The history of unsustainable meat

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a deconstruction of

neoliberal capitalism, which sounds quite wanky, but neoliberal capitalism is the

system which allows very wealthy people to steal public money.

Neoliberal capitalism is why everything feels so chaotic and strange right now and why people are so vulnerable to conspiracy theories and messages from the far right.

and why people are so vulnerable to blaming each other.

We're being distracted while the wealthiest wealthiest people in the world steal our taxes.

They steal our taxes and funnel them into private interests.

And we experience this as feeling hopeless and powerless.

So if you didn't catch last week's podcast, go back and listen to it.

Because I did 90 minutes on that exact subject on the history of how we got to this situation.

And it was a frustrating podcast to record because it's such a massive subject.

There's so much that I left out.

And Lawsy asked me to do a part two, to do a part two to this podcast.

And that had been my intention.

But I'm having to cram this week.

I'm having to cram the recording of this podcast into a short amount of time.

The reason being, it was fucking Paddy's Day yesterday.

I'd forgotten all about St.

Patrick's Day and the fucking parades.

My office is in Limerick City, so for the past two days, there's been parades, there's been marching bands, marching bands outside my fucking window, so I haven't been able to record on a podcast

while a couple of hundred people are playing drums.

It's just not possible.

It's not possible at all.

And I tried, I fucking tried.

Yesterday in particular, on St.

Patrick's Day, I was in my office trying to record.

And I just, I gave up.

I gave up and I said, fuck it.

Let's be realistic.

No one's recording a podcast where there's a marching band outside your window.

Just forget about it.

So I said, why not go down and look at the parade?

I'm not a huge fan of parades.

Nothing against parades.

I can see that other people absolutely adore parades, but I'm just a little uneasy with...

Crowds of that size, specifically crowds where you have like thousands of people and they're all going in different directions and you're mingling with a giant crowd.

That leaves me feeling dizzy and overwhelmed but I can do it.

I can do it.

It's just it's not a comfort zone.

But anyway I went down to look at the St.

Patrick's Day parade to join the crowds.

I walked down as far as Henry Street as the parade procession was coming towards me and I'm there.

You know I'm there with all the fucking people Happy little children, little toddlers, upping their dad's shoulders, absolutely loving it.

When I saw that,

it made me less pissed off that the parade was impacting my capacity to record my podcast.

But then as I look,

coming up the fucking in the center of the parade in Limerick, there's all these these puppets, like huge puppets now, 16, 17 foot tall, amazing, incredible puppets towering over the crowd, kids loving it.

And then, behind the fucking puppets, coming up the road, waving at everybody.

The fella dressed as me.

Now I'm not wearing...

I'm in civilian mode now, so I don't have a plastic bag in my head.

I'm just there as a regular person.

mingling with the fucking crowd.

But one of the center

one of the centerpieces of this year's Limerick City St.

Patrick's Day parade was a fella

dressed as me

he was wearing a plastic bag identical to mine like the red plastic bag he had the red hat he was also dressed like saint patrick so it was like saint patrick blind boy on a giant puppet horse and this was one of the centerpieces of the Limerick City parade so I'm there in the fucking crowd.

First off,

the fella dressed as me,

he was so confident.

He was so confident and comfortable.

He was doing something that I wouldn't do in a million fucking years.

I would not be able to

put the plastic bag on my head and be blind by in the Limerick City fucking parade.

I that would freak the fuck out of me.

That many people staring at me as I move on a mechanical horse would scare the living shit out of me.

So I'm watching some other fella doing a brilliant job at it.

You might be thinking, how are you able to do gigs, so blind boy?

Different situation.

Up on stage, there's a barrier and you don't really have to look at the entire audience when you're up on stage.

But like a parade in the middle of a crowd, different situation.

That'd be too much for me.

He was waving at people, really confident, fucking fantastic.

But then

all around me, because I'm in a fucking crowd, then everyone's like, oh my god, it's blind boy.

It's blind by.

And then everyone starts waving, how are you, blind boy?

And then he waves back.

The cunt waved at me.

He waved at me.

And I got a split second of, oh, blind boy's waving at me.

How are you, blind boy?

And his costume is so good.

His blind boy costume is so good that I realise, oh shit, everyone thinks it's actually me.

They don't think it's a dude dressed as blind by.

They think me, that that's what I'd done up my fucking Monday afternoon.

Is I joined the Limerick St.

Patrick's Day parade.

But the absurd reality was

I'm not wearing any bag.

I'm there as a civilian with a big grumpy head on me.

Forced to

forced to attend the parade.

because I can't record my podcast.

I can't record my podcast because there's a parade outside my window where a fella's dressed like me.

And because of that, I can't record my podcast.

That's interrupting me.

So I'm just there anxious in a fucking crowd.

While everyone else is pointing at someone dressed as me, going, Are we a blind boy?

Blind boy over here.

Over here, blind boy.

And then in my head, I'm going, that's not blind boy.

I'm blind boy.

But you wouldn't know that because I'm not wearing a bag in my head and to be honest that fella's a better blind boy than me anyway he's doing brilliantly I'd be shit at doing that and then

fake blind by moves on with the parade doing a fantastic job and then I'm like stuck I'm stuck in a fucking crowd now you see as soon as I'd seen me

as soon as I saw me in the parade I'd gone to the front lines.

I'd gone to the very front to get a look at me.

And

you know I don't like this external praise shit I was a little bit I don't know it's proud the word

that was nice it was nice that it was nice that the I suppose the people of Limerick the city of Limerick

wanted to put a fake blind boy in in the fucking parade and I liked having a vicarious blind boy I nearly preferred that to wearing a bag in my head.

Like I'll be honest with you,

if I could just do this podcast and write books and then never be seen in public again, even with a bag in my head, I'd do that.

So it was actually, it was nice having someone else like five feet away from me who everyone thought was blind by.

I actually really enjoyed that.

A lot of pressure was taken off me.

But anyway, because I was down

looking at me in the parade, because me was distracting me from recording my podcast, I got stuck up at the fucking front in the barrier and then was basically locked in.

I now couldn't move.

It was about

40 people deep behind me.

So I'm like, fuck it.

I'm now gonna have to stay here.

I'm gonna have to stay at this fucking parade.

And I can't even go back to my office if I wanted to.

And of course then when I get stuck,

ideas, ideas for the fucking podcast start coming to me, but I'm stuck in a parade.

Then more, more blind boys boys come.

There was other people,

not as good as the main blind boy.

On the horse, he was amazing.

But there was other

members of a marching band that decided that they're going to dress up as blind boy too.

Fair play to them, but I'm stuck now on Henry Street in the parade, up against the barrier, completely stuck.

Looking at multiple versions of me marching past me,

I don't have a bag on.

And then people beside me are going, I I think that the first one was the real blind boy obviously they're fake blind boys but I think the guy on the horse he was the real blind boy I'm listening to this just saying what an utterly what a bizarre situation to be in what a strange strange situation to be in and if I'd have

if I'd have turned to those people I wouldn't if I'd have turned to those people and said you know I'm actually blind boy they'd have said fuck off no you're not blind boy has social anxiety what would he be doing at the front of the st Patrick's Parade looking at multiple blind boys for?

Why would he be doing that?

And I'd have nothing to say.

What I started to think about is

when I was stuck against the barrier in the St.

Patrick's Day Parade,

I wasn't experiencing crowd anxiety.

Okay.

I've done enough exposure over the years.

Like 20 fucking years ago, I'd have gotten a full-blown panic attack.

Like it would not have been possible for me to have been in that crowd.

But over the years, I've gradually exposed myself.

I deliberately walked through crowds, deliberately, in order to not be afraid of them.

So now crowds are something where, like I said, it's not a comfort zone, but I can tolerate them completely.

And if I do experience a feeling of being overwhelmed, I just look at people's shoes.

I try to avoid looking at multiple faces.

Loads and loads of different faces is what gets overwhelming.

So I looked down at people's shoes.

So I was looking down at everyone's feet.

And as I was doing it,

I remembered something my ma told me about when

she moved to Limerick in the 1950s, I believe.

Like the Limerick St.

Patrick's Day Parade route, it hasn't changed in years.

And my Ma remembers one year where

so Limerick is

it's known historically as Pigtown

and Limerick city center used to have like four bacon factories and these factories had abattoirs now St.

Patrick's Day is always March 17th St.

Patrick's Day is March 17th right but Easter Sunday that changes like Easter Sunday It's the first Sunday after the after the first full moon following the spring equinox, right?

So Easter Sunday can fall anywhere between March 22nd and April 25th.

And Easter is the end of Lent.

And

back in the 1950s, people took Lent seriously.

People would abstain from meat for Lent.

But then when fucking Easter Sunday comes around, people are eating meat.

It's that simple.

So I'm in the St.

Patrick's Day Prayer.

I'm looking down at everybody's feet.

There's thousands of people in the streets in Limerick.

And when I'm looking down at people's feet, I'm remembering something my mad told me.

My mad told me that in the 1950s,

if Easter Sunday fell early, so if Easter Sunday was close to St.

Patrick's Day, after the parade, the whole city would be covered in bloody footprints.

You see, the abattoirs, there were three or four abattoirs, they were at the top of the city and they'd be ramping up production in preparation for Easter Sunday and all the

the fucking blood

the blood from the pigs

would trickle down the streets of Limerick and people would walk all over it during the parade and the whole place be full of bloody footprints and then the blood would trickle into the river and the river would be red with pigs blood and everything would smell like like metal like iron the streets would smell like iron from all the disturbed blood.

And this was a serious industry in Limerick.

It ended in the 1970s, but Limerick's pork industry really sustained the city throughout the 19th century.

It didn't, not just providing people with employment, but like Limerick ham was famous the world over.

It was a delicacy throughout the 19th century.

Obviously you had to be wealthy to afford the ham, but the abattoirs would sell the offal and the backbones and the eye bones sell them pure cheap to butchers.

And then the working class people of Limerick had access to cheap meat, and everybody raised pigs in their back gardens.

Regular people would feed and raise pigs in whatever little space they had and then sell those to the abattoirs.

Even more strange is

in the 19th century there were these

famous gloves, right?

They were called chicken skin gloves.

They were only made in Limerick.

These were luxury items.

If they were around today,

like Kim Kardashian would be wearing them, right?

But they were gloves that were made in Limerick in the 19th century.

The thinnest gloves that you could imagine.

And they were sold inside walnuts, right?

So

very

posh, wealthy ladies would buy this walnut with these gloves that were unbelievably thin and they'd cost them or thin they'd wear them over their hands to keep their hands soft now if if you're squeamish or you don't like hearing about animal cruelty fast forward about 20 seconds actually did this whole episode is gonna be speaking about the meat industry Just a content warning because some people don't want to hear about that at all.

So if you're one of these people, this episode might not be for you.

That's fair enough.

There's nearly 400 episodes.

Go back and listen to an earlier episode.

So these internationally famous,

incredibly thin gloves that were stored inside walnuts, they were made from the skin of unborn cows and unborn pigs in Limerick City.

I know it's not nice to hear, but I just find that fascinating.

How you can have how entire industries just disappear.

They just disappear.

And people's way of life and sense of meaning disappears.

And local craft, as fucked up as it is, some Limerick woman in the 19th century made a set of very thin gloves

out of the skin of an unborn pig, and these became a worldwide luxury item.

And that knowledge is just forgotten.

That industry is gone.

It was an industry that lasted about 150 years.

And

ethics and animal cruelty aside, all of the research that I've done into the history of the Limerick pig industry is that

it was a sustainable model that didn't exploit the community.

No, it exploited pigs.

It slaughtered pigs.

No crack if you're a pig.

But as a capitalist model, It was sustainable meat production.

Thousands of working class people in full employment, unskilled and skilled, working in the pig factories and providing jobs that were generational professions passed down from father to son or mother to daughter.

There's even a saying in Limerick which is, what's the difference between the pope and a butcher?

A butcher can become the pope but the pope can never become a butcher.

because the skills were were guarded and handed down.

Because the workers were so skilled and valuable they were unionized the limerick pork butchers unionized in 1870 and they went on strike in 1884 brought the whole industry to a halt that's collective bargaining that's value that's meaning skilled workers with secure jobs happy with the pay that they're getting and the conditions then you had an ecosystem of local people

raising pigs in their own homes, out their back gardens.

The pigs are being fed scraps, they're free to roam.

The pigs are eating household rubbish.

And then a lot of these people were using what available space they had, or even community gardens, to grow their own vegetables to eat, but fertilizing them with the manure from the pigs that they're raising.

Very sustainable, minimal environmental impact.

a meaningful relationship with whole food that's organic as a given.

And then when the pigs are eventually butchered, every part of that pig is used.

The best meat is sold, the fat is rendered, the skin is used for gloves and clothing, the hairs are made into brushes locally, the offal is then sold to butchers cheaply for the local people to eat.

The pigs' faces and ears were dried and made into toys for dogs and even the blood.

In the 19th century, the blood was taken just down the road to a place there's a place in limerick now called the blood mill road because there was a mill there in the 19th century and they used to take the local pigs blood and turn it into fertilizer but then when that mill closed

instead the blood the blood would just trickle down the streets and pollute the river shannon and turn it red and i was thinking all this when i was When I was just standing in the parade, how we once had this industry that lasted 150 years and kept so many people employed intergenerationally, and it was solid and it stayed here.

And what have we got now?

Fucking corporate headquarters of Ober.

Loads of people in the city centre employed by Ober.

And Ober have their European corporate headquarters in Limerick City.

And you know why?

Because they don't have to pay tax in Ireland.

And Ober, the ethics of Ober, is very questionable.

Ober,

Ober don't call their drivers employees, they're independent contractors.

The exact opposite, the complete opposite of being in a union and having collective bargaining.

Giant corporations like Ober try to redefine what a worker is so that those workers and employees can't avail of employees' rights, of workers' rights.

Instead, you're an independent contractor with no rights.

And this is what Limerick relies upon for jobs.

Ober, who have no roots here, who could leave tomorrow if the tax rate changed.

In 2016, in 2016, Fina Gael, who are one of the two large political parties in Ireland, a team of investigative journalists found that Ober

wrote part of Fina Gael's election manifesto in 2016.

Why is a giant multinational corporation that pays fuck all tax that's trying to redefine what a worker can be?

why is that giant multinational corporation writing the election manifesto of a fucking political party of a democratic political party what the fuck is going on how e what evil shit is going on what evil neoliberal capitalist shit is going on and in limerick you just put up with it because it fucking Ober has got the corporate headquarters in the middle of the city and because Ober is there there's cafes that are open there's people walking about there's people people spending.

There's people in the city centre for fucking St.

Patrick's Day.

And then you see all the Uber drivers and the Uber 8 drivers.

The vast majority of them are at the bottom of the system.

People from South America mostly.

Who don't have EU passports.

And how sad is it that workers in 1890 in Limerick City probably had more rights and more power to collective bargain than workers now in Limerick City in 2025.

I was still stuck in in the parade thinking about all this shit and again visualizing the description of my ma's description of the blood trickling down the streets into the river and people just walking over it just getting on with their days and smearing the blood all over the streets.

I thought to myself at least you can smell it at least you can touch it at least you can be disgusted by it.

Whereas you can't see the blood that's dripping down from Ober and the Ober headquarters.

They're built on where one of the abattoirs was where one of the abattoirs was 50 years ago up at the very top of Bedford Row a factory called Mathesons I believe it was and then I couldn't stop visualizing the the Shannon River going red turning red on st.

Patrick's Day 50 years ago and it made me think of in Chicago every single Patrick's Day where they dye the river green the city of Chicago dyes its fucking river bright green every St.

Patrick's Day.

There's loads of photographs of it and it's probably probably the most famous Saint Patrick's Day ritual in the world is Chicago dyeing its river green.

And I got my little my little autistic pattern recognition tingle and I thought to myself, I wonder is there connection between the Chicago River being dyed green and the collapse of the bacon industry in Limerick?

It turns out there fucking is.

Very deep connections.

And as soon as I got back to my office I started researching this.

So here's the thing with meat, whether it be pork or beef, the industry as it is shouldn't really exist.

Meat is unsustainable.

The meat that we buy in the supermarket is completely unsustainable.

You shouldn't be able to buy a steak for a fiver

or a ham for eight euros.

We shouldn't be able to do these things.

The reason we can do these things, things, the reason this is affordable, is because the model is unsustainable.

So we do pay the price.

We pay a massive price, but we don't see it directly.

The beef industry, for instance, it's

one of the most environmentally destructive industries on the planet, right?

There's massive emissions.

from the cows themselves, meat then.

There's forests, huge amounts of forests that are cut down like the fucking Amazon.

Brazil and Argentina massive forests cut down to graze cows.

The amount of food and grain that's required to feed a cow, the amount of water that's required to feed a cow, it's a hugely destructive industry.

The industry that exists so that you and me can go to the shop and buy a steak for a fiver that shouldn't really exist.

Realistically,

meat is probably something that

you'd be able to afford once a week.

If the beef was produced, we'd say ethically, sustainably, with minimal environmental impact and travel, then it would be mad expensive and you wouldn't eat it a lot.

Like in Limerick, like in Limerick.

150 years ago or even 50, 60 years ago.

Locally raised pigs

were butchered locally by local people, skilled and unionised.

Every single part of the pig is used and the product, Limerick ham and limerick bacon, was a luxury item.

Limerick ham was on first class, the first class dining carts in the Titanic.

Limerick ham was on that.

So Limerick ham was so expensive.

that only the wealthiest people could afford it as a treat and then what was affordable was the offal.

In Limerick, people ate packet and tripe, which is offal, or people ate soups that were made from pork bones.

But the actual ham and bacon was prohibitively expensive because it was made sustainably.

And you might be thinking, Jesus, that's awful.

I want to buy bacon every single day.

You can.

The cost of that is environmental destruction and exploitation of workers and animal cruelty.

But if you go back to

you can only have ham once a week because it's so expensive.

But with that, you get a sustainable model.

You get an entire city in employment, unionized workers, no waste because there's multiple local industries, and probably a healthier, more varied diet that contains more vegetables.

So, how did we end up in this situation where our meat is unsustainable, completely destroying the planet?

And also,

like people who work in meat processing plants now,

again, they're the people at the bottom of the system.

You saw this during COVID.

Some of the workers that got treated the worst were people working in meat processing.

Where did all this start?

It started in fucking Chicago.

It started in Chicago.

At the same time that Limerick had a small sustainable baking industry in Chicago from about the 1820s onwards, you started to see the emergence of

industrialized meat production, unlike anything that had ever been seen before.

That's a big story, so I don't want to interrupt it before I begin it.

So let's have a little ocarina pause right now.

I'm gonna play

my stone bass ocarina, and you're gonna hear an advert for some bullshit.

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Coach, the energy out there felt different.

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You can bend the notes on this one, I like that.

That was the Ocarina pause.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly.

This is a listener-funded podcast.

This podcast is my full-time job.

I write it, I research it, I edit it, I record it, I do it all myself.

I pay for my equipment, I rent my office, I pay all my bills through listener funding.

All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month.

And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it.

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Listen to this podcast for free.

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because this is listener funded, I'm not beholden to advertisers.

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So because of that, you're going to get your algorithmically generated adverts.

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advertisers, they can't tell me what to do, what to speak about, and I can tell them to fuck off as well.

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Do it on your browser.

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So some upcoming gigs.

My next gigs are in New Zealand and Australia, right?

I'm off there next week.

They're sold out.

I can't wait to to come.

I'm still open to guest suggestions.

So if there's people you want me to speak to at Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, and fucking Auckland, give me a shout.

Then after that, Limerick, that's sold out.

There's a gig in Cavin there around fucking

May, but I don't know if I'll out announce that yet, right?

Then I'm off to the

England, England, and Scotland there in June.

I can't wait for that, all right?

There's not a lot of tickets left for this tour.

But I'm going to be in Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex, and Norwich.

I cannot wait for that tour.

And again, if there's people you want me to speak to at any of those locations, give me a shout and I'll bring them on as guests.

September 19th, I'm up in Derry.

I love Derry, can't wait to go back to Derry.

Some people will be like, can you call it London Derry as well?

No,

I can't do that because

the name Derry, the name Derry means Dirah.

It's a very, very old name.

It means oak wood.

So by holding on to the name Derry there, it lets us know that the area where Derry is was once an oak wood.

Oak was a very, very important tree.

to Indigenous Irish people.

We got great use out of the bark and also we got ink from the fruit that grows on the oak tree.

I think, I think only they're like little hazelnuts that grow on oak trees.

And I think sometimes a wasp, a wasp, gets into one of these, and when that happens, you can make ink out of it.

So that's why I call dairy dairy because it means dirah and oak wood.

And that name there tells us something very important about biodiversity and the land.

And when you call it London Derry, it means fuck all.

Although what it could mean,

so English canonization did

like destroy a lot of our forests and cut down a bunch of our trees to build ships for the for the English Navy.

So I'll call it Londonderry if it means, how ya, we're from London and we we cut down all your trees for the laugh.

We're from London.

And we're the reason that this isn't an oak wood anymore.

Londonderry.

I'm okay with with that when the name rats on itself.

So, anyway, I'm in Derry in September.

And then I just announced a Vicker Street gig in September there today on the 22nd of September.

Long way away, but if you want to come to one of my wonderful Vicar Street gigs, now's your chance.

So now I'm going to tell you the story of the history of industrial meat processing in Chicago.

in the 1800s.

So by about 1860, Chicago was an emerging city.

Chicago is

it's kind of in the middle, in the middle of the United States, just there on Lake Michigan.

By 1860 the west of North America hadn't been fully colonized yet.

You've got the south obviously and you've got the east coast, fucking New York, Boston, Philadelphia.

Chicago's in the middle with Lake Michigan and loads of railways.

that travel to the east coast and to the west coast

and Chicago starts to work as like a distribution hub for all of America.

Now, before 1860 in America, people were not eating meat every single day.

No fucking way.

They'd be lucky if they ate meat once a week.

It took eight hours to fully butcher a cow, and the cow had to be local,

it couldn't travel any great distance, it had to be local, it had to be fed locally, and it had to be butchered locally.

Getting a steak was a long process that was expensive and complicated.

Chicago changed that in the 1860s.

There was this whole

area of marshland

and they developed it into what was called the Union Stockyards.

So cattle was being raised in the plains to the west.

Cows were being raised and pigs and sheep.

and the plains to the west in the wild west right 1860 and then the cattle and the sheep and the pigs were being brought on trains to Chicago and all the animals now were kept in this in pens in this huge area called the Union Stockyards in Chicago and then the cattle live was delivered to fucking New York or Philadelphia or wherever via railroads but that was still very expensive because if you're traveling live animals across the United States in 1860, a big long journey via rail you have to feed the animals along the way.

So if a cow is traveling from Colorado all the way across to New York, it's still very expensive.

But then something changes.

The refrigerated rail car gets invented.

So a rail car that has ice in it and you can keep meat cold on a fucking train.

So now what happens is cattle is being sent from the west to Chicago and now it's being butchered in Chicago and freezing meat is being delivered to the east coast.

The ability to freeze meat, to freeze your meat and keep it fresh for weeks or for as long as it's fucking frozen, that made meat affordable now.

Now it was cheaper and Chicago started to develop the industry of meat processing.

So cattle is coming from the west.

and stopping in Chicago where the cattle is being slaughtered and butchered in these new factories that contain disassembly lines.

Multiple people working on an assembly line, killing and butchering a cow in about 10 minutes.

What used to take eight hours now takes 10 minutes.

But at the same time, Chicago is getting an influx of incredibly poor refugees from Lithuania and Germany and Ireland.

All these really, really dark poor peasants from Europe are pouring into Chicago and they're working in these giant meat factories in the 1860s.

Now this is the height of laissez-faire capitalism.

So the only thing that matters is the profits of the factories.

So as you can imagine, the workers, they're dying.

They're getting injured.

They're getting their hands chopped off in machinery.

They're getting sick from being around rotting meat.

They've no workers' rights whatsoever.

So they're working 16, 17 hour days.

There's children working there.

Initially, on the east coast, in like fucking New York and Boston, most people won't eat frozen meat.

The idea of eating meat that's frozen and that comes from halfway across the country, people aren't into it.

Like, this, how can it be fresh just because you froze it?

But eventually, people start eating their frozen meat, and demand goes up and up and up.

The factories get bigger, more people are employed, more cows are brought in, more cows cows are being raised in the West, and now Chicago by about 1890 is disgusting.

The unions, like you're talking about a couple of square miles of cows just being butchered with no safety standards, no environmental regulations, nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

People are living in slums beside the slaughterhouses.

People on the east coast of America now are able to buy cheap meat.

It starts to impact fucking cuisine.

Like, if you look at the difference between Italian-American food and Italian food, like meatballs and spaghetti, there's no such thing as meatballs and spaghetti in Italy.

That's Italian-American food.

Italian-American food was all about

showing off, not just Italian-American food, Jewish-American food, fucking Irish-American food, corned beef and cabbage.

Do you ever go to a Jewish deli in New York like Katz is delicatessen and you see the size of the sandwiches and the meat?

D'you ever go to any restaurant in fucking America and the portion sizes are two or three times what you'd eat in fucking Ireland.

That has ideological roots in the meat factories of Chicago.

Immigrants from poor European countries who had fuck all.

Italian immigrants, Irish immigrants, Jewish immigrants from fucking Lithuania.

They had nothing in their own countries.

And their food was austere and frugal.

And then, when they get to America and start identifying as being American, their cuisine changes to be about

plenty.

Pasta and tomatoes become pasta and meatballs because it's a sudden influx of affordable frozen meat coming in from Chicago via the refrigerated rail cars.

An unsustainable meat industry is emerging where workers are treated like absolute shit, they're dying, there's no health and safety standards, and the environment is being destroyed.

And there's horrendous pollution in Chicago, where blood and entrails is just dumped into the Chicago River.

The other thing that this does, and this is what capitalism, capitalism

strips,

it strips things of their meaning by turning them into commodities.

So for the first time,

people are eating meat with no relationship to the animal whatsoever.

Steaks are just arriving and you're not even seeing a butcher shop.

When we buy meat now, there's no relationship with an animal whatsoever.

That's deliberate.

Capitalism doesn't want us thinking about animals.

Doesn't want us thinking that our food might have had emotions or feelings or a glimmer in its eyes.

It's stripped of all meaning except for taste.

Taste is the only meaning that you can get from meat now.

But where are all the cows coming from?

Let's say 1870.

The cows that are going into Chicago and getting butchered in the Union stockyard, where are those cows coming from?

They're coming from the fucking West, the wild west, the cowboys, the ranchers.

This is where the cows are coming from.

But indigenous people live in the west.

Quote-unquote American Indians live in the fucking west.

Most of the cattle is being raised in what's called the Great Plains.

This absolutely gigantic, flat area that covers a huge part of America.

Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico.

Fucking huge area of flatland and grasslands.

It hasn't been fully colonized by Europeans yet.

What's there?

Indigenous Native American people, many different tribes, and fuck tons of buffalo.

Wild herds of buffalo.

Millions on the Great Plains.

Buffalo are their American animals, also known as bison.

They're like wild cows.

They herd.

But

what you have is the

humans that are living there.

They've been living there for 10,000 years, 15,000 years.

You've got different

groups of people like the Pawnee or the Cayenne or the Blackfoot.

And their entire culture and civilization is based around these buffalo.

Now the colonizer mindset is to say these people are primitive, these people are backwards.

But if you read the studies,

these people were first off they were taller than Europeans and they were physically healthier than their European counterparts.

They lived in teepees like tents made from buffalo hide and they moved with the buffalo herds.

Their rituals, their medicine, their claws, their mythology, their stories, their folklore, everything,

fucking everything, is the buffalo.

And they were healthy, successful people who had a civilization that worked for them

and they had a sustainable way of living with the fucking buffalo.

Often by hunting the buffalo off cliffs.

But their relationship with their wasn't just a food source.

Their relationship with the buffalo was one of intense meaning.

It was the meaning in their lives and in their stories and in their mythology.

So when the cattle industry starts to expand, the ranchers and the fucking cowboys, buffalo become a problem.

Buffalo are grazing grass that could instead be used for herds of domestic cattle and ranches.

While buffalo are also a pain in the arse for railroads, America is starting to expand its rail over to California.

Buffalo herds they go onto the rail tracks and buffalo are so big they're fucking huge that it can derail a train.

So in 1870 buffalo start going extinct.

Hunters, the government sent fucking hunters to kill as many buffalo as possible just for the crack, just for the sake of it.

But also the US government

they also don't want indigenous people.

They're trying to get indigenous American people to live on reservations.

They don't want the US government in 1870, they don't want fucking the Pawnee or the Cayenne

to be traveling with the herds of buffalo.

They want these people living on small reservations where they can be contained and watched.

So the US government starts to kill buffalo as a way to ethnically cleanse, genocide, the fucking indigenous people.

And this is well fucking practice because Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell did this in Ireland in the 1600s.

Oliver Cromwell cleared our forests to put cattle there and also sent wolf hunters killed all the wolves the wolves in Ireland for two reasons because wolves were eating cattle and because of the Irish indigenous relationship with wolves the mythology of wolves the wolf as a symbol of a freedom fighter fighting the British fucking Cromwell killed all the wolves and got rid of the forests so the Yanks killed the buffalo to ethnically cleanse the indigenous Americans and to destroy their language, their culture and to remove their sense of meaning with their food source and the land.

Get rid of the buffalo and then you take away their meaning and we can make them, we can put them on fucking reservations then.

These people who've been moving with stories around these buffaloes for thousands of years.

Let's kill the buffalo.

Israel does this too.

Like Israel after the Nakba of 1948.

Israel in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.

Israel had a big thing about planting forests.

Israel loved planting forests, right?

And on the outside, you'd think, oh, that's quite environmentally friendly.

But what Israel were actually doing is

Palestinian villages that could have been there for thousands of years.

When Israel took it over, they bulldozed the village and then built a forest over it, planted a fucking forest, so that if anyone was to even return to the site of the village, they'd have no relationship with the land whatsoever.

The landscape had been changed permanently so the connection and the meaning with the land is gone that's how the us

committed ethnic cleansing and genocide on indigenous people especially the quote-unquote plains indians by killing the fucking buffalo killing the buffalo to remove meaning and relationship with the land and the plains indians they had a sustainable model of meat consumption there so the buffalo were cleared to make way for giant farms full of fucking cattle that were sent to Chicago.

Chicago now by about 1900 is absolutely fucked.

Capitalism has run rampant.

Abuse of animals, workers are dying, people are getting food poisoning, the environment is being destroyed and we're seeing the modern industrial model of unsustainable meat as an industry.

We're seeing this now.

But at the same time,

a new type of journalist emerges called a muckraker.

And a muckraker was

like an early type of investigative journalist.

And a fellow by the name of Upton Sinclair, who was a muckraker journalist,

he went into the stockyards of Chicago and pretended to be a worker, but he was actually a journalist.

And he spent about six months living amongst the filth and poverty of the meat industry in Chicago and then he wrote a book.

The book is called The Jungle.

Now Upton Sinclair was a socialist.

He wanted the workers to unionize.

So he wrote this book

and this was 1904

and the book was just about

it was gore.

It was a gore book.

It was a bestseller.

It became really, really popular because people wanted to read about the depravity of the meat industry.

You're literally talking about stories of men falling into machinery and their bodies being mixed up into meat that get turned into hot dogs and then people eat it.

Our floors, floors full of, there was no toilets, floors full of human shit and piss and rat piss and everything you can imagine and this being sweeped up into meat and that being packed into hot dogs.

People bought this book The Jungle like it was a horror novel.

It was sensational, but it wasn't sensationalized.

Upton Sinclair was telling the truth.

And even if you try and get this book now, and this is the sad thing about meaning, if you try and buy the jungle now, all the front cover is all images of jungles.

The front cover is removed from the meaning that this is about urban industrial meat production.

Anyway, this book, it eventually makes its way to Teddy Roosevelt the President.

This book caused such a stir that people like stopped eating meat from Chicago.

They were like, this is disgusting.

It led to the first

federal food safety laws.

It led to regulation, regulation of the meat industry.

It led to unions,

unionization of the workers.

That book there, The Jungle, is an example of why journalism, journalism is

so important as a cornerstone of fucking democracy.

Because you see, the immigrants, those immigrant workers who are working in in the meat factories who are dying and their families who are living in shit and squalor and blood and guts those people don't have any voice they have no voice and they are in the eyes of the wealthy meat factory owners they're disposable get rid of them there's new immigrants coming but a journalist had the ability to tell wealthy people who had power and a voice and political clout and then things changed.

The meat industry became regulated, still unsustainable and horrendous, but not as bad as children getting their hands chopped off and 16-hour days.

And the other issue was the environmental impact.

So, in the Chicago River,

so much blood and guts and offal from the stockyards and the meat factories went into the river

that the

years and years of dead animals went to the bottom of the river and the river became known as Bubbly Creek.

So the river literally bubbled with decomposing gases of offal and this became known as Bubbly Creek.

And it caused pollution problems, river pollution problems and sewage problems in Chicago for fucking years.

And then eventually in the 1960s.

The Plumbers Union.

So when the Plumbers Union used to have difficulty with the Chicago River, specifically the sewage system, because it was so fucked up for years and years because of the meat industry, in the 1960s, the Plumbers Union used to try and find where sewage leakages were happening.

So what they did is they used to put green dye into the Chicago River.

And then they'd follow the path of where the dye is, and then they'd figure out where the sewage leaks were.

And this was the Plumbers Union.

Then one year they did it, and it happened to be near St.

Patrick's Day.

And everyone noticed, oh, the river is green, this must be for St.

Patrick's Day.

Now the Plumbers' Union were like, that wasn't the intention.

This river has been fucked up from the meat industry for years.

So we dye it green to figure out where the sewage leaks are.

But you know what?

For the laugh, every St.

Patrick's Day, we're gonna dye the river green.

So that's what they started doing.

But who paid for it?

The Plumbers Union.

The Plumbers Union of chicago paid for it every year now why would they do that

loads of the plumbers were irish obviously because chicago is a working class irish city historically but when a plumbers union this massive union of workers who have rights when they

if they put their hands into their pockets and create this giant spectacle every single year, we dye the river green.

It's a show of power.

It's soft power.

There's a little threat behind it.

Look how powerful we are.

We're the plumbers union.

We can dye the river fucking green.

If we stop working, if we go on strike, this city goes back to being polluted.

We're essential.

We're important.

And we deserve rights.

We deserve rights and good working conditions.

But of course, that was the 1960s.

And then we know that Reagan

and his neoliberal policies, he dismantled a lot of unions.

He made unions not as powerful as they were in the 1960s.

So even the dying of the river green has lost meaning now.

Now we just think it's aesthetic.

Oh, Irish Americans, Paddy's Day, dying the river green.

It means the same as McDonald's in America.

McDonald's dye their milkshakes green on Patrick's Day.

That literally means fuck all.

That means fucking nothing.

That's McDonald's, the capitalists, trying to sell green milkshakes.

But the real history of dying the river green in Chicago, it's a show of power for unions.

It's about workers' rights, unions, collective bargaining and not being exploited.

That's what it means.

And these people just happen to be overwhelmingly of Irish descent.

And to circle it back to Limerick.

What does Chicago and the Green River have to do with Limerick and the pork industry?

That's what destroyed the Limerick pork industry.

The Limerick pork industry was small scale, it was sustainable, it employed the whole city, but it wasn't massive,

full industrialization.

It wasn't machinated, it required skilled people, and they had value and they had meaning and because of that they had rights.

But the cost of all of this is that the meat wasn't that affordable for everybody.

But the Chicago model, the Chicago meat model,

sure that undercut the Limerick fucking, the Limerick bacon industry.

That destroyed it all.

Couldn't compete and then eventually everything shut down.

And now,

now you can walk into your supermarket in Limerick to buy your steak.

And if you look at the back of it,

it might come from fucking Argentina and it costs a fiver.

That shouldn't exist.

That simply shouldn't exist.

Argentina and Brazil are cutting down rainforests for giant farms farms with hundreds of thousands of cows and workers are being exploited and then the meat is sent halfway across the world and we're able to buy it for a fiver.

That shouldn't exist.

There's a huge cost, a massive cost and the cost is human rights and the complete destruction of the environment.

So that's all I have time for this week.

I suppose this is a bit of a part two from last week's podcast.

I'm talking about the same system.

I am talking about...

In the 1900s you had liberal economics.

You had an economic model where the economy is treated like a wild animal.

Profit is the only thing that matters.

And capitalists can do whatever the fuck they want, whatever they want.

And then in the 20th century, this was curtailed, curtailed via regulations on business.

and workers had the right to unionize.

And then from the late 70s onwards, you get neoliberalism.

The rebirth of these 19th century ideas of unfettered capitalism, where the only thing that matters is profit, where you view the economy like a wild animal.

And then

regulations get dropped.

You've got companies like Uber redefining what a worker can be.

Unions don't exist anymore.

And beef from Argentina costs a fiver.

So this is a bit of a part two from last week in a way.

What I wanted to focus on more and in greater detail was

alienation and meaninglessness.

How capitalism removes us from meaning.

The food we buy doesn't have meaning.

It's just commodities.

And also the work that a lot of people does doesn't have meaning.

It's a thing that's done.

to collect wages.

And this system results in a feeling of alienation, powerlessness.

I didn't explore that fully this week because I didn't have the fucking time.

Two days were taken off me because of the parades.

So I'll

revisit those themes when I have the time to put in the research and the writing and to deliver it properly.

In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, genuflect to a snail.

God bless.

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