Industrial Meat Processing

With the rise of giant meat processing companies, such as Armour and Swift, sausages became cheap industrial products. Meat factories were organized as animal disassembly places where sausages, hot dogs in particular, were made of the leftovers including intestines. Sausages poured out of factories that processed millions of animals each year. A nickel hot dog became embedded in Chicago’s street food scene. 

Always suspect because they were made of “mystery meat,” exposés of packinghouse conditions by muckraking journalists led to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and modern meat inspection.