Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

A few more musings prompted by my recent reading of Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation." (For earlier musings, click here and here.)

In France in the mid-'70s, I attended opening-day ceremonies at a brand-new slaughterhouse. I was doing an internship with the French national energy company. We'd been invited because the company had played a role in setting up the gas and electricity for the plant. When I was offered the chance to attend the ceremonies, I hesitated for a few seconds. I don't generally do well with blood ... Would a visit make me ill? ... Perhaps it would leave me with nightmares? ... But I was also young, arrogant, and curious. And when would I ever get a similar chance? Off we headed.

Alongside executives and officials, I toured the shiney, empty plant (workers stood in their work positions as we passed by) and applauded as ribbons were cut. Then I followed the first pigs through the slaughtering process.

It was a gruesome spectacle. The beasts were herded and prodded from an outdoor pen through a kind of fenced funnel and into the slaughterhouse. A guy at a gate released them one at a time. The next worker shot a bolt into the beast's head. The next hooked a chain around its back ankles, and the cadaver was hauled into the air, to be swung along from a kind of from-the-ceiling-down assembly line. Lickity-split, another worker slit the pig's throat. As the pig sailed along towards further processing, ruby-red blood drained out of it into a stainless-steel trough-and-drain beneath.

The order of subsequent events jumbles in my memory. I recall that I was struck by how fast and efficient the process was. I also recall that I was indeed fighting queasiness. At one early point, the pig passed through a kind of miniature carwash. It was flamed and flayed in other machines until bristles and hairs were gone.

I can't remember when the head came off -- you'd think I'd have a recollection of such a moment, but I don't. I recall some other moments vividly, though. The removal of the trotters was, for some reason, especially hard to watch. But the big showpiece came when a worker slit the pig's belly open. The next worker reached inside and pulled a big armful of slimey, warm guts out onto some kind of steel pan.

Eventually the creature was flayed, gutted, dismembered, cut, sliced, and trimmed, and its parts were wrapped in plastic and ready for shipping. Executives, officials, and visitors congratulated each other, shook hands, and went their separate ways. The pigs kept filing into the warehouse. The workers continued slicing, stabbing, scooping ...

Many years later, I spent an afternoon on an industrial farm in a dry part of the American west. It was, of course, about a billionth as gruesome an experience as visiting a slaughterhouse. Still.

The boss proudly gave me a tour of his business. He showed me carrot seeds. He showed me soil. He seemed proud of the fact that it was unpromising; in fact, it seemed about as fertile as crumbled-up styrofoam. He showed me water, which had been diverted to his farm from very far away. He showed me pesticides and fertilizer, both derived from petroleum. Combine 'em together with sun, and -- Well, it was all very scientific, it gave him a lot of professional satisfaction, and it resulted in tons of market-competitive carrots. He beamed, pulled a carrot out of the fertilizer- and pesticide-laced sand, brushed it off, and handed the orange root to me. I thanked him and ate it. It tasted like a carrot.

I don't mean to make too much of either of these minor personal adventures, and even self-dramatizing MBlowhard wouldn't say that they were defining moments in my life. I'm also not someone who's prone to play too-pure-for-life. I know perfectly well that if I agonized too much about the ways many products come into being, I'd have no choice but to become a hermit. And I do enjoy living in the world.

All that said, I did find my modest visits to food-production-land eye-opening. At the slaughterhouse, I was impressed by how quickly a living mammal can be transformed into grocery-store-style food. But I also found it impossible not to feel sympathy for the pigs, who were clearly not enjoying their best day. I also found it impossible not to feel sympathy for the slaughterhouse workers. Sure, yes, thank you very much: They were probably glad to be employed. But would anyone expect them to be all that happy to be spending their working lives dismembering freshly-killed mammals, or scooping warm, bloody guts out of passing pig carcasses?

As time passed after my slaughterhouse visit, I came to eat less and less meat. I had indeed spent the couple of hours at the slaughterhouse in a strange state: dreamlike, transfixed, horrified. Even today, that afternoon seems more like a dream I can't shake than like most of my memories. In any case, within a few years, I realized that I'd become a de facto vegetarian, so I made it official. I remained one for about fifteen years. Even today when I eat meat it's with some appreciation for how the food came to wind up on the plate before me.

As for the carrots: My fellow-feeling is much more attenuated by the time it reaches carrots. Even so, that particular visit made its impact too. Pesticides, fertilizer, water, and sun: that's all those carrots grew up on. Where was the decaying-matter-style food? I was left wondering whether a child could grow up on nothing but protein powder, water, and vitamins. Perhaps it could -- but would we think it a good idea?

Ever since my factory-farm visit, I've preferred consuming "organic" produce. I'm no fanatic about this. I'm a big-city guy who eats at restaurants and with friends a lot of the time. But still: You can talk as much science-style sense to me as you wish. I simply prefer to eat carrots that grew into carrothood in real soil, deriving their nutrients from non-petroleum-based, even "organic" matter.

As for people who don't make much of the food question, well, it's their right, of course. Lydia McGrew of Right Reason (and many critics of the Crunchy Con thang generally) seems to feel that how and what you choose to eat are questions of trivial importance. I'm unable to go along with that judgment. Where my own nourishment is concerned, I'd rather take some care. Where public health is concerned, I can think of few fields where decent regulation and policing seem as important. Where the production of food is concerned: Hey, big-big money and big-big power are at stake, billions of animal lives hang in the balance, and the well-being, safety, and health of all of us are involved. These considerations don't total up to anything minor in my calculus.

Nuts though many in the animal-rights world are, I'm unable to be entirely dismissive of all of their arguments. (As for their extremism: Well, I don't have to share it, do it? Besides, it's a simple fact of life that crusaders are often going to be a little nuts. But some of them serve worthwhile purposes: They alert us to matters we'd otherwise overlook. Perhaps a flourishing culture needs some kooks and nuts. But perhaps a flourishing culture also needs to know how to take them.) The look in those pigs' eyes has stayed with me for more than three decades, as has the general atmosphere of fear, blood, and death. (And this was apparently, I was told, one of France's nicer slaughterhouses!) In any case, I accept some of what the animal-rights people say. At a minimum: If we're going to raise and slaughter millions upon millions of beasts in order to feed ourselves on them, I'd certainly prefer that we do it more respectfully rather than less. They're giving up their lives to feed us, after all. Shouldn't we show a little decency and gratitude?

I'm not by any means dismissive of people concerned about high-tech, industrial-style agriculture either. Let's hear it for big yields and for filling the stomachs of the masses, of course. But I simply don't find it appetizing to eat a veggie that is nothing but seed-plus-water-plus-sun-plus-petroleum-products. The combo may "work" in the sense of resulting in something veggie-like. But the idea of it turns my stomach. I didn't have a good feeling eating the carrot I was handed, and I'd rather avoid such carrots generally.

As for the "feelings" thing ... Well, of course the feelings end of things is often overemphasized these days. Still, all other debates aside for a second or two: Isn't "having a good feeling about it" a big and basic part of eating? If you feel icky about what's on your plate, you may not even wind up eating it. (Incidentally, if you eat Frankenfood and you have a good feeling about the whole process, that's fine with me.) But can anyone reasonably claim that, where eating is concerned, the psychological (ie., icky/appetizing) element isn't important? And once our fortunes have ascended past the struggling-with-starvation level, why shouldn't we fuss over these issues? Which, to my mind, raises interesting questions about aesthetics. Perhaps the "aesthetics" side of life isn't always as inessential or as optional as Americans sometimes like to make it out to be.

Some semi-relevant facts and figures from Eric Schlosser:

• Working in a slaughterhouse is one of the most, if not the most, dangerous job in America. The injury rate in a slaughterhouse is three times higher than in a typical factory. One in three slaughterhouse workers is injured on the job every year, despite wearing suits of chain mail meant to protect them from blades and knives.

• Repetitive-stress injury rates are 35 times higher among slaughterhouse workers than they among average workers.

• A big meat processing plant can turn out 800,000 pounds of chopped beef a day. The flesh of dozens of different cattle may turn up in a single hamburger patty.

• In Schlosser's opinion, the worst job in America is the job of cleaning up the slaughterhouse at the end of the day. This is done by outside crews. They're dressed in protective clothing. They're spraying hot water laced with chlorine. They're clambering up and over lots of industrial machinery in slippery conditions. They're often shin-deep in blood and guts. And then they return and do the job all over again the next night.

• The American-industrial way of raising and processing veggies and meat has, as we all know, resulted in a lot of bland or tasteless food. As a consequence, food producers jazz many of their products up with lab-synthesized flavors. Much of the taste and aroma of American fast food -- ie., the additives that make our taste buds perk up -- is now manufactured at a series of large chemical plants off the New Jersey Turnpike.

• In recent decades, American meat plants have revved production rates up to amazingly high levels. A Chicago-style meatpacking plant in 1900 slaughtered 50 cattle an hour. In the early 1980s, advanced meatpacking plants slaughtered 175 cattle an hour. Today, the rate is up to 400 an hour.

• There's a close relationship between slaughter-rates and two other things: worker injuries and tainted meat products. Past a certain point, the faster you slaughter cattle, the more workers get injured, and the more meat winds up in bad shape. European countries evidently keep production rates somewhat lower than ours to guard against these consequences.

These following facts are probably completely irrelevant in terms of this posting. But the little boy in me can't resist passing them along anyway:

• Every steer being fattened for beef drops 50 pounds of manure a day.

• The cattle moving through a couple of gigantic feedlots near Greeley, Colorado, produce more shit-per-day than people in Boston, Denver, Atlanta, and St. Louis combined do.

• These feedlots are a way of raising cattle that has been developed and has become widespread only in the last few decades. Geezers and Boomers? This is not how the cattle whose beef you grew up on were raised. These lots are enormous, crowded, and dirty. Despite being grass-eaters, the cattle are fed on corn and on meat by-products. The cattle are pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, and get little exercise, According to Schlosser, cattle being raised in modern American feedlots essentially live in mud and pools of their own shit.

• Competitive forces have played a big role in the development of these conditions. These forces have also driven consolidation. In 1970, the top four meatpacking firms slaughtered 21% of the nation's cattle. Today, the top four meatpacking firms slaughter 84% of the nation's cattle.

As I noted here, the meatpacking business (much influenced by the fast-food industry), is dependent on cheap immigrant and illegal-immigrant laborers. These people are easy to exploit and underpay. They don't organize, they don't (yet) know how to turn to lawyers, they quit after only a short time -- and there are always more of them. (The American government subsidizes these arrangements with hiring and "training" bonuses and incentives, by the way.) Steve Sailer reports that meatpackers are giving employees a day off to attend rallies in support of immigration reform (aka amnesty).

What kinds of exposure to food-production have you had? How did it affect you?

Best,

Michael