Meatpacking America How migration, work, and faith unite and divide the heartland

Not a meatpacking industry exposé similar to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) or Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2001), this ethnographic study examines how religion and the pursuit of the American Dream connect refugees and native-born residents and revive historically white, privileged small towns in flyover country. Although racism and ethnocentrism continue to separate white people from Black and brown people, both sides realize the benefits and strengths that all offer through their shared values. The meatpacking industry's presence in smaller communities has created thousands of jobs for refugees who have revitalized moribund towns with little future. In small-town Iowa, the meatpacking plants of Iowa Premium Beef and Tyson Foods offer spaces for acceptance, diversity, and inclusion to flourish. Nabhan-Warren (religious studies; gender, women's, and sexuality studies; Univ. of Iowa) is rightly sympathetic to the refugee workers who provide a vital, skilled labor force to meet the dietary needs of nonvegetarians in the US and around the world, despite the widely held belief that they perform mind-numbing, brutal, unskilled labor. For their part, the companies provide decent salaries, benefits, and opportunities for advancement, creating as safe a process as possible for both the animals and those who kill and dismember them and package their meat. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals. --Duncan R. Jamieson, Ashland University