Fast Food Nation: Chapter 8–9

As they hack away, using all their strength, grunting, the place suddenly feels different, primordial. The machinery seems beside the point, and what’s going on before me has been going on for thousands of years—the meat, the hook, the knife, men straining to cut more meat.

The animals are powerful and imposing one moment and then gone in an instant, suspended from a rail, ready for carving.

Knocker, Sticker, Shackler, Rumper, First Legger, Knuckle Dropper, Navel Boner, Splitter Top/Bottom Butt, Feed Kill Chain—the names of job assignments at a modern slaughterhouse convey some of the brutality inherent in the work.

But the dramatic and catastrophic injuries in a slaughterhouse are greatly outnumbered by less visible, though no less debilitating, ailments: torn muscles, slipped disks, pinched nerves.

Each supervisor is like a little dictator in his or her section of the plant, largely free to boss, fire, berate, or reassign workers.

Late on the second shift, when it’s dark outside, assignations take place in locker rooms, staff rooms, and parked cars, even on the catwalk over the kill floor.

Eight years earlier, Henry Wolf had been overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes while cleaning the very same tank; Gary Sanders had tried to rescue him; both men died; and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) later fined National Beef for its negligence.

The number of OSHA inspectors was eventually cut by 20 percent, and in 1981 the agency adopted a new policy of “voluntary compliance.”

For most of the 1980s OSHA’s relationship with the meatpacking industry was far from adversarial. While the number of serious injuries rose, the number of OSHA inspections fell.

During a three-month period in 1985, the first log recorded 1,800 injuries and illnesses at the plant. The OSHA log recorded only 160—a discrepancy of more than 1,000 percent.

Convinced that no such videotape existed and that IBP had fabricated the entire story in order to deny him medical treatment, Kevin Wilson sued the company for slander.

The Iowa Supreme Court concluded that the lies she told in this medical case, as well as in others, had been partly motivated by IBP’s financial incentive program, which gave staff members bonuses and prizes when the number of lost workdays was kept low. The program, in the court’s opinion, was “somewhat disingenuously called ‘the safety award system.’”

The National Labor Relations Board had ruled that Monfort committed “numerous, pervasive, and outrageous” violations of labor law after reopening the Greeley beef plant in 1982, discriminating against former union members at hiring time and intimidating new workers during a union election.

After a long and arduous organizing drive, workers at the Monfort beef plant voted to join the UFCW in 1992.

But ConAgra, IBP, and the other large meatpacking firms are self-insured. They are under no pressure from independent underwriters and have a strong incentive to keep workers’ comp payments to a bare minimum.

It began to draw up the first ergonomics standards for the nation’s manufacturers, aiming to reduce cumulative trauma disorders.

Kenny eventually recovered from the overexposure to chlorine, but it left his chest feeling raw, made him susceptible to colds and sensitive to chemical aromas.

One day, Kenny was in rendering and saw a worker about to stick his head into a pre-breaker machine, a device that uses hundreds of small hammers to pulverize gristle and bone into a fine powder.

It said that his stool sample had tested positive for Escherichia coli 0157:H7, a virulent and potentially lethal foodborne pathogen.

A modern factory designed for the mass production of food had instead become a vector for the spread of a deadly disease.

The package of hamburger patties in Lee Harding’s freezer and astute investigative work by Colorado health officials soon led to the largest recall of food in the nation’s history.

Recent studies have found that many foodborne pathogens can precipitate long-term ailments, such as heart disease, inflammatory bowel disease, neurological problems, autoimmune disorders, and kidney damage.

Although the rise in foodborne illnesses has been caused by many complex factors, much of the increase can be attributed to recent changes in how American food is produced.

The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on.

“The hamburger habit is just about as safe,” one food critic warned, "as getting your meat out of a garbage can.” White Castle, the nation’s first hamburger chain, worked hard in the 1920s to dispel the hamburger’s tawdry image.

As Hogan notes in his history of the chain, Selling ’Em by the Sack (1997), the founders of White Castle placed their grills in direct view of customers, claimed that fresh ground beef was delivered twice a day, chose a name with connotations of purity, and even sponsored an experiment at the University of Minnesota in which a medical student lived for thirteen weeks on “nothing but White Castle hamburgers and water.”

Steven P. Bjerklie, a former editor of the trade journal Meat & Poultry, is appalled by what goes into cattle feed these days.

A single worker at a “gut table” may eviscerate sixty cattle an hour.

They are directly exposed to a wide variety of pathogens in the meat, become infected, and inadvertently spread disease.

“Meat and food products, generally speaking,” J. Ogden Armour claimed in a Saturday Evening Post article, “are handled as carefully and circumspectly in large packing houses as they are in the average home kitchen.”

The industry has repeatedly denied that problems exist, impugned the motives of its critics, fought vehemently against federal oversight, sought to avoid any responsibility for outbreaks of food poisoning, and worked hard to shift the costs of food safety efforts onto the general public.

The industry’s strategy has been driven by a profound antipathy to any government regulation that might lower profits.

At SIS-C slaughterhouses, visibly diseased animals—cattle infected with measles and tapeworms, covered with abscesses—were being slaughtered.

On September 29, 1993, his replacement, Michael R. Taylor, announced that E. coli 0157:H7 would henceforth be considered an illegal adulterant, that no ground beef contaminated with it could be sold, and that the USDA would begin random microbial testing to remove it from the nation’s food supply.

Theno insisted that every Jack in the Box manager attend a food safety course, that every refrigerated delivery truck have a record-keeping thermometer mounted inside it, that every kitchen grill be calibrated to ensure an adequate cooking temperature, and that every grill person use tongs to handle hamburger patties instead of bare hands.

It was ground into fine particles by giant augers, mixed into exact proportions of lean meat and fat, stamped into patties, perforated, frozen, passed through metal detectors and then sealed in plastic wrap.

“We live in a very litigious society,” Jacque Knight, a USDA spokesman explained; if every meat recall was publicly announced, companies would face problems from “everybody with a stomachache.”

“There have been no illnesses associated with this product,” the company’s press release brashly asserted.

When used properly, steam pasteurization cabinets can kill off most of the E. coli 0157:H7 and reduce the amount of bacteria on the meat’s surface by as much as 90 percent.

Instead of focusing on the primary causes of meat contamination—the feed being given to cattle, the overcrowding at feedlots, the poor sanitation at slaughterhouses, excessive line speeds, poorly trained workers, the lack of stringent government oversight—the meatpacking industry and the USDA are now advocating an exotic technological solution to the problem of foodborne pathogens.