CUTS AND CLASSIFICATION: THE USE OF NOMENCLATURES AS A TOOL FOR THE REFORM OF THE MEAT TRADE IN FRANCE, 1850-1880

Reformers seeking to improve the diet of the French working classes in the middle of the 19th century agreed that fresh meat was too expensive for consumers hailing from modest and poor backgrounds. At local markets, the economic parties within the meat industry and municipal authorities strove to limit retail prices by setting an administrative price. In doing so, they faced the difficulty of establishing a just price at the shop level to provide fair remuneration for both livestock producers and butchers. The differentiation and the hierarchic ordering of pieces of meat and their relative prices were the solution to this problem. The introduction of an official, legally-binding nomenclature of meat cuts helped the reformers to overcome the problem of the heterogeneous nature of prices in shops and market stalls. These nomenclatures limited in a regulatory manner the designation of cuts, the attribution of prices, and the forms of transaction. Thus, they contributed to the homogenization of butcher stalls and the widening of the scale of prices for meat available to working-class consumers. The administrative diffusion of meat classifications was performed through meat consumer cooperatives and, somewhat later, veterinary inspectors. A proof of their legitimacy was that the terms were still present at the turn of the 20th century in any good household education manual.