Inside Big Ag: On the Dilemma of the Meat Industry

The worst thing about sausage is that it has to be made. We know this because a generation of journalists has infiltrated North America’s feedlots and slaughterhouses to expose the apparatus that churns out mass quantities of commodity meat. American agribusiness—wreaking havoc on animals, laborers, consumers, and planet Earth—is generally understood to be irredeemable. Today, enlightened consumers wouldn’t be caught dead near a Big Mac. For what it’s worth, that’s progress.

The reformist lexicon that fuels the outrage resonates with the political right, left, and everyone in between. A libertarian Virginia farmer fumes over the “industrial agriculture complex.” An Oxford-educated activist vents that “globalized corporate agriculture” has left us “stuffed and starved.” A poet-farmer whose horse-drawn plow breaks up Kentucky soil laments how “the ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach.” Yikes (and yuck).

Such visceral disgust makes one wonder: Just who are these people monopolizing the world’s food supply? Indeed, the strangest thing about antiagribusiness angst is that it rages full tilt without a real understanding of the machinations that empower the corporate leviathan. We’re routinely hit with dramatic visuals: the slaughterhouses, endless corn and soy fields, obesity charts, deforestation photos, undercover animal-abuse films, and battery-caged birds. But we ignore the sterile office space where the sausage-making playbook is written.

Two books—Ted Genoways’s The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food and Christopher Leonard’s The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business—begin to fill this gap. Genoways, a contributing writer at Mother Jones (and former editor of this publication), and Leonard, an investigative reporter, offer respective portrayals of Hormel and Tyson Foods that show how the brutality of the abattoir reflects the sangfroid of the boardroom, where cuts of a more metaphorical sort enhance the wealth of salaried executives at the expense of disposable wage workers.

The central conceit of Genoways’s exposé of Hormel Foods is something called “line speed.” Actually, it’s more than a conceit. For Hormel, line speed is a lifeline. It’s the calibrated rate at which 30,000 hogs pass through two Midwestern slaughterhouses every day. That’s about 7.7 million hogs a year. When a company is handling that much pork, the smallest increase on the cut line immediately translates into a heap of profit.

But not everyone benefits. If the classic portrayal of increased line speed ends with a panicked Lucille Ball popping chocolates into her mouth, Hormel’s version results in lost fingers and repetitive-stress pain. “The speed of work,” one immigrant-worker advocate told Genoways, “is causing an epidemic of quietly crippling injuries.” At Quality Pork Processors (Hormel’s sole meatpacking supplier), faster line speed leads to more debilitating problems. The Chain’s most intriguing story line tracks the medical saga of slaughterhouse workers who suffered crushing headaches, numbness, and foot pain so severe they couldn’t walk.

This set of symptoms—which was eventually diagnosed as progressive inflammatory neuropathy (PIN)—appeared in workers who stood cheek by jowl on the plant’s “head table.” The head table is the section of the slaughterhouse where employees pressure-blast pig brains into sludge, leaving a “fine rosy mist” to hover in the air. Koreans buy the end product to thicken stir-fry meals.

Not only did sick workers share airspace polluted with aerosolized brain matter, but they also noticed that their symptoms appeared simultaneously as the pace of work quickened. “The line speed, the line speed,” recalled the Austin, Minnesota, neurologist who first encountered these patients. “That’s what we...