American Meat’s Disgusting Secret: Why Factory Farms Are Even Worse Than You Thought

Fremont, Nebraska, 2004: Maria Lopez, a meat production line worker, gathers and bags fat trimmings while her co-worker slices pork shoulders. Struggling to keep up with the plant's accelerated assembly line, her fingers slip toward a spinning saw...

October 19, 2014 | Source: Salon | by Lindsay Abrams

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(Credit: AP/Paul Sakuma)

Fremont, Nebraska, 2004: Maria Lopez, a meat production line worker, gathers and bags fat trimmings while her co-worker slices pork shoulders. Struggling to keep up with the plant’s accelerated assembly line, her fingers slip toward a spinning saw on her workspace – she gets a bit too close; her reaction is a bit too slow. Lopez is rushed from the premises, her severed index finger reattached in a series of surgeries that leave her without feeling in the appendage. The drama keeps her out of work for two months – and, when the plant’s line speed is once again increased, convinces her to quit her job for good – but the accident wasn’t enough to bring production even to a pause. As journalist Ted Genoways describes it in his new book, “her coworkers were instructed by floor supervisors to wash the station of her blood, but the line never stopped.”

What journalist Christopher Leonard recently did for Tyson and the chicken industry, Genoways, the former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, does for pork, recounting the history of Hormel Foods – the company responsible for introducing the world to Spam – as it evolved from humble beginnings to an industrial giant with a nearly myopic focus on expansion and acceleration, regardless of the costs. And boy, are there costs: the bloody scenes with which Genoways opens the book; a mysterious neurological disorder linked to a machine that has workers breathing in a fine mist of pork brains; communities broiling with resentment over the influx of undocumented workers increasingly taking over this dangerous work; abuse suffered by the animals on whom workers’ frustrations are instead taken out; and a decline in food safety that, unbelievably, is set to become the new industry standard.

Nation, this is what your appetite for cheap, standardized pork products has wrought.

Salon spoke with Genoways about “The Chain,” his four-year investigation into the pork industry that takes its title from that never-slowing production line. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

To start off, I was really interested in the way you combine these meat safety issues with social issues, and the way they intersect at these pork plants. Was that your original intention?

Well, like so many of these things, it grew out of reporting on a single aspect of the story. Back in 2009 and 2010, I was interested in the story about the workers who had been affected by the neurological disorder that broke out in the plant in Austin, Minnesota. And when I was initially thinking of working on that, I was certainly interested in who the workers would be, but I didn’t know going into it that almost all of the affected workers were Hispanic and many of them undocumented workers. And it was seeing that, and seeing how those issues seem to just kind of fan out in all directions, that I started thinking, you know, this is more than an article, this is more complex than can be embodied in a single piece. This is really a book.