Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [60]
THE WAMPLER PROCESSING PLANT in Franconia, Pennsylvania, is a squat building that sits close to a state highway about thirty miles northwest of Philadelphia. The large industrial building that houses the main plant has an odd two-story brick office affixed to the front of it that separates management from labor. A plastic banner announces the number of hours worked without injury. Tall vent pipes atop the building fill the air with the scent of roast turkey and smoked chicken. Trucks and forklifts move in and out of the parking lot. At the side entrance, workers wearing standard-issue hair nets gather at a doorway to talk on cell phones, smoke, drink coffee, and joke (in Spanish) about their bosses. Management let us know, in English, that reporters are not welcome.
No chickens are slaughtered here. Two-thousand-pound bins of raw turkey and chicken meat arrive daily from the South in refrigerated trucks. The meat is ground, seasoned, tumbled, injected, emulsified, smoked, heated, cooled, and pressed into large turkey roasts. It is squeezed into casings to make turkey franks, which are then vacuum-wrapped and shipped all over the country. Despite the old saw about the two things you never want to watch being made, this particular form of sausage making is more repulsive than a legislature at work because it’s done in an environment that encourages the growth of Listeria monocytogenes—something you can’t find even on the floor of the Texas Senate.
No sign on the outside of the building suggests that Wampler is a Pilgrim’s Pride company, owned by our old outlaw from Texas, whose company is always at the top of the fines-and-enforcement list at our state’s environmental agency. No company logo, no silhouette of the company founder, no life-size reproductions of Lonnie Bo in a pilgrim hat, cradling a white fryer in his arms, appears on the sides or backs of the trucks that transport his chicken. It’s enough to make a Texan homesick. But Wampler is indeed a Pilgrim’s Pride property, acquired in 2001.
There are thirteen hundred slaughterhouses and processing plants and only seventy-six hundred USDA inspectors watching over what goes on there. Because of the concentration and mechanization of the meat and poultry industry, the risk of poisoning by a food-borne pathogen is increasing. One mistake by a worker ripping the entrails from six cows a minute, and a feces-smeared carcass is ground and mixed with a herd of clean cows hanging from the production chain. Inspectors can see the fecal smears, but bacteria can be found only by microbial testing. The inspectors, who work under enormous pressure, are the last line of defense between invisible, microscopic food-borne pathogens and your family’s dinner table. When they fail, or when the system dominated by the meat industry fails, the results can be fatal. The death of Nancy Donley’s son is described in Eric Schlosser’s remarkable book Fast Food Nation:
Her six-year-old son, Alex, was infected with the bug in July of 1993 after eating a tainted hamburger. His illness began with abdominal cramps that seemed as severe as labor pains. It progressed to diarrhea that filled a hospital toilet with blood. Doctors frantically tried to save Alex’s life, drilling holes in his skull to relieve pressure, inserting tubes in his chest to keep him breathing. . . . Toward the end, Alex suffered hallucinations and dementia, no longer recognizing his mother or father. Portions of his brain had been liquefied. “The sheer brutality of his death was horrifying,” Donley says.
For almost two years Vincent Erthal was the USDA inspector on the second shift at Wampler’s Franconia plant. Erthal describes the plant as one of the dirtiest he had seen in his twenty years with the USDA. Leaked internal documents obtained from another source support his claims. They