I want you to know the truth about the meat you eat. I deleted my personal comments. It's up to you to demand change or not.
Those excerpts are from the book Slaughterhouse by Gail A. Eisnitz, an expose about the factory farms where %99 of the meat you eat is produced. Those factories are not isolated cases. They're the norm all across USA. If you want the whole book, fuck copyright―give me an email account or anything I can send the file to. I will.
Note: I had to delete some excerpts due to the word limit. There's more.
“A lot of times the skinner finds out an animal is still conscious when he slices the side of its head and it starts kicking wildly. If that happens, or if a cow is already kicking when it arrives at their station, the skinners shove a knife into the back of its head to cut the spinal cord."
This practice paralyzes the cow from the neck down but doesn't deaden the pain of head skinning or render the animal unconscious; it simply allows workers to skin or dismember the animal without getting kicked.”
“Kevin's favorite hug was a group hug," said Holly Scott, a small, young woman with blonde hair and a soft, high-pitched voice. She was testifying at yet another congressional briefing on meat inspection, held in February 1995, and I was attending. "Kevin, Mom, and Dad would encircle with a heartfelt hug around their necks," she continued. "Kevin was a miracle child, because I had major health problems which were complicated by pregnancy. It was very risky to become pregnant; I had to be hospitalized nearly every six weeks."
"It's been over a year now since we have had one of these group hugs from Kevin; or, for that matter, any contact with Kevin." Kevin's mom and grandmom had taken Kevin to the mall to have his portrait shot. He was rewarded for being a good boy for the photographer with a fast-food lunch. "Kevin insisted on having a `hanabur wis cheese on it' that day. The photo I have is a bittersweet reminder of that day. Bitter because just minutes later he took about four bites of food that would end his life. Sweet because it is one of the last images we have of Kevin." “Over the next few weeks, Kevin's body was slowly dismantled, organ by organ.
"The last story I read to Kevin was his favorite bedtime story, Good Night Moon. The pages read, `Good night stars, good night air. Good night noises everywhere.' The next day, Kevin's heart stopped beating. He went to sleep forever."
And thus, Kevin, the only child that Holly Scott would ever have, became just another statistic. He was one of an estimated five hundred victims who now die each year in the United States from E. coli 0157:H7 poisoning. E. coli 0157:H7, known to contaminate meat during sloppy, highspeed slaughter operations, generally takes with it the most vulnerable victims: children and the elderly.”
The CDC calculates that between 6.5 and 81 million cases of food poisoning occur each year in the United States: that is, as many as one out of every three Americans suffers a foodborne illness each year. While most sufferers experience flulike symptoms-diarrhea and vomiting-roughly half a million of those cases require hospitalization. Deaths from food poisoning more than quadrupled during the decade of deregulation from an estimated two thousand in 1984 to roughly nine thousand in 1994. The major source of these infections is foods of animal origin.
My doctor had told me to take it easy and reduce the stress in my life. Friends told me to take some time off and stop working so hard. I headed out of Washington, D.C., for Maryland's Eastern Shore and a day at the beach. Maryland's Eastern Shore is also a major poultry-producing region. I was all too familiar with red-meat operations but not with the poultry industry, where the deregulation of the 1980s had first started. As long as I was passing through, there seemed no good reason not to stop and have a look at a chicken farm.
The "farm" I noticed close to the highway was a warehouse the size of a football field. I pulled off for a closer look. Its huge doors were open for ventilation with giant screens keeping the "broilers"-chickens raised for meat-inside. A young couple came out of the nearby farmhouse. They agreed to show me around. Inside, the air was thick with ammonia and dust. Through watering, stinging eyes I saw what I'd only seen in textbook photos: a sea of forty thousand chickens packed together so tightly in one giant shed they could hardly move, pecking around in their own droppings on the floor. I'd read that big operations like this produce on average about five hundred pounds of dead birds each day. So I wasn't surprised when I noticed that here and there a chicken was lying on its back, motionless. When I pointed to one and asked the grower about it, he said it had died of "flip-over disease." It used to take four months to grow a three-pound bird, he explained, and now, thanks to genetics and growth stimulants, it took only six weeks. That was more than their bodies could handle, he said, and so they flipped over, dead from a heart attack at the ripe old age of one month. Behind the warehouse a huge pile of dead birds swarmed with flies, filling the air with the smell of rot. I didn't make it to the beach that day.
Once dumped from their cages and shackled upside down to an overhead conveyor, chickens begin their journey through the nation's slaughterhouses-twenty-five to thirty million of them every day. Since it's easier to bleed a bird that isn't flapping and struggling, most live birds have their heads dragged through an electrically charged water bath to paralyze-not stun-them. Other industrialized nations require that chickens be rendered unconscious or killed prior to bleeding and scalding, so they won't have to go through those processes conscious.* Here in the United States, however, poultry plants-exempt from the Humane Slaughter Act and still clinging to the industry myth that a dead animal won't bleed properly-keep the stunning current down to about one-tenth of that needed to render a chicken unconscious.t A conveyor then carries the shocked and paralyzed birds to a high-speed circular blade meant to slit their throats but which occasionally misses birds as they rush past at the rate of thousands per hour. After about a minute's bleed-out, the birds are dunked into a scald tank to loosen their feathers, then run through a series of machines with thousands of rubberized "fingers" that literally beat the feathers off their bodies. After their heads and feet are removed and they've been washed, the chickens are rehung on an evisceration line. There, machines automatically cut them open and pull their guts out. After examination by a USDA inspector, it's off to the chill tank, a giant refrigerated vat of water where up to six thousand birds are communally cooled for processing. Today, thanks to automation in the industry, individual poultry plants operating in this fashion can kill and process as many as 500,000 birds per day.
Prior to 1978, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with fecal contamination inside its body cavity. In 1978, citing the problem with the automatic eviscerators, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces from a dangerous contaminant to a "cosmetic blemish" and allow workers simply to rinse it off. The result: inspectors began condemning half as many birds. Consumers ate the rest. The new industry-wide practice of washing feces-contaminated birds, billed as a "sanitation reform," makes birds look wholesome but does little more than embed bacteria more deeply into the animals' tissues. Since 1978, USDA scientists have learned that rinsing a chicken as many as forty times does not remove all the bacteria. Thanks to the USDA's acquiescence to an industry demand, the department's approval of washing poultry would prove to open the floodgates to an uncontrollable sea of contamination.
"With the advent of modern slaughter technologies," said former USDA microbiologist Gerald Kuester, "there are about fifty points during processing where cross-contamination can occur. At the end of the line, the birds are no cleaner than if they had been dipped in a toilet."
“Until the early 1980s, USDA inspectors not only carefully examined each bird for a long list of diseases and condemned those with pathological conditions, they were also responsible for ensuring the removal of contaminants like feces and partially digested food.
"Trimmable conditions" that didn't affect the entire carcass-broken legs, bruises, blisters, scabs, and sores-had to be cut away.
When such defects were found on a bird, the inspector pointed them out to a plant worker, oversaw their removal, and then reinspected the finished product to make sure it complied with stringent inspection standards. If he had to stop the production line to ensure compliance, he stopped the line. It was the inspectors' authority to check for contaminants, stop production, and reexamine the product that restricted the speed at which the line could run.
As if the filth-producing technologies of the late 1970s hadn't already made poultry dangerous enough, when the Reagan administration came into office, the USDA decided the time had come to deregulate. Agency appointees reasoned that by "streamlining" the inspection process by forcing inspectors to concentrate on disease detection alone, inspectors would no longer be stopping the line for a long list of contaminants. By turning contamination control over to company employees-who could be intimidated or fired at will-and by allowing an increased number of "defects"-feces, scabs, inflammations, bruises, blisters-to pass freely into human food channels, the USDA could cut its inspection force and let the poultry industry run its plants at full throttle. In 1983, Streamlined Inspection was formally proposed and implemented as a pilot in some plants."Streamlined Inspection didn't formally affect line speeds," said GAP's Tom Devine. "Rather, at these plants inspectors were stripped of their ability to detect conditions that would justify stopping the line." By removing the greatest obstacle to production-the inspectors' authority-USDA officials could enable the pilot plants to double and even triple their line speeds.
By 1985, when Streamlined Inspection was implemented in poultry plants nationwide, 450 fewer USDA poultry inspectors were examining a billion and a half more birds than ten years earlier.
Inspectors who in the 1960s had examined eighteen birds per minute were now required to inspect up to thirty-five birds per minute-fifteen thousand a day. They were provided roughly one and a half seconds to examine each bird inside and out-theoretically inspecting both the carcass and viscera for twelve different diseases and a host of abnormalities.
“For a highly acclaimed series that ran in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, reporter Scott Bronstein conducted interviews with eighty-four USDA poultry inspectors from thirty-seven plants, many of whom voiced the extreme frustration they experienced in trying to enforce the law. Every week, Bronstein wrote, millions of chickens "leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers."
In addition, GAP obtained affidavits from many poultry workers and inspectors documenting the conditions in their plants. Former Perdue worker Donna Bazemore twice sub mitted testimony to Congress on conditions in poultry plants.
"The plants are filthy," she reported in her first testimony:
The floors are covered with grease, fat, sand, and roaches. Bugs are up and down the sides of the walls. Some of the flying roaches were huge, up to four and five inches long. We'd joke that you could put a collar on them and walk them.... There are flies all around, including big blowflies. Employees are constantly chewing and spitting out snuff and tobacco on the floor.”There is so much fecal contamination on the floor from chickens that it kept getting into one worker's boots and burned his feet so badly his toenails had to be amputated.
The waste is not always from the chickens. The company won't allow workers to leave the line when they have to go to the bathroom.... Usually they just suffer and put a strain on their bodies, but sometimes they have to relieve themselves on the floor.
The problems are just as bad in the slaughter process [as they are in the plants generally]. After they are hung, sometimes the chickens fall off into the drain that runs down the middle of the line. This is where roaches, intestines, diseased parts, fecal contamination, and blood are washed down. Workers get sick to their stomachs into the drain. The drain is a lot less sanitary than anybody's toilet. That doesn't seem to matter, though. The Perdue supervisors told us to take the fallen chickens out of the drain and send them back down the line.”
“A recent GAP investigation into conditions in six poultry plants in North Carolina turned up similar conditions.
"There were lots of rats, snakes, cockroaches, and maggots in the plant," one worker said. "I saw flies on the chicken as it went down the line and 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, "I personally have seen rotten meat-you can tell by the odor. This 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."
One employee told a USDA inspector that "hundreds of maggots were in the clothes hamper where our smocks were kept." Another worker, in the department where chicken bones were ground up and processed into chicken franks and bologna, reported that "almost continuously, the bones had an awful, foul odor. Sometimes they came from other plants and had been sitting for days. Often there were maggots on them. These bones were never cleaned off and so the maggots were ground up with everything else and remained in the final product.”
Next I visited an egg factory. This also looked nothing like a traditional farm. Inside the three huge warehouses were rows of cages four tiers high. These buildings housed 375,000 birds, crammed four to a cage with floor space measuring a foot by a foot and a half. Living on sloping wire floors, so that the eggs roll out to a conveyor belt, with the wire cutting into their feet, the hens' legs were deformed and their feet covered with blisters and sores. I remembered seeing a demonstration where a battery (caged) hen was released and placed on solid ground. The bird was so crippled, she couldn't even stand. As is typical throughout the egg industry, the birds at this operation couldn't stretch their wings or even sit comfortably to lay their eggs. Watching them struggle for cage space, it became clear why hatchery workers sear off chicks' beaksthey would resort to anything to prevent birds kept under these conditions from pecking each other to death. As it was, many of the birds were raw and bloody and had few feathers left. And, because the worker who picks the dead hens out of the cages hadn't yet made his morning rounds, birds that had been flattened-trampled to death by their cell mates-were still littering the floors of their cages.
“A rat came out of the box room and ran across the floor," reads one inspector's affidavit.
The inspector shut down the line after the rat ran across her foot. At that point all the boxes should have been inspected for any more rats as well as for droppings that aren't supposed to be mixed in with the beef. But the veterinarian just laughed, had the floor hosed down, and allowed the line to be turned back on in five to ten minutes. After that, hunting and killing rats turned into something between sport and a bad joke for the inspectors. Company employees told us that rats were all over the coolers at night, running on top of meat and gnawing at it. We saw fecal contamination get through-up to one-foot smears-as well as flukes [liver parasites], grubs [wormlike fly larvae that burrow into the cow's skin and work their way through the animal's body], abscesses [encapsulated infections filled with pus], [hide] hair, and ingesta [partially digested food found in the stomach or esophagus].
"You're telling me the meat is safe," said the ABC correspondent. "How much fecal matter is allowable in our meat?"
"I'm not sure," replied the USDA official."I don't have the answer to that. I'll have to ask our experts."
“As a last-ditch effort at damage control, the USDA convened a panel of industry experts and took them on a tour of the pilot plants. USDA meat inspector David Carney tagged along with the review team and explained in an affidavit what he saw:
I want to make a record of the bureaucratic games I witnessed as a union observer in the USDA's recent management review. What I saw was a lavish, no-holds-barred hard sell of Streamlined Inspection deregulation by agency management to the consultants on the review team. The USDA turned the review into a big-budget advertising blitz instead of a serious effort to make informed policy choices. They acted like used-car salesmen for Streamlined Inspection.
At the pilot plants we visited, more carcasses were contaminated with more filth than at plants under normal federal inspection coverage. For example, there was more hair, ingesta, fecal stains, and pieces of bone. There were more bruises, some up to the size of a basketball. Streamlined "wholesome" also included many more pizzles-cattle penises -attached to the inner sides of meat that goes into steaks.”
We used to trim the shit off the meat. Then we washed the shit off the meat. Now the consumer eats the shit off the meat. -David Carney, USDA Meat Inspector
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