One way that nasty bacterial strains from factory farms make it to "the community"--i.e., you. Jez Page/Flickr
The
specter of "pink slime"—pureed, defatted, and ammonia-laced
slaughterhouse scraps—has caused quite the uproar over the past six
weeks. (The latest: Propublica has a great
explainer
on pink slime and other filler products.) The current fixation on pink
slime may well lead to the demise of the product; already, supermarket
and fast-food chains and school cafeterias are opting to stop adding the
stuff into their burger mixes. The company's maker, Beef Products
International, has had to temporarily
shut down three of its four plants in response to collapsing demand, which doesn't augur well for the company's long-term health.
But I'm wondering if focusing on the ew-gross aspects of "lean,
finely textured beef" (as the industry calls it) doesn't miss the bigger
picture, which is that the meat industry's very business model is
deeply gross. Even if pink slime is purged from the face of the earth,
the system that produces our meat and related products (eggs, milk)
won't be fundamentally changed. A while back, I
identified
something about meat production that's "even grosser than pink
slime"—proposed new rules that would privatize inspection at poultry
slaughterhouses while dramatically speeding up kill lines. Here are four
more.
1. "Rodents on egg conveyor belts."
Want to see for yourself what it is like inside a teeming livestock
confinements—or at least read an account from a journalist who's been
inside one? Good luck. The meat industry strictly protects its
facilities from public view. That's why animal-welfare groups have taken
to sneaking camera-toting undercover agents into facilities posing as
employees. Over and over again, what they record is horrific. The
latest: An undercover Humane Society of the United States
investigation found stomach-turning conditions at a facility run by Pennsylvania egg giant Kreider Farms. Here are some highlights:
• Rodents on egg conveyor belts
• Rotting corpses in cages with hens laying eggs for human consumption
• Hens stuck by their heads, legs and wings in cage wires
• Mummified hen carcasses in cages
• Overcrowding of hens in cages that only provide 54-58 square inches
[less than 8 inches by eight inches] of living space per hen (well below
the national average for egg-laying hens)
• Flies in barns so thick that the investigator had to scrape off his boots after walking down each aisle
• Piles of dead hens on floors of barns
• Dead flies in hens’ feeding troughs
• Barns so dark that workers needed head lamps and flashlights
• Ammonia levels so high that workers often had to wear masks
• Manure and eggs from some barns tested positive for salmonella
• Each worker is tasked with overseeing more than 100,000 animals.
There is nothing unusual about what the Humane Society found at
Kreider. Last year, an enormous Iowa-based egg producer caused a
salmonella outbreak by releasing more than half a billion tainted eggs.
It was only after the fact that the FDA, which is supposed to oversee
the egg industry, took
a hard look at the company's operations. The resulting
report
reads an awful lot like the Humane Society's recent one. A picture
emerges of the company's egg-laying facilities as salmonella-ridden,
dilapidated hovels characterized by rodent infestations, flies, and,
everywhere, feces—both from the laying hens themselves and from wild
birds scrounging for free feed.
Other investigations by animal-welfare groups have shown similar conditions at
hog and
cow confinements.
2. Chickens on sex hormones. What sort of additives
is the livestock industry feeding the billions of creatures in its
cages? Hard to say, because feed rations are a tightly guarded trade
secret. So researchers at Johns Hopkins recently took a backdoor route
to getting information on feeding practices: they analyzed the
ground-up feathers of post-slaughter factory-farmed chickens (a product
known as "feather meal"), on the principle that what birds eat gets
taken up by their feathers. (Abstract
here.)
The researchers analyzed 12 samples—10 from the US, two from China.
First, the headline finding: Two of the US samples contained something
called norgestimate, which the study disturbingly calls a "sex
hormone." The researchers found a range of other pharmaceuticals in the
feathers as well. Ten of 12 samples contained caffeine, and the same
number showed acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. Four US
samples contained diphenhydramin, active ingredient of Benadryl. Both
Chinese samples contained the antidepressant fluoxetine, aka, Prozac.
Prozac? What can all of this mean? It's not hard to
conjecture that factory-farm operators dose birds with caffeine to
keep them awake and eating as long as possible—the better to fatten
them up for slaughter—and then hitting them with painkillers and
antihistamines to calm them down for needed rest. (The sex hormone
norgestimate, the authors report, is used to reduce anxiety in birds.)
Then there's the antibiotics. It's not surprising that all 12 samples
contained traces of at least two and as many as 10 different
antibiotics. We know that the
livestock industry gobbles up 80 percent of the antibiotics consumed in the US,
which is a pretty gross fact in and of itself. The weird part is that 6
of the ten US samples contained a class of antibiotics that have been
banned in poultry production since 2005—suggesting that some poultry
producers may be feeding their birds products that have been prohibited
by the FDA. If producers really are flouting the FDA's mandatory
rules, that's sobering news, given that
the agency is crossing its fingers that the industry will comply with its new "voluntary" set of antibiotics guidelines.
The authors say that the industry generates 4 billion pounds of
ground-up feathers each year. What happens to it all, and all of the
weird pharmaceuticals it contains? According to the authors, a
significant portion of it gets put into livestock feed—for pigs, cows,
fish, and even, yes, chickens. It also ends up on cropland as
fertilizer.
3. Flies and cockroaches carrying antibiotic-resistant pathogens from factory farms to surrounding towns.
I've written a lot about how the meat available at supermarkets
routinely carries bacteria resistant to a range of antibiotics—and how
that uncomfortable fact occasionally leads to deadly outbreaks, like one
last year involving a
Cargill plant in Arkansas that sent out 36 million pounds of turkey tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella.
Well, there's another way bacteria strains make their way from factory
farms to what public-health officials call "the community" (i.e.,
potentially,
you): through the cockroaches and flies drawn to the vast amounts of manure produced on factory farms. For a
paper published last year in the journal
Microbiology,
researchers from North Carolina State and Kansas State universities
took one for the team — i.e., the public. They did something few of us
would want to do: rounded up common flies and roaches hanging around
factory hog farms, and tested them to see what kinds of bacteria they
were harboring.
Their finding? More than 90 percent of the insects sampled carried
forms of the bacteria Enterococci that are resistant to at least one
common antibiotic, and often more than one. In a
press release, study coauthor Coby Schal, entomology professor at NC State, put the situation like this:
The big concern is not that humans will acquire drug-resistant
bacteria from their properly cooked bacon or sausage, but rather that
the bacteria will be transferred to humans from the common pests that
live with pigs and then move in with us.
4. Slaughterhouse workers sometimes get weird brain disorders along with their crap wages. In a
long and devastating Mother Jones article last summer,
Ted Genoways described the plight of workers at the "head table" of a
factory-scale pig-processing plant. Not only did they come down with a
strange brain condition, apparently as a consequence of breathing in
pulverized pig brains, but they also had to endure the evasions of their
employer, Hormel, in its effort to escape liability.
The story's brain angle is spectacular, but the broader narrative
Genoways lays out is all too routine. In a single long piece, Genoways
lays out the crude history of US meat over the past 80 years. We get the
unionization of the kill floor in the wake of Sinclair's
The Jungle,
the post-war emergence of meat packing as a proper middle-class job,
the fierce anti-union backlash of the '70s, followed by
corporatization, scaling up, plunging wages, and then, well, all manner
of hell breaking loose, graphically documented by Genoways.
By 2005, things had gotten so dire for meat-packing workers that
Human Rights Watch—typically on the lookout for atrocities in war
zones—saw fit to issue a
scathing report on their plight. The report's title says it all: "Blood, Sweat, and Fear." Here's a taste:
Constant fear and risk is another feature of meat and poultry labor.
Meatpacking work has extraordinarily high rates of injury. Workers
injured on the job may then face dismissal. Workers risk losing their
jobs when they exercise their rights to organize and bargain
collectively in an attempt to improve working conditions. And immigrant
workers—an increasing percentage of the workforce in the industry—are
particularly at risk. Language difficulties often prevent them from
being aware of their rights under the law and of specific hazards in
their work. Immigrant workers who are undocumented, as many are, risk
deportation if they seek to organize and to improve conditions.
For their trouble, meatpacking workers earn median annual income of $24,190, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics—barely above the
poverty line for a family of four.
So, yes, pink slime is gross stuff. Call me crazy, but I prefer my
burgers without added ammonia. But it's not even close to the grossest
thing about our meat-production system—far from it.
burgers meatloaf
bologna hot dogs
taco filling meatballs