Vivid Book of the Month November 2004

Regulars
BOOK OF THE MONTH
An industry out of control

by Andrew Begg
November 2004

SLAUGHTERHOUSE - The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry by Gail A. Eisnitz
Prometheus Books, 311 pages, ISBN 1-57392-166-1, purchased at amazon.com

Slaughterhouse is a devastating indictment of influence and power in the American meat industry, revealing the abject ethical bankruptcy of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the federal government organisation whose responsibility is to monitor and oversee all facets of American agriculture, including livestock. The book shows the USDA to be riddled with conflicts of interest and an active campaigner against the Humane Slaughter Act - which requires humane handling for all animals prior to being shackled, hoisted and bled at a slaughterhouse - and simply a tool in the pocket of the large meat producers. Its dereliction of duty has had disastrous results for consumers, meat processing industry workers, and unsurprisingly the animals, whose horrendous suffering is the result of an industry that is effectively out of control.

The book shows modern slaughterhouses to be cesspits of disease, which comes as a result of USDA providing approximately six thousand federal meat inspectors to examine the insides and outsides of more than eight billion animals a year. The worst case of food poisoning until the publication of this book occurred in December 1998, when 35 million pounds of contaminated hot dogs and lunch meat manufactured by a Sara Lee plant in Michigan were recalled from 22 states, but not before 15 people had died, six women had miscarried and another 100 people had become seriously ill. That this occurs is of little surprise to the people who process meat.

''There were lots of rats, snakes, cockroaches and maggots in the plant,'' one worker said. ''I saw maggots in boxes which contained bags that the chicken would be wrapped in.''
A worker at another plant described the chicken processed at the plant as ''not safe to eat. Every day, I saw black chicken, green chicken, chicken that stank, and chicken with feces on it. Chicken like this is supposed to be thrown away, but instead it would be sent down the line to be processed.''
An employee at a third plant said, ''The rotten meat is mixed with fresh meat and sold for baby food. We are asked to mix it with the fresh food, and this is the way it is sold. You can see the worms inside the meat.''

Slaughterhouse makes plain the fact that meat producers have next to no regard for their employees, the majority of whom are migrant or itinerant workers earning subsistence wages. Licensed to kill morning, noon and night, severe psychological problems and serious physical injuries – many of which stem from having to kill at an amazingly rapid speed as the animals rush past at the rate of thousands an hour – are common amongst meat processors. Working largely undercover, Gail Eisnitz documents her meetings with dozens of them.

But any sympathy the reader might feel at the tales of working class plight pales into insignificance when compared to the abhorrence of the descriptions of the awful pain inflicted in a multitude of ways on animals by meat processing workers, who regard animals merely as raw material to be dismembered as quickly as possible.

''Any other types of violations?''
''Cattle dragged and choked, stuff like that. Knocking ‘em four, five, ten times. Every now and then when they’re stunned they come back to life, and they’re up there agonizing. They’re supposed to be restunned but sometimes they aren’t and they’ll go through the skinning process alive. I’ve found them alive clear over to the rump stand, (the plant area where the hide is cut off the hindquarters).''
''How long does it take an animal to get there?''
''They’ve been completely legged, he said. ''Ten minutes maybe. And they run them through an electrical shock system, too.''
''Maybe they weren’t alive, I said. Could it just be muscle reaction?''
''When they’re sucking in air and bellowing, their eyes bugging out? If people were to see this, they’d probably feel really bad about it. But in a packing house everybody gets so used to it that it doesn’t mean anything.''

Anyone who reads this book will be tempted to question the ethics of the various groups involved in the meat industry – from the growers to the slaughterers, from the butchers to the retailers, to the restaurants and cooks who dish it up. Their questioning might even extend to the vast majority of the human race, who willingly perpetrate the horror in blissful ignorance as to how it got there. Read Slaughterhouse, but prepare to be shocked.