The Chain

Ted Genoways

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062288776
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A powerful and important work of investigative journalism that explores the runaway growth of the American meatpacking industry and its dangerous consequences

"A worthy update to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and a chilling indicator of how little has changed since that 1906 muckraking classic."— Mother Jones

"I tore through this book.... Books like these are important: They track the journey of our thinking about food, adding evidence and offering guidance along the way." — Wall Street Journal

On the production line in American packing-houses, there is one cardinal rule: the chain never slows. Under pressure to increase supply, the supervisors of meat-processing plants have routinely accelerated the pace of conveyors, leading to inhumane conditions, increased accidents, and food of questionable, often dangerous quality.

In The Chain, acclaimed journalist Ted Genoways uses the story of Hormel Foods and its most famous product, Spam—a recession-era staple—to probe the state of the meatpacking industry, from Minnesota to Iowa to Nebraska. Interviewing scores of line workers, union leaders, hog farmers, and local politicians and activists, Genoways reveals an industry pushed to its breaking point—while exposing alarming new trends, from sick or permanently disabled workers to conflict between small towns and immigrant labor. A searching exposé in the tradition of Upton Sinclair, Rachel Carson, and Eric Schlosser, The Chain is a mesmerizing story and an urgent warning about the hidden costs of the food we eat.

Part One

Chapter 1

THE BRAIN MACHINE

On the kill floor of Quality Pork Processors Inc., the wind always blows: from the open doors at the docks where drivers unload massive trailers of screeching pigs, through the overheated room where the hogs are butchered, to the plastic-draped breezeway where the parts are handed over to Hormel Foods for packaging. The air gusts and swirls, whistling through the plant like the current in a canyon. In the first week of December 2006, Matthew Garcia felt feverish and chilled on the blustery production floor. He fought stabbing back pains and vomiting, but he figured it was just the flu. El Niño had touched the prairies of southern Minnesota with unusually warm air that fall, and public health officials were warning that powerful strains of influenza might sweep the state. But he was still in his teens and strong—and he was determined to tough it out.

Garcia had gotten on at QPP in Austin, just two hours south of Minneapolis–St. Paul, only twelve weeks before and had been stuck with one of the worst spots on the line: running a device known simply as the “brain machine”—the last stop on a conveyor snaking down the middle of a J-shaped, steel-encased bench called the “head table.” Every hour, more than 1,300 severed pork heads went sliding along the belt. Workers sliced off the ears, clipped the snouts, chiseled the cheek meat. They scooped out the eyes, carved out the tongues, and scraped the palate meat from the roofs of mouths. Because, famously, all parts of a pig are edible (“everything but the squeal,” wisdom goes), nothing was wasted, not even the brains. A few years before Garcia started on the line, someone up the chain of command, someone at Hormel, had found a buyer in Korea, where liquid pork brains are used as a thickener in stir-fry.

So all week long a woman next to Garcia would carve meat off the back of each head then let the denuded skull slide down the conveyor and through an opening in a Plexiglas shield. On the other side, Garcia inserted the metal nozzle of a 90-pounds-per-square-inch compressed-air hose into the opening at the back of each skull, tripping a trigger that blasted the pig’s brains into a pink slurry. One head every three seconds. A high-pressure burst, a fine rosy mist, and the slosh of brains slipping through a drain hole into a catch bucket. (Some workers told me the goo looked like Pepto-Bismol; others described it as more like a lumpy strawberry milk shake.) When the ten-pound barrel was filled, another worker would come to take the brains for packaging and shipping. And the hollow skulls were dropped down a chute, where yet another worker, one Garcia never saw, gathered heads to be ground into bone meal. Most days that fall, production was so fast that the air never cleared between blasts of the brain machine, and the fine mist would drift, coating workers at the head table in a grisly mix of tissue and blood.

No one thought much of it. On the slaughtering side—the so-called hot side or warm room—temperatures were kept artificially high to stop blood from clotting and clogging drains, to prevent fat from hardening and gumming up the machinery. Everyone’s bare arms and faces were covered with gore, their white smocks gone red and slicked with grease. And the thick air was made even more choking by the Whizard knives—spinning circular blades, powered by a roaring pneumatic compressor. Sooner or later, the steady hum of the Whizards and the brutal repetition of line jobs—some duplicating the same cut as many as 30,000 times per shift—gave everyone carpal tunnel syndrome or tendonitis. And all you have to do is wait in the QPP parking lot at shift change to see the shambling gait that comes from standing in one spot all day on the plant floor. Eight hours straight, Garcia stood, many days without so much as a lunch or bathroom break, slipping heads onto the brain machine’s brass nozzle, pouring the glop into the drain, then dropping the empty skulls down the chute—fighting his way through headaches and waves of nausea. “It was like a flu,” he told me later, “fever, vomit, weakness—the kind of weakness that I just don’t get work done fast enough.” But if he wanted to move up, he couldn’t afford to miss any days, not when the bosses were pushing for more and more overtime.

That fall, rampant defaults on subprime mortgage loans had sent the housing market into a nationwide tailspin, and, with the looming threat of recession, demand for Spam was climbing. The line ran faster and longer—two shifts each weekday, most Saturdays, even some Sundays, and still Hormel couldn’t keep up. There was talk of adding a third shift. By Thanksgiving, Garcia would return home spent, his back and head throbbing. But he soon realized that this was more than just exhaustion from overwork or some winter virus.

On December 11, Garcia awoke to find he couldn’t walk. His legs felt dead, paralyzed. His family rushed him to the Austin Medical Center, not far from the subdivided Victorian they rented on Third Street. Doctors there sent Garcia for a complete exam at St. Mary’s Hospital, part of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, about an hour away. By the time he arrived, he was running a high fever and complaining of piercing headaches. He was immediately admitted and put through a battery of tests—including MRIs of his head and his cervical and thoracic spine. Every one indicated neurological abnormalities, most importantly a severe spinal cord inflammation, apparently caused by an autoimmune response. It was as if his body were attacking his own nerves.

In the coming days, as his condition spiraled downward, baffled doctors struggled to understand what was happening to Garcia. He was transferred to the clinic’s Mary Brigh Building for extended inpatient care. By Christmas, he had been bedridden for two weeks, and his physicians feared he might be suicidal. Garcia was diagnosed with “acute adjustment disorder”—the medical term for severe depression brought on by a sudden and unexplained illness or injury. They sent a psychiatrist to counsel Garcia. He needed to prepare himself for a different kind of life, they said—one in a wheelchair.

There is no Matthew Garcia.

Or, rather, Matthew Garcia is not his name. It’s the name I’ve given him to shield him from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but I don’t know his real name anyway. All I know is the name on his driver’s license, his I-9s and ITINs, his medical records and workers’ comp claims. All I know is the name on his Social Security card. But that name belongs to someone else, someone in Texas, in prison or worse, someone with a suitably Hispanic name who sold his information or had it stolen from him. There is no Matthew Garcia in Austin, Minnesota, and if you go looking, you won’t find him.

But then there’s also no Emiliano Ballesta or Miriam Angeles or any of the other Hispanic workers who stood side by side with Garcia at the head table, because seemingly everyone working at QPP in the first decade of the new century had a fake name and false papers with a phony address. And not just the people on the kill floor. Quality Pork Processors is simply another way of saying Hormel, and QPP’s corporate headquarters in Dallas is just an accounting firm, a mailing address, and a tax shelter in a poured-concrete office park along the LBJ Freeway. And if you leaf through a phone book in Austin, Minnesota, you can find a listing for Kelly Wadding, the CEO of QPP, but if you drive there, you’ll find no house, no such address.

In Austin, such half-truths and agreed-upon lies are as much a part of the landscape as the slow-moving Cedar River, which divides the two sides of town. On one bank stands the Hormel plant, with its towering six-story hydrostatic Spam cooker and sprawling fenced compound, encompassing QPP and shielded from view by a fifteen-foot privacy wall. When I asked for a look inside, I got a chipper email from Julie H. Craven, the company spokeswoman: “They are state-of-the-art facilities (nothing to be squeamish about!) but media tours are not available.” On the other bank is the Spam Museum, where a patois of aw-shucks midwesternisms and corporate double talk are spoken like a second language. Former plant workers serve as Spambassadors, while Monty Python’s “Spam Song” is piped in on an endless loop (“Spamity, Spam! Spamity, Spam!”), and the sanitized history of Hormel unfolds in more than sixteen thousand square feet of exhibits, artifacts, and tchotchkes. There’s even a booth with a digital countdown to see if you could pack Spam fast enough to keep up with the speed of the factory line.

One room is done up as the Provision Market, the original storefront opened by George A. Hormel (pronounced HOR-mel to rhyme with “normal”) in the Litchfield Building on Mill Street in November 1891. What the exhibit labels won’t tell you is that on Thanksgiving Day of that year, Hormel took his sweetheart, Lillian Gleason, skating on the frozen river, then walked her to the old creamery tucked amid a grove of scrub oaks on the east bank where he had set up his meatpacking plant. He wanted Lillian to see the new two-horsepower engine he had just bought along with a power chopper and stuffer to make sausage. This was going to be the beginning of big business for Hormel. Lillian must have been impressed; when she married George three months later, she was three months pregnant with their son, Jay.

From the earliest days of the business, George Hormel understood economies of scale. In the first year, he and his sole employee could slaughter three animals on a good day. By the next year, better tools and divided labor allowed them to more than quadruple their output. But their greatest expansion came during an unlikely time: in 1893, railroad overbuilding, combined with a severe drought on the western plains, caused a bank panic and the deepest depression in American history. Hormel, instead of cutting back, concocted a risky plan. First, he saw that failing railroads meant cheaper shipping, so he started importing hogs from all over Minnesota and Iowa and sending the butchered meat to retailers as far away as St. Louis and Chicago. Second, the arrival of the refrigeration car had allowed eastern competitors to elbow into the midwestern market for fresh meat, but Hormel banked on the assumption that empty pockets meant that people would be willing to eat more smoked and cured meat. Among his new ideas was thinly slicing and sugar-curing back meat, which he marketed as a novelty breakfast item he called Canadian bacon.

Even a fire that destroyed the creamery in 1896 became an opportunity. Hormel built a new facility in its place with high volume in mind and expanded his staff to twenty men. By the time the country began to emerge from the panic, Hormel’s—as locals called it—was processing 60 hogs a day and had persuaded the Great Western to lay a rail line directly to their door. By the turn of the century, the plant was processing 120 hogs per day. By the time the United States entered into World War I, they were up to 2,000. At the brink of the Great Depression, when George handed the business over to Jay, the plant was processing 4,000 hogs per day.

In one corner of the Spam Museum, George and Jay, portrayed as full-size, ghostly white figures (like corporate George Segal sculptures), reenact the moment in 1929 when the family business was passed down. “I’m getting too old to run this company,” George says in the stilted recording. “It’s time for you to take over.” When the real Jay C. Hormel ascended to president, the company, for all its increased production, faced serious economic crisis. But Jay was a masterful manager—and, like his father, a gambler in the true capitalist sense. Remembering the expansion that Hormel’s had achieved in 1893, Jay bet that Americans, once again with little money in their pockets, would buy into the idea of low-cost canned dinners. He developed two of the country’s first meat-based canned soups: Hormel chili and Dinty Moore stew. To distinguish them from condensed Campbell’s Soups, they were marketed as “the big meals in the big cans.”

Strong sales of Hormel’s new product lines kept the company afloat—but workers were dissatisfied that their wages had not risen along with profits. In 1932, Joe Ollman and John Winkels on the hog kill teamed up with Frank Ellis, the foreman of the hog-casing department, to begin organizing plant employees under the International Union of All Workers. About the same time, Jay Hormel made a rare miscalculation. Seeking to reduce turnover on the line, he instituted a progressive pension plan, something he regarded as an incentive to stay with Hormel. After all, the company would contribute $1 every week toward retirement and life insurance, against just 20 cents deducted from each worker’s paycheck. But Jay didn’t bother pitching the plan to employees; he simply instructed foremen to strong-arm workers into signing membership cards—a style of leadership he later rued as “benevolent dictatorship.” When the supervisor on the hog kill buttonholed one worker and forced him to sign, labor organizers incited a ten-minute work stoppage until the foreman tore up the man’s membership card.

When rumor of the incident spread through the plant, it was enough to spur enormous turnout for a union rally in Sutton Park. Impassioned speeches from Ellis and Ollman convinced six hundred Hormel workers to sign up on the spot, and talk arose of organizing workers throughout Austin. Local business leaders panicked. Jay Hormel urged them to accept union labor. “I am not going to get mixed up in a fight in my hometown,” he declared. But other businesses refused to allow their workers to organize, and Hormel was reluctant to put himself at a competitive disadvantage. “He suggested that we go out and organize the other packing plants first,” Frank Ellis later remembered. “We told Mr. Hormel that we would organize the other plants, but needed more money now; higher wages was our problem and competition was his.”

In November 1933, Ellis and other union organizers, armed with pipes and clubs, escorted Hormel from the general offices and shut down the plant’s refrigeration system—threatening to spoil $3.6 million of meat. For three straight days, Hormel went to the picket line to meet with union leaders and address workers from an improvised platform. He brought the strike to a quick end by accepting a series of forward-looking incentives, including profit sharing, merit pay, and the “Annual Wage Plan,” an unheard-of salary system in an industry dominated by piecework and hourly rates. Hormel also agreed that increases in output would result in more pay for workers, and he even guaranteed them fifty-two weeks’ notice prior to termination.

Perhaps most importantly, Hormel recognized the newly formed union. “I couldn’t lick you, so I joined you,” he told them. The concessions earned him a matchless period of management-labor harmony, but Fortune derided Hormel as the “red capitalist”—and the Depression was cutting deeper and deeper into fresh and cured meat sales. Paying high wages for slow-selling products was eating up Hormel’s profit, and lower sales meant less money to pay workers. When Jay attempted layoffs, he was met with a sit-down strike in 1934. To keep workers on the line and improve his margins by reducing waste, he devised yet another canned product, this one made from ground-up scrap meat.

But like everything in Austin, it first needed a new name. He called it Spam.

Just as Emiliano Ballesta’s shift at QPP was ending on February 12, 2007, a massive blizzard came sweeping down from Canada. Snow shifted and swirled across Interstate 90. By the time Ballesta reached his mobile home west of the highway on the outskirts of Austin, drifts were starting to pile up, and he entered to find that the pipes had frozen solid. Worried about his wife and five children—most of all, his five-year-old son, who had recently been diagnosed with leukemia—Ballesta shimmied into the crawl space with a pair of small kerosene heaters. Instead of thawing the pipes, he ignited the wispy insulation hanging from the floorboards, and, in no time, flames engulfed the trailer. When police and firefighters responded to the call, they found thick smoke rolling from under the eaves, Ballesta and his family unharmed but watching helplessly as everything they owned burned. By morning, nothing remained but a blackened hull.

The family bounced around after that, crashing with friends and family, sleeping on couches and floors for weeks at a stretch. Ballesta’s most pressing concern was making sure that his oldest son, a senior at Austin High School, graduated on time and that the rest of his children had a place to sleep. To save up enough to make rent on an apartment of their own and replace some of their belongings, Ballesta started taking extra overtime hours at QPP. He had been working at the plant since 1994, most of that time at the head table, chiseling meat from the cheeks and jowls of hogs’ heads. Despite his experience and despite the fact that recent immigrants on the line regarded him as something of a father figure, Ballesta was only making $12.75 an hour—barely a $26,500 base salary. But he had worked Saturdays to pick up overtime for as long as he could remember, and lately there was plenty available.

As the recession took hold, both Hormel and QPP offered more and more hours to workers. Hormel employees told the New York Times that they’d never seen so much overtime. One worker boasted that he’d been able to buy a new TV and refrigerator with his additional pay. Though head meat goes into sausage, not Spam, the increased production of one item increases output of everything else. So as Hormel increased production of ham and shoulder for Spam, Ballesta was racking up overtime hours at the head table, too—so many hours, in fact, that he could afford to move his family into a rented house not far from the plant. And his son graduated right on schedule.

In May 2007, Ballesta was at the commencement ceremony when he noticed his legs starting to feel tight and numb. Within days, his right hip and thigh were throbbing, and it was as if the soles of his feet were on fire. At first, he chalked it up to fatigue, so many extra hours standing, but soon he was having trouble walking from the QPP parking lot to the plant door. He could barely make it to the locker rooms on the top floor, dragging up the staircase by pulling himself on the steel handrail.

Ballesta didn’t know it, but he wasn’t alone. Miriam Angeles, who worked near the head table removing remnants of spinal cords, had started having burning pain in her lower legs, too, and now her right arm had begun falling asleep—both at work and at home, when she tried to nurse her infant daughter. Mariana Martinez, who floated from station to station filling in for sick workers, had been spending most of her days at the head table since March, and now she too was suffering from headaches, backaches, weak legs, and burning feet. Susan Kruse, the woman who stood on the other side of the Plexiglas shield from Matthew Garcia, clearing neck meat from the aperture where the spinal cord enters the skull, had a knot in her left calf that wouldn’t go away. When the cramps spread to her right leg, and stiffness in her hands turned to tingling, Kruse finally went to the doctor.

In the meantime, Mayo doctors had prescribed Garcia a steroid to calm his nerve inflammation, and he’d improved enough to lift himself from his wheelchair and get around without a walker. He still hadn’t regained pelvic floor function, robbing him of bowel control and forcing him to insert a urinary catheter each morning, but he managed to return to work at QPP. Garcia was sent to the box room, where he unloaded pallets of cardboard to be assembled for shipping, but he could only stomach half shifts before the pain was too much and he had to go home to bed. While he was out, the ha...