Everything You Didn't Want To Know About Hormel, Bacon, and Amputated Limbs

[G_j]

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2014/10/chain-ted-genoways-spam-hormel

—By Tom Philpott| Wed Oct. 15, 2014 6:00 AM EDT

Much of the outrage generated by the meat industry involves the rough treatment of animals. But as Ted Genoways shows in his searing new book The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food—which grew of his long-form 2011 Mother Jones piece "The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret"—the people employed in its factory-scale slaughterhouses have it pretty rough, too. The book hinges on a rare neurological disorder that, in the mid-2000s, began to affect workers in a Spam factory in Austin, Minnesota—particularly ones who worked in the vicinity of the "brain machine," which, as Genoways writes, used compressed air to blast slaughtered pigs' brains "into a pink slurry." As Genoways memorably puts it: "A high-pressure burst, a fine rosy mist, and the slosh of brains slipping through a drain hole into a catch bucket." I recently caught up with him to talk about the world of our dark, Satanic meat mills, and the bright spots he sees after immersing himself in it.

Mother Jones: When did you first get interested in the meat industry?

Ted Genoways: I'm a fourth generation Nebraskan, and my grandfather, my dad's dad, during the Depression, worked in the packinghouses in Omaha around the union stockyards there. One Sunday, when they were visiting relatives just outside of Omaha, my grandfather decided to take my dad in to see the packing houses, and into the hog-kill room, when he was probably about 10 years old. And my dad said that he was just sort of overwhelmed by the noise and the screeching of the hogs and the terror. My first book was a book of poems, Bullroarer: A Sequence, that had one section that dealt with some of that.

MJ: How did you go from poetry to investigating this disturbing brain disorder among meat-packing workers?

TG: Around 2000, I had a job working as a book editor at the Minnesota Historical Society Press, and the first book that I worked on there was a book called Packinghouse Daughter, by Cheri Register, about the packinghouse strike in Albert Lea, Minnesota, in 1959. Her father was one of the meatpacking workers there. I also read Peter Rachleff's book about the Hormel strike in the '80s in Austin, Minnesota, Hard-Pressed in the Heartland.

So it caught my eye in 2007 when there were some AP stories, and eventually the New York Times did a story, about the outbreak of this neurological disorder among the packing house workers at Quality Pork Processors in Austin. The fact that the people affected were almost entirely Hispanic intrigued me.

...more..

"You've got somebody who's had a finger chopped off or has had a deep cut on their arm so that they're bleeding all over their station. There's somebody there to just pause that station and clean it while the rest of the line continues to move."

[malaise]

1. The Jungle - version 2

Sinclair nailed it and it has only gotten worse.

[mountain grammy]

6. I read "The Jungle" when I was 14.

I remember that Sunday (over 50 years ago,) sitting in the living room reading my book when Mom called me to dinner. A wonderful pot roast that I had been smelling all day. I took one look at the meat on the plate, went to the bathroom and threw up.

I didn't become a vegetarian, but have never forgotten that book.

[malaise]

7. Like you I never forgot that book

It sure changed my way of thinking.
I did give up all red meat in 1979, but that was years after I read the book.

[navarth]

2. a multitude of innocent animals

who are capable of fear, despair and suffering. All tortured and murdered so the humans can have their happy meal. Count me out.

[closeupready]

3. I'm an enthusiastic carnivore, but I eat less of it now, due to

the failure to oversee the meatpacking industry on several axes.

K&R

[tclambert]

4. Well, if you throw away contaminated meat, that's throwing away money.

Any manager of a meat processing plant can figure that out. If you mix the contaminated meat with "good" meat and send it out, you have that much more product your plant produced and sold. More product, more money. As long as no one can prove in a court of law that you made somebody sick, there's no cost associated with it. So, to maximize profit, which is what the boss' boss says is the only standard of ethics for a businessperson, a good manager has a responsibility to send out as much contaminated meat as he can get away with.

[sunnystarr]

5. It would have been nice

if the article described what it was talking about. It eludes to the fact that there's some kind of disease or disorder that the workers get because of the higher speeds used. It doesn't describe or name what that is. It talks about how the higher speeds lead to the need for more product which means that the hogs are fed more antibiotics to ensure they all get to be the same size so that the same size incisions can be used on the line. So how does that translate to being a danger to the worker and the consumer? It doesn't say.

The article talks about how quickly they were able to get rid of the union and the white workers, both of whom wouldn't put up with the high speed work conditions. But it doesn't tie into the fact that unsafe conditions are easy to subject workers to when they're undocumented immigrant workers. That these are the jobs that the white's won't do meme really means that these are the conditions that are rejected by white workers. Which is a great story too but not the topic of this article.

Interesting piece that just didn't deliver.

[Luminous Animal]

8. All these answers are in the 2011 Mother Jones article 'The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret"

It's linked in the first paragraph of the current article.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/hormel-spam-pig-brains-disease?page=1

[sunnystarr]

9. thanks .. interesting article (nt)