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Roger Horowitz is a New York-born business, technology, and labor historian. He is an expert on food history, and has written about meat production and consumption in the United States. He is the director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library [1] where he manages programs encouraging the use of Hagley's research collections in business, political, and social history. There, he also develops and organizes annual academic conferences, public lectures, and seminar series. He also works as an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware Department of History [2] as well as an independent consultant on oral history.
Horowitz attended the University of Chicago, where he obtained a BA in History in 1982. Seven years later he got a PhD in History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is author of several books, including KOSHER USA [3] (Columbia University Press, 2016) which explores kosher food through the modern industrial food system, and Meatpackers, [4] (Twayne Publishers, 1996) coauthored with Rick Halpern, in which they study trade unions and their fight for and labor rights in cities like Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, Fort Worth, Waterloo, and Iowa. His research on American food history, labor, industry, and technology has also been published in refereed journals and book chapters.
Roger Horowitz has had a long career serving the Business History Conference (BHC) in various capacities. [5] Horowitz began his service to the BHC as Secretary-Treasurer, a position he held from 1999 to 2018. In this role, he was responsible for overseeing the organization's finances and maintaining its records. [6]
In 2018 Horowitz received the Forest C. Pogue Award for Lifetime Achievement in Oral History, from the non-profit organization Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR) [15] and in 2017 he received both the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies from the Jewish Book Council [16] and the Dorothy Rosenberg Prize for the History of the Jewish Diaspora, from the American Historical Association. [17]
The Roger Horowitz Papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society
Kashrut is a set of dietary laws dealing with the foods that Jewish people are permitted to eat and how those foods must be prepared according to Jewish law. Food that may be consumed is deemed kosher, from the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the term that in Sephardic or Modern Hebrew is pronounced kashér, meaning "fit".
Gefilte fish is a dish made from a poached mixture of ground deboned fish, such as carp, whitefish, or pike. It is traditionally served as an appetizer by Ashkenazi Jewish households. Popular on Shabbat and Jewish holidays such as Passover, it may be consumed throughout the year. It is typically garnished with a slice of cooked carrot on top.
The meat-packing industry handles the slaughtering, processing, packaging, and distribution of meat from animals such as cattle, pigs, sheep and other livestock. Poultry is generally not included. This greater part of the entire meat industry is primarily focused on producing meat for human consumption, but it also yields a variety of by-products including hides, dried blood, protein meals such as meat & bone meal, and, through the process of rendering, fats.
Jonathan Ogden Armour was an American meatpacking magnate and only surviving son of Civil War–era industrialist Philip Danforth Armour. He became owner and president of Armour & Company upon the death of his father in 1901. During his tenure as president, Armour and Co. expanded nationwide and overseas, growing from a mid-sized regional meatpacker to the largest food products company in the United States.
The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., or The Yards, was the meatpacking district in Chicago for more than a century, starting in 1865. The district was operated by a group of railroad companies that acquired marshland and turned it into a centralized processing area. By the 1890s, the railroad capital behind the Union Stockyards was Vanderbilt money. The Union Stockyards operated in the New City community area for 106 years, helping Chicago become known as the "hog butcher for the world," the center of the American meatpacking industry for decades. The yards became inspiration for literature and social reform.
Processed meat is considered to be any meat which has been modified in order to either improve its taste or to extend its shelf life. Methods of meat processing include salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, boiling, frying, and/or the addition of chemical preservatives. Processed meat is usually composed of pork or beef, but also poultry, while it can also contain offal or meat by-products such as blood. Processed meat products include bacon, ham, sausages, salami, corned beef, jerky, hot dogs, lunch meat, canned meat, chicken nuggets, and meat-based sauces. Meat processing includes all the processes that change fresh meat with the exception of simple mechanical processes such as cutting, grinding or mixing.
The Amalgamated Meat Cutters (AMC), officially the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, 1897–1979, was a labor union that represented retail and packinghouse workers. In 1979, the AMCBW merged with the Retail Clerks International Union to form the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)
The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), later the United Packinghouse, Food and Allied Workers, was a labor union that represented workers in the meatpacking industry.
George Albert Hormel was an American entrepreneur, he was the founder of Hormel Foods Corporation in 1891. His ownership stake in the company made him one of the wealthiest Americans during his lifetime.
Kosher style refers to foods commonly associated with Jewish cuisine but which may or may not actually be kosher. It is a stylistic designation rather than one based on the laws of kashrut. Generally, kosher-style food does not include meat from forbidden animals, such as pigs and shellfish, and does not contain both meat and milk in the same dish; however if such dish includes meat, it may not be kosher slaughtered. In some U.S. states, the use of this term in advertising is illegal as a misleading term under consumer protection laws.
Abraham Aaron Rubashkin was an American businessman of Russian Jewish origin. He died during the COVID-19 pandemic due to complications brought on by COVID-19.
Rowena Moore was an African-American union and civic activist, and founder of the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation in Omaha, Nebraska. She led the effort to have the Malcolm X House Site recognized for its association with the life of the national civil-rights leader. It was listed on both the National Register of Historic Places and the Nebraska register of historic sites.
Agriprocessors was the corporate identity of a slaughterhouse and meat-packaging factory based in Postville, Iowa, best known as a facility for the glatt kosher processing of cattle, as well as chicken, turkey, duck, and lamb. Agriprocessors' meat and poultry products were marketed under the brand Iowa Best Beef. Its kosher products were marketed under various labels, including Aaron’s Best, Shor Habor, Supreme Kosher, and Rubashkins.
Swift & Co. v. United States, 196 U.S. 375 (1905), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Commerce Clause allowed the federal government to regulate monopolies if it has a direct effect on commerce. It marked the success of the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt in destroying the "Beef Trust". This case established a "stream of commerce" argument that allows Congress to regulate things that fall into either category. In particular it allowed Congress to regulate the Chicago slaughterhouse industry. Even though the slaughterhouse supposedly dealt with only intrastate matters, the butchering of meat was merely a "station" along the way between cow and meat. Thus, as it was part of the greater meat industry that was between the several states, Congress can regulate it. The Court's decision halted price fixing by Swift & Company and its allies.
National City was a suburb of East St. Louis, Illinois. Incorporated in 1907, it was a company town for the St. Louis National Stockyards Company. In 1996, the company, which owned all residential property in the town, evicted all of its residents. The following year, because it had no residents, National City was dissolved by court order. Its site was subsequently annexed by nearby Fairmont City, Illinois.
Yaakov Yitzchak Horowitz is an American rabbi and one of North America's foremost experts on kosher food production.
Orthodox Union Kosher, known as OU Kosher or OUK, is a kosher certification agency based in New York City. It was founded in 1923 by Abraham Goldstein. It is the certification agency of about 70% of kosher food worldwide, and is the largest of the “Big Five” major certification agencies, which include OK, Kof-K, Star-K, and CRC.
A Jewish deli, also known as a Jewish delicatessen, is a delicatessen establishment that serves various traditional dishes in Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine, and are typically known for their sandwiches such as pastrami on rye, as well as their soups such as matzo ball soup, among other dishes. Most of them are in the Ashkenazi style, due to the history of the Jewish diaspora that has sometimes been adapted to local taste preferences, as in the American Jewish cuisine. Jewish delicatessens serve a variety of Jewish dishes, and many are also kosher-certified, while some are kosher-style and do not mix meat and dairy in the same dish, while others serve food with no dietary restrictions such as the Reuben sandwich.
The Canadian Food and Allied Workers (CFAW) was a Canadian meatpacking labour union which existed from 1968 until 1979. It was created as a result of a merger between Canadian locals of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters (AMC) and the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). In 1979, it merged with the Retail Clerks International Union (RCIU) along with its American counterpart to form the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).
The 1985–1986 Hormel strike was a labor strike that involved approximately 1,500 workers of the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota in the United States. The strike, beginning August 17, 1985 and lasting until September 13 of the following year, is considered one of the longest strikes in Minnesota history and ended in failure for the striking workers.