The Chain

This is a must-read book about Spam. No, not the kind that clogs up your inbox, but the cheap canned meat that pioneered the postwar love affair with processed foods, which Monty Python so cleverly satirized.

In this hard-driving and wide-ranging investigation, Ted Genoways focuses on Hormel Foods and its signature product—Spam—to expose the dark underbelly of industrial pork production that brings us our bacon, hams, chops—and Spam. It broke my heart and turned my stomach at the same time.   

This book did for me what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle did for millions in 1906—it made me think deeply about the safety of our food supply, how the animals we turn into our meats are handled, and the treatment of the workers who kill, cut, and pack our meats.

Genoways’ searing expose of current-day meatpacking plants became a companion to my own research on the early days of Hormel and its competitors. His stories about the people who work in our factories portray the devastating tradeoffs in health and safety they must make for their livelihood, costs that ultimately fall… show more.