One Man's Meat...

"They use everything about the hog except the squeal", joked the guide. He was showing the wonders of the Chicago stockyards and packing plants to a group of Lithuanian immigrants at the start of the 20th. century. In The Jungle Upton Sinclair gives a graphic description of what that joke meant for those who worked in the appalling conditions of the packing plants, and also of what went into the cans:

"and if that were not enough, there was a trap in the pipe, where all the scraps of meat and odds and ends of refuse were caught, and every few days it was the old man's task to clean these out, and shovel their contents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meat!"

The Jungle was published in 1906. Socialists would not deny that since then there have been considerable improvements in the standards of public health and hygiene and the exploitation of the working class appears less blatant. But given that the same unhealthy social system remains, it is not unsurprising to read in Saturday's edition of The New York Times of a young woman who after eating a hamburger went on to develop bloody diarrhoea, loss of kidney function as well as seizures so bad they rendered her unconscious and lead doctors to put her in a medically induced coma for nine weeks. The specific pathogen which nearly killed 22 year old Stephanie Smith and left this former dance instructor paralysed sickens tens of thousands annually. The same article goes on to provide a description of practices and procedures which would not appear out of place in 'The Jungle':

"..a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses,"

"..the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay.."

"..Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli, industry research shows. Yet Cargill, like most meat companies, relies on its suppliers to check for the bacteria and does its own testing only after the ingredients are ground together. The United States Department of Agriculture, which allows grinders to devise their own safety plans, has encouraged them to test ingredients first as a way of increasing the chance of finding contamination. Unwritten agreements between some companies appear to stand in the way of ingredient testing. Many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli, according to officials at two large grinding companies. Slaughterhouses fear that one grinder’s discovery of E. coli will set off a recall of ingredients they sold to others..."

After reading the above you should not need a doctor to tell you that "ground beef is not a completely safe product". Socialists however would like to draw your attention to the fact that evidence of the grisly machinations of the profit motive at work is clear throughout the six page long article.

Contrary to popular belief prices cannot be set at the whim of manufacturers. If it were so they would not need to worry about production costs. Concern for the contents and accurate labelling of meat products should be seen in the context of a social system where the motive for producing food, and every commodity, is sale and profit; where the choice of what anyone eats is qualified by what they can afford to pay. Food produced cheaply enough for 'most people' to easily afford means that a privileged few have a different choice.



(Based on an original article by P. Deutz)