.6 billion kg) of it, or 21% of the world’s beef supply.

Beef has also reached iconic status in American culture. As “Slaughterhouse-Five” author Kurt Vonnegut once penned, “Being American is to eat a lot of beef, and boy, we’ve got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that’s why you ought to be glad you’re an American.”

In part, the dominance of beef in American cuisine can be traced to settler colonialism, a form of colonisation in which settlers claim – and then transform – lands inhabited by Indigenous people. In America, this process centered on the systemic and often violent displacement of Native Americans. Settlers brought with them new cultural norms, including beef-heavy diets that required massive swaths of land for grazing cattle.

As a food historian, I am interested in how, in the 19th century, the beef industry both propelled and benefited from colonialism, and how these intertwined forces continue to affect our diets, culture and environment today.

Cattle and cowboys

Beginning in the 16th century, the first Europeans to settle across the Americas – and later, Australia and New Zealand – brought their livestock with them. A global economy built on appropriated Indigenous territories allowed these nations to become among the highest consumers and producers of meat in the world.

The United States in particular tied its burgeoning national identity and westward expansion to the settlement and acquisition of cattle-ranching lands. Until 1848, Arizona, California, Texas, Nevada, Utah, western Colorado and New Mexico were part of Mexico and inhabited by numerous tribes, Indigenous cowboys and Mexican ranchers.

The Mexican-American War, which lasted from 1846-48, led to 525,000 square miles being ceded to the United States – land that became central to American beef production. Gold, discovered in the northern Sierra by 1849, drew hundreds of thousands more settlers to the region.

The desire for cattle-supporting land played an integral role in the systematic decimation of bison populations, as well. For thousands of years, Native Americans relied on bison for physical and cultural survival. At least 30 million roamed the western United States in 1800; by 1890, 60 million head of cattle had taken their place.

Beef replaces bison

It is no coincidence that the rise of an extensive and powerful American beef industry coincided with the near-elimination of bison across the United States.

Bison populations were already in steep decline by the mid-1800s, but after the Civil War, as industrialisation transformed transportation, communication and mass production, the US Army actively encouraged the wholesale slaughter of bison herds.

In 1875, Philip Sheridan, a general in the US Army, applauded the impact bison hunters could have on the beef industry. Hunters “have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last forty years,” Sheridan said. “They are destroying the Indians’ commissary … (and so) for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle.”

In 1884, with no hint of irony, the US Department of Indian Affairs constructed a slaughterhouse on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana and required tribal members to provide the factory’s labor in exchange for its beef.

By 1888, New York politician and sometimes rancher Theodore Roosevelt described Western stockmen as “the pioneers of civilisation,” who with “their daring and adventurousness make the after settlement of the region possible.” Later, during Roosevelt’s presidency – from 1900 to 1908 – the US claimed another 230 million acres of Indigenous lands for public use, further opening the West to ranching and settlement.

The Union Stock Yards in Chicago, the most modern slaughterhouse of the era, opened on Christmas Day in 1865 and marked a turning point for industrial beef production. No longer delivered “on the hoof” to cities, cattle were now slaughtered in Chicago and sent East as tinned meat or, after the 1870s, in refrigerated railcars.

Processing over 1 million head of cattle annually at its height, the Union Stock Yards, a global technological marvel and international tourist attraction, symbolised industrial progress and inspired national pride.

Where’s the beef

By the turn of the 20th century, beef was solidly linked to American identity both at home and globally. In 1900, the average American consumed over 100 pounds of beef per year, almost twice the amount eaten by Americans today.

Canadian food writer Marta Zaraska argues in her 2021 book “Meathooked” that beef became a key part of the American origin myth of rugged individualism that was emerging at this time. And cowboys, working the grueling cattle drives, came to embody values linked to the frontier: self-reliance, strength and independence.

Popular for decades as a street food, America’s proudest culinary invention – the hamburger – debuted at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904 alongside other novelties such as Dr Pepper and ice cream.

After World War II, suburban markets and fast-food chains dominated the American foodscape, where beef burgers reigned supreme. By the end of the century, more people around the globe recognised the golden arches of McDonald’s than the Christian cross.

At the same time, national programmes reinforced food insecurity for Native Americans. In efforts to eventually dissolve reservations and open these lands to private development, for example, in 1952 the US government launched the Voluntary Relocation Program, in which the Bureau of Indian Affairs persuaded many living on reservations to move to cities. The promised well-paying jobs did not materialise, and most of those who relocated traded rural for urban poverty.

True cost of a burger

Policies encouraging settler colonialism ultimately led to more sedentary lifestyles and a dependence on fast, convenient and processed foods – such as hamburgers – regardless of the individual or environmental costs.

In recent decades, scientists have warned that industrial meat production, and beef in particular, fuels climate change and leads to deforestation, soil erosion, species extinction, ocean dead zones and high levels of methane emissions. It is also a threat to biodiversity. Nutritionist Diego Rose believes the best way “to reduce your carbon footprint (is to) eat less beef,” a view shared by other sustainability experts.

As of January 2022, about 10% of Americans over the age of 18 considered themselves vegetarian or vegan. Another recent study found that 47% of American adults are “flexitarians” who eat primarily, but not wholly, plant-based diets.

At the same time, small-scale farmers and cooperatives are working to restore soil health by reintegrating cows and other grazing animals into sustainable farming practices to produce more high-quality, environmentally friendly meat.

More encouraging still, tribes in Montana – Blackfeet Nation, Fort Belknap Indian Community, Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, and South Dakota’s Rosebud Sioux – have reintroduced bison to the northern Great Plains to revive the prairie ecosystem, tackle food insecurity and lessen the impacts of climate change.

Even so, in the summer of 2024, Americans consumed 375 million hamburgers in celebration of Independence Day – more than any other food.

Hannah Cutting-Jones is Assistant Professor, Department of Global Studies; Director of Food Studies, University of Oregon.

This article was first published on The Conversation.