CHAPTER 13

A DISASSEMBLY PLANT

Picture in your mind the vehicle assembly plant at the Ford Rouge Center in Dearborn, Michigan. Raw materials, components, and parts flow in – iron ore from Upper Michigan and Minnesota, rubber from Brazil, and countless components from all over the world. Metal, glass, textiles, leathers, plastics, paints, and thousands of other materials go into the making of an automobile. They all funnel into the various parts of the complex – engine, stamping, frame, body, tool and die, paint shop, and assembly plants – and a Ford F-150 pickup truck dives out the other end.

Now run that picture in reverse and you will see metaphorically what goes on at any large meat-packing plant in Colorado, Montana, Kansas, Alberta, or Ontario. Cattle go in one end and hundreds of cuts of beef, thousands of pounds of hamburger, and tens of thousands of non-food products ranging from fertilizers to drugs come out the other end.

Prior to the 1880s, the North American meat industry was small and fragmented. Only the wealthy ate meat on a regular basis. Most people’s consumption of meat was restricted to special events when an old cow or sheep was slaughtered and eaten.

Before refrigeration, an animal that had been slaughtered had to be eaten quickly before it spoiled, so it was impossible to distribute the meat widely. As a result, only one family would eat each animal, with perhaps limited distribution to local people.

The industrial revolution produced rapid economic growth by the end of the nineteenth century – a growth fed in large measure by beef. The economic boom resulted in a large segment of the population becoming urbanized and wealthy enough to include meat as a regular part of their diet.1

This fact and the advent of refrigeration led to the birth of the modern meat-packing industry. Refrigeration allowed for meat to be stored and shipped, so no longer was it necessary for a slaughtered animal to be consumed quickly.

The demands made on the Union in the American Civil War for foodstuffs and other goods for troops in the field helped to spark the rise of Chicago as a great metropolis, the city immortalized by Carl Sandburg in his poem, “Chicago.”

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler.

In 1864, a consortium of nine railroad companies began work on what was to be one of the largest industrial structures in the world, the Union Stock Yards in Chicago. They paid $100,000 for 320 acres of swampy land in southwest Chicago. Along with private investors, the railroad companies then provided another $1.6 million to develop the stockyards. By 1900, this complex occupied 475 acres – almost one square mile – and contained within it more than fifty miles of roads, offices, hotels, restaurants, and saloons.

A huge labyrinth of 2,300 livestock pens held up to 200 horses, 21,000 cattle, 22,000 sheep, and 75,000 hogs.2 Along with the livestock pens were the giant meat-packing plants owned by rivals Armour and Swift. To service the needs of the packing houses, 130 miles of railroad track circled the perimeter of the complex. The yards pumped more than half a million gallons of fresh water every day from the Chicago River, and returned so much manure and waste that the river downstream from the complex became known as “Bubbly Creek.” Later, they drilled two artesian wells, each more than one thousand feet deep, to service the area.3

At the turn of the century, the U.S. meat-packing industry employed 68,500 workers (including 3,000 women and 1,700 children).4 More than 25,000 of them worked in Chicago. At that time Chicago produced 82 per cent of the meat consumed in the United States. Here, millions of animals were converted into meat and associated by-products.

Thousands of employees spent their days slaughtering and disassembling the animals. A desire to speed up the business of converting pigs and cows into pork and beef helped to stimulate the birth of the assembly line.

Before the advent of the assembly line, a steer would be taken into the slaughterhouse, stunned by a hammer blow to the head, then stabbed and allowed to bleed out onto the floor. Workers then wrestled the carcass onto a frame, where a butcher would cut it up. From the time a cow entered the slaughterhouse until the butcher began his work took about fifteen minutes and required three men. This process proved too slow for the huge numbers of animals that were arriving every day.

Shortly after the union yards were opened, the owners hit upon a radical new idea for streamlining the operation – the conveyer belt. Now cattle were stunned in the usual manner, but then a “shackler” would fasten a chain around the animal’s rear legs and hoist it up on a moving chain powered by a steam engine. One shackler could hoist seventy animals every minute. At the first station, the animal’s throat was slit, permitting the blood to flow out as it moved down the line. The task of butchering was broken down into a multitude of simple repetitive steps. One person would cut off the head, while the next removed the hooves and tail. The next might gut the animal and remove all the internal organs. Skinners removed the hide. As the animal moved along on the chain it would be quickly and efficiently dissembled.

As the speed of disassembly increased, so labour costs fell. Unskilled workers needed little training to perform their allotted task. Low-paid labourers, rather than higher-paid butchers, could butcher the animals.

Henry Ford credited, at least in part, his inspiration for the moving automobile assembly line to the overhead trolley that had been developed by the meat-packers.5 (Ransom Eli Olds, founder of the Olds Motor Works in Detroit, actually built the first stationary automobile assembly line, but Ford improved on the idea by installing a conveyor belt.)

Working in a meat-packing plant must have been as close as anyone has come to hell on earth. Immediately on entry, workers and visitors alike would find all their faculties simultaneously assailed. First was the noise – added to the din of the steam engines were the mechanical sounds of the chain clanking and the bellows of terrified cows who had yet to be stunned or those that had not been properly stunned. At the same time, the smell of cattle and pig excrement and the smell of blood were overwhelming. Because these plants were not air-conditioned, the heat was terrible. Men wielded sharp knives and saws while standing on floors slippery with blood and entrails, all the while trying to keep pace with a line that never stopped.

Regrettably, conditions remain abysmal in most packing plants today. In January 2000, Nebraska Lieutenant Governor David Maurstad reported on working conditions in meat-packing plants in his state. In a model of understatement, he notes that:

The conditions inherent to meat packing plants create an environment where the work is physically demanding and aesthetically unpleasant. Employees are exposed to significant hazards such as falls, noise, cuts and amputations as well as repetitive motion disorders, back injuries, and other ergonomically related hazards.6

It is no wonder that this industry had and continues to have, along with a high labour turnover rate, one of the worst safety records of any industry in the United States.7

CONSPIRACY, CONSOLIDATION, AND CONTROL

Almost as soon as the Chicago yards were opened and the assembly-line system initiated, the five companies that controlled the stockyards entered into a conspiracy to control the entire industry. So complete was their hold on the meat-packing industry that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate their affairs.

William Colver chaired the investigation. On July 3, 1918, the committee presented its findings and recommendations in a letter to President Wilson. This letter denounced the meat-packers unreservedly. Having been asked whether “monopolies, controls, trusts, combinations, conspiracies, or restraints of trade out of harmony with the law, and public interest” existed, the FTC reported that “we have found conclusive evidence that warrants an unqualified affirmative.” The report continued:

It appears that the five great packing concerns of the country – Swift, Armour, Morris, Cudahy, and Wilson – have attained such a dominant position that they control at will the market in which they sell their products, and hold the fortunes of their competitors in their hands.

Not only is the business of gathering, preparing, and selling meat products in their control, but an almost countless number of by-product industries are similarly dominated; and not content with reaching out for mastery as to commodities which substitute for meat and its by-products, they have invaded allied industries and even unrelated ones.… If these five great concerns owned no packing plants and killed no cattle and still retained control of the instruments of transportation, of marketing and of storage, their position would not be less strong than it is.

The producer of livestock is at the mercy of these five companies because they control the market and the marketing facilities and to some extent the rolling stock which transports the product to the market.

The competitors of these five concerns are at their mercy because of the control of the market places, storage facilities, and the refrigeration cars for distribution.

The consumer of meat products is at the mercy of these five because both producer and competitor are helpless to bring relief …

Out of the masses of information in our hands, one fact stands out with all possible emphasis. The small dominant group of American meat packers is now international in their activities, while remaining American in their identity. Blame which now attaches to them for their practices abroad as well as at home inevitably will attach to our country if the practices continue.8

The committee outlined several reforms as to how this situation could be remedied.

Over the next eighty years, the U.S. Government has repeatedly attempted to increase competition in the meat industry. But most of these attempts have resulted in little more than a slap on the wrist for the industry.

It is a fact that American companies produce the cheapest food in the world. (The term cheapest here means that Americans pay less of their annual income for food than almost any country in the world.) And this fact may partly explain government complaisance. Furthermore, from a public-health perspective, there are remarkably few poisonings related to processed food in the United States. The government attitude seems to endorse the idea that while a few corporations may exercise control over the food supply, well, they’re doing a good job. Furthermore, the United States produces almost one-quarter of all the beef in the world – a global giant in beef production, unmatched by any other country.

Currently in the U.S. the largest four companies account for 70 to 80 per cent of the total U.S. market. There has also been a massive consolidation and enlargement of individual cattle slaughter plants. Between 1995 and 2000, the total number of facilities slaughtering cattle declined by 98 (12 per cent), while the numbers of animals killed at the largest-volume facilities increased. In 2000, out of a total of 738 cattle slaughter facilities, 16 plants each killed more than one million animals per year.9 This represents an enormous number of animals. If these plants operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, each plant will be slaughtering an average of 2,750 animals a day, 115 an hour, or 2 per minute. (National Beef slaughters 390 animals every hour, a rate that is not unusual in the U.S.10) These 16 plants slaughter more than 70 per cent of the cattle destined for meat in the entire United States.11

In addition, the same four large companies that control the slaughter of cattle also control a very large segment of the grain sector, and thus also control the cattle feed industry.

William Heffernan, professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri, likens the food system to an hourglass “in which farm commodities produced by thousands of farmers must pass through the narrow part of the glass that is analogous to the few firms that control the processing of the commodities before the food is distributed to millions of people in this and other countries.” He adds, “Increasingly, the major decisions in the food system are being made by an ever-declining number of firms.… They are primarily concerned with maximizing their profits. That is the purpose of such corporations.”12

Indeed, the largest of these transnational agri-business firms, Tyson Foods, boasts pro forma revenues nearing $25 billion, with 120,000 “team members” in more than 300 facilities and offices in 32 U.S. states and 22 countries from Canada to Mexico, England, Ireland, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and Taiwan. The world’s largest processor and marketer of beef, chicken, and pork products, Tyson Foods owns IBP, formerly Iowa Beef Processors, which is the world’s largest supplier of beef and pork, as well as allied products, such as tanned hides used to make leather.13

Tyson and the other top three U.S. beef packers, ConAgra, Cargill (owner of Excel Corporation), and Farmland National Beef Packing Company, control 81 per cent of the market. Similarly a handful of producers dominate other sectors of the food industry, with many of the same names revealed as the key players across different sectors such as beef and pork packing, poultry, animal feed, grain terminals, corn exports, soybean exports, flour milling, soybean crushing, and ethanol production.

Because grain traders and processors own some of the largest livestock feeding and slaughter operations, we end up with what is called a “closed, vertically integrated market.” The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy explains:

In a vertically integrated market, the different stages of production – from corn to the crushing plant to generate animal feed, high fructose corn syrup and ethanol, to the feeding of cattle on a feeding lot – are internal to a company’s operation. There is no price discovery at the different stages of production, meaning no competition to indicate what prices for different operations should be.14

But integration doesn’t end here. Rendering facilities process byproducts such as offal (entrails and internal organs), bone, blood, and other material into fat and protein products for feed and industrial uses. In the past, most rendering facilities operated independently, but the continuing trend is toward increasing volumes processed by packer/renderers. Because many of the largest meat packers (especially in poultry) are integrated right from feed manufacturing and livestock production all the way through slaughter and distribution, the animal proteins produced in their own rendering facilities are sometimes used in their own feed rations.

What does all this mean to our ability to control prion diseases? This great concentration and integration of industry may serve to magnify the chance of widespread distribution of a relatively rare event. Let us suppose that a single prion-affected cow enters a packing plant with no obvious symptoms of disease. Material from this cow could go not only into beef for human consumption (conceivably being incorporated into thousands of pounds of ground meat for hamburgers) but also to the rendering plant attached to the slaughterhouse and to the feed made with material from the rendering plant. Of course, as a we learn more about the dangers inherent in prion diseases, the concentration and integration of the industry may also make it possible to implement safeguards quickly and efficently.

FATTENED FOR SLAUGHTER: WITH FEATHERS, GARBAGE, AND MANURE

A newborn calf weighs about 80 pounds. By the time it goes to slaughter, the average cow weighs about 1,213 pounds (up from 1,187 pounds in 1995). What has changed over the last hundred years is the length of time it takes for a calf to put on that additional 1,133 pounds. The methods of feeding and fattening cattle have undergone a complete transformation. Back when cattle roamed the vast pasturelands of North America, they pretty much kept their own schedule of feeding and fattening. No longer. A fourth-generation cattle rancher quoted in the New York Times says, “In my grandfather’s day, steers were 4 or 5 years old at slaughter. In the 50’s when my father was ranching, it was 2 or 3. Now we get there at 14 to 16 months.”15

Beef processors have almost universally adopted the feedlot system of “finishing” cattle. Finishing refers to the large weight gain that cows undergo between the ages of about eight months and fifteen months. This time is spent in huge penned enclosures with hundreds or thousands of other cattle being fed a scientifically formulated food designed to promote the maximum weight gain in the shortest possible time. Once in the finishing process, cows gain about three and a half pounds every day. Not only is this an efficient and economic method of feeding cattle, it also produces a uniform and somewhat fatty beef.

Because meat is mainly protein, specialists in animal nutrition recognized very early that one of the keys to rapid weight gain was the amount of protein in the animal’s diet. In 1939, Roscoe Snapp, professor of animal science at the University of Illinois, noted the “need of the animal body for the complex organic compounds called proteins. The important thing about proteins is that they contain nitrogen, an element indispensable to all animal life.… As a matter of fact, the lean portions of the body, the skin and its modifications, and the connective tissues consist almost entirely of protein materials, which have been elaborately built up from the protein stuffs consumed by the animal.”16

Unfortunately, corn delivers only about 9 per cent protein while grasses such as alfalfa contain about 18 per cent protein. Other vegetable-derived foodstuffs such as hay, or various grain stuffs that have traditionally made up the bulk of cattle feed, all are in the range of 10 to 20 per cent protein. From the earliest days of feeding cattle the search was on for an inexpensive high-protein feed, or at least a food supplement.

U.S. farmers began forcing cows to become cannibals in the early 1940s. A 1947 handbook on the feeding of beef cattle instructed farmers that meat scraps and products from rendering plants “are satisfactory protein supplements for beef cattle.”

Sometimes cattle may not like meat scraps or tankage at first, but after several days they will generally eat the small amount that is needed to balance a ration. It is best to accustom a cow to these feeds gradually by mixing a small proportion at the start with better-liked feeds.17

Perhaps the cows were trying to tell their feeders something.

In the search for increased usable protein to be included in feed, no substance was off limits, including “recycled” cow manure and chicken manure as food for cows. In 1972, governments expressed concern about the potential environmental hazard presented by the huge quantities of manure from feedlots. At that time, U.S. farm animals produced an estimated 112 million tons of manure dry matter per year (obviously much heavier when fresh), while Canadian animals produced 24 million tons. These two problems – increasing protein in feeds and getting rid of manure – taken together suggested a brilliant solution.

Animal nutritionists suggested that animals, especially ruminants, could be placed in “an improved competitive position for supplying an even greater part of the world’s future protein needs.” (A ruminant animal has four stomachs; ruminants include cattle, sheep, goats, deer, elk, and bison. This proposal targeted cattle.) To that end, they promoted “animal recycle systems for utilizing undigested feed nutrients and by-products of digestion and metabolism.” In plain English, it would make great economic sense if, rather than spreading cow manure on grass and then using the grass for feed, we can skip the middle step, i.e., grass, and feed the manure directly to the cattle. If they could find a way of doing this cheaply, they would have a winner on their hands.18

If this proposal makes you feel queasy, you have only to look at the ingredients currently used in formulating cattle feed. Among the more than 175 items, we find dried cattle manure with a protein content of 17 per cent, blood meal, hydrolyzed feather meal, hydrolyzed animal hair, cooked municipal garbage, ground limestone, dried poultry manure, and numerous chemicals such as urea, sodium triolyphos, and monoammonium phosphate. Of all of these, blood meal with 80 per cent protein is one of the most desirable, followed by meat meal at 55 per cent.19 We know where manure comes from, but what is the source for feather meal, or blood and meat meal? These are products of a huge – and very low-profile – sector, the rendering industry.