The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  The killing machine is next. Each bird lands in a position with its neck fixed between guide bars. Then a motorized circular blade moves in to slit the bird’s throat. As the birds bleed out, a camera-based counting system tracks the number of birds that go by. Just after the kill, the birds enter another high voltage chamber. This one is called a “stimulator.” Here, the hens are run along an electrode plate for approximately forty seconds. This induces breast contractions and a flapping motion in the birds to exhaust any chemical energy left in the muscle. Tenderizing the breast muscles makes the deboning process faster and easier.

  Next, the hanging bodies enter scalding tunnels, the longest part of the line, where heat from hot water is transferred to the birds’ feather follicles so that they can be plucked by the scaler at the next stop. Scalding is either “soft” or “hard.” Soft scalding, at 55°C, produces yellow-skinned birds, and hard scalding upwards of 57°C produces birds with white skin.

  The conveyor then lifts the birds back up through the final stages of the operation: the head puller, where the birds are decapitated, and the hock and feet cutter, where the birds’ legs and feet are chopped off and they are released from the shackles.

  At this stage, except for legs and head, the birds are still whole. They still need to be eviscerated, chilled, and inspected before being rehung on the line. Then the carcasses are cut in two crosswise on a halving wheel. The “saddles,” or back halves, which include the thighs and drumsticks, are packaged in what’s sometimes called the “leg room,” while the front halves, with the breasts and wings, are split up by a harvesting machine. Modern robotic deboning machines can process one bird in 2.5 seconds.

  In Europe, Asia, and Canada, processing plants run line speeds from 175 to 200 bpm (birds per minute). In a single plant, that amounts to twelve thousand birds per hour, or ninety-six thousand birds in an eight-hour day. In the United States alone, nearly nine billion broiler hens are raised for slaughter every year.

  Speeding up slaughter to maximize efficiency is not just happening in poultry processing, however. Meat is big business. The trend is industry-wide, with chickens, pigs, and cows—whole animal farms by the day—all barrelling down the line. And these animals are not the only casualties. At US meat plants, the increase in line speed is causing serious injuries to workers. According to records from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, worker amputations happen on average twice a week.

  So how did we go from farm to factory? It was a Chicago meatpacker, Gustavus Franklin Swift, who first invented the conveyor belt system used in meat processing plants. A shrewd businessman who was always looking to maximize his gains, Swift saw the inefficiency of transporting whole animals from Chicago to other major US cities by rail. At the time, 60 percent of an animal’s mass was considered inedible. Heads, hooves, bones, and innards were all dead weight that needlessly contributed to shipping costs. Swift’s idea was to take larger animals like hogs and cattle and dismember them in advance. By cutting hogs up at the stockyards, for example, he could transport them across the country as hams, ribs, bacon, and sausages using refrigerated rail cars.

  Swift’s contemporary Philip Danforth Armour, the founder of Armour & Company, found a different way to transform animal carcasses into something more profitable. He made his fortune by packaging the first shelf-stable meats in the form of canned chilis, hashes, and stews. But Armour also maximized the economic value of animals by finding new uses for the slaughterhouse waste products: pigtails became paintbrushes; bristles became hairbrushes; guts became tennis racket strings; fats were made into soaps; bones became fertilizer; and hooves were boiled up into glue.

  Chicago’s Union Stock Yards became a centre of “remorseless innovation.” Armour himself famously proclaimed that he sold “everything but the squeal.” Today, the meat industry despises the term “factory farm,” but the cold fact is that animals are regarded in every way as commodities: they are raised as “products” and sold in “units.” *13 As Ted Genoways writes in The Chain, the whole model is “carried out with the exactitude of a factory, and built around serving the needs of other factories—the packinghouses, the packers, shipping warehouses—farther along the supply chain. Each step can be replicated and repeated countless times in identical or near-identical facilities almost anywhere the residents of nearby communities will allow it.”

  While the slaughter of chickens has been fully automated for some time, for larger animals like pigs and cows, which are of higher value, death is still largely a manual affair. In most meat plants, restrained or stunned animals still have their throats slashed manually. As the blood drains out, it’s collected in a trough and rendered to become blood meal. Along with ground-up bone, it is repackaged and sold as bone meal, a rather squeamish thought for vegetarians, who may forget that growers of everything from corn crops to vegetable gardens use animal blood as “organic fertilizer.”

  Sweet treats like gummy bears, candies, marshmallows, and Jell-O are also slaughterhouse by-products in disguise. Their key ingredient is gelatin, made from skin, bones, horns, and connective tissues collected after slaughter and placed in lime slurry pits for about three months to loosen the collagen in them. The lime is then washed off and the collagen is boiled down and turned into gel sheets or powder used in almost every moulded dessert. But gelatin’s binding power is not only used in food; it has become a valuable commodity in everything from the soft pill capsules used in pharmaceuticals to paper production. All photographic film is made using gelatin. That’s what the “film” that coats the plastic base is. The gelatin is the medium that suspends silver halide crystals that react to light. Which means every movie that was shot on film—from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings—was projected through slaughterhouse remains.

  To insiders, it’s known as “the invisible industry.” Rendering, the process of transforming inedible animal parts into other products, is now a multi-billion-dollar business. In North America alone, over sixty billion pounds of “animal waste” are turned into commercial goods every year. In the 1940s, rendered animal parts could be found in around seventy-five commercial products. Today, the list is incalculably longer: antifreeze, cement, bullets, waterproofing agents, fabric softeners, detergents, chewing gum, fireworks, sheetrock, plywood, crayons, paint, insulation, and linoleum are just a few of the everyday items that contain unrecognizable animal remains.

  Animal parts also become feed for the pet food industry. Globally, pet food sales are soaring. It’s a $66-billion-a-year industry. But no one stops to ask which animals the “meat” comes from? Along with slaughterhouse slurry, or meat meal—which is made up of the parts we don’t like to eat, like eyes, feet, and brains—other forms of “mystery meat” have been known to make their way into feed for our pets. Researchers at Chapman University in California examined the DNA in fifty-two different commercial pet foods and found that sixteen of them contained meat from a species that was not on the label. According to an article in Modern Farmer magazine, the pet food industry has a dirty secret. Producers have been found purchasing meat meal “from rendering plants known to accept euthanized shelter animals. Other reports have disclosed the inclusion of roadkill, restaurant fryer grease, spoiled supermarket meat, and the remains of diseased zoo animals.”

  Over seventy billion animals a year meet the grim reaper in an industrialized setting, but what’s equally shocking is how invisible all this killing is. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, we may have thought that the grotesque horrors of gas chambers had been ended, but for animals the method was reintroduced in the 1980s and ’90s, and gas chambers are widely used to this day. Controlled atmospheric stunning (CAS) is considered a humane method for rendering pigs and poultry insensible before slaughter. But inside the gas chambers themselves there’s incredible suffering. Animals gasp, shriek, convulse, and attempt to escape as CO2 increases in the chamber. In electric stunning systems for poultry, some birds emerge from the water bath still conscious, and, be
cause of increasingly fast line speeds, birds that are not properly attached by workers to shackles sometimes miss the automatic blade that is meant to kill them. As a result, in the United States anywhere from seven hundred thousand to a million birds a year are still conscious when they are scalded to death in the scalder.

  Civilization and polite society have raised us to believe we are above the barbarism of beasts. But that is hardly so. Our clinical methods of killing have simply allowed us to turn a blind eye to the horrors of food production. As the British author George Monbiot writes, “What madness of our times will revolt our descendants? There are plenty to choose from. But one of them, I believe, will be the mass incarceration of animals, to enable us to eat their flesh or eggs or drink their milk. While we call ourselves animal lovers, and lavish kindness on our dogs and cats, we inflict brutal deprivations on billions of animals that are just as capable of suffering. The hypocrisy is so rank that future generations will marvel at how we could have failed to see it.”

  *1 Examining thirty cookbooks by prominent chefs, Ike Sharpless published a study entitled, “Making the Animals on the Plate Visible: Anglophone Celebrity Chef Cookbooks Ranked by Sentient Animal Deaths.” Ranked by order, it was found that Batali’s Molto Gusto: Easy Italian Cooking was the worst offender, with 5.25 average deaths per recipe and 620 total animal deaths.

  *2 The extra space in Europe however does mean the birds are slightly freer to move. With birds that are not as sick and soiled, there is less need for chemical decontamination. The same is true for the difference in eggs. You may have noticed that eggs in US supermarkets are always sold refrigerated, while in Europe they are stocked on shelves at room temperature. That’s because the egg-laying conditions in the US eggs are dirtier, so they have to be sprayed with a chemical sanitizer. After being rinsed in hot water, the eggs must be kept refrigerated afterwards.

  *3 “The word “garbage” isn’t proverbial. Mixed in with the grain can be an assortment of trash, including ground glass from light bulbs, used syringes and the crushed testicles of their young. Very little on a factory farm is ever discarded.”

  —Solotaroff, Paul. “In the Belly of the Beast” Rolling Stone. (2013, December 10).

  *4 According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 25 percent of the world’s land is degraded, but in areas like sub-Saharan Africa, Southern America, Southeast Asia and Northern Europe soil quality restraints affect more than half the land usage.

  *5 In the deforested Amazon, 80 percent of the soy grown becomes animal feed. The cleared land is also used for pasture for beef cattle. Exotic animals like jaguars, sloths, and anteaters are disappearing in the region, as over 700,000 hectares of their forest home was cleared between 2011 and 2015. For every hamburger and chicken wing there is corresponding loss of wild animals that inhabited ecologically rich areas like the Congo, the Amazon rainforest and the Himalayas. The link, once made, becomes obvious. To create the unnatural, we’re destroying the natural.

  *6 There is variability in price. At the low end bull sperm can go for $5-$15 per straw, at the high end with Wagyu bulls the price can be $2000 per straw.

  *7 Obituaries are even written for famed bulls.

  November 1, 1990 - October 24, 2005

  Internationally respected, 71HO1181 Comestar Leader EX EXTRA was considered a true dairyman’s bull. He left the mark of dairyness from head to tail on his daughters, siring high milk producers, show winners and highly classified progeny, leaving breeders satisfied around the world.

  “This bull produced tremendous dairy strength with great udder texture and bone quality,” said Lowell Lindsay, Semex Sire Analyst. “A Blackstar x Sheik x Mark Anthony, he was similar to his three full sisters for width of chest, great feet & legs and like his sisters, he passed it along to his daughters.”

  Leader’s impact on the industry will be felt for generations to come as he had over 20,000 daughters classified in Canada alone. Certainly an impressive statistic on its own, but couple that will the fact that 67% of these daughters are classified GP or better, (270 EX and 3,411 VG) and it is easy to see why Leader will remain a favorite wherever dairy cows are appreciated worldwide.

  *8 “Our way of working with this problem has been careful to favor the middle ground. Seed taken from the herd is looked at what it looks like and how it smells. Any deviation in color, composition or smell is interpreted as abnormal and the item is rejected.”

  *9 The high birth rate in pigs is leading to an increased mortality rate for the sows, as the litter rate has been “linked to a troubling rise in prolapse—the collapse of the animal’s rectum, vagina, or uterus”.

  *10 According to data from the UNFCCC, “If cattle were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions.”

  *11 “In some regions, the vast majority of water feeding high-mountain rivers comes from rain and snowmelt, not melting glaciers.” Some regions however, are dependent upon glacial run-off.

  *12 One of these is anchoret, a species of anchovy, which have fed Peruvians for thousands of years.

  *13 In Iowa, for example, livestock are sold by “animal units” not by headcount and are measured by weight according the equivalent of standard-sized cattle. A hog, then, is considered to be 0.4 of an animal unit.

  5

  BLACK GOLD

  The obscure we see eventually, the completely apparent takes longer.

  —EDGAR R. MURROW

  IT WAS ALL GOING ACCORDING TO PLAN until the baby pandas showed up. The National Grid operators had their eyes trained on their television sets as usual, but this time the expected spike did not occur. They were looking for a phenomenon known as TV pickup. In the United Kingdom, it happens when massive audiences watch sporting events like the World Cup, or the season finale of popular shows like EastEnders. As the program ends, the Brits have a tendency to all get up at the same time to take advantage of the commercial break and make a cup of tea. Behind the scenes though, this seemingly innocuous task sets off a cascade of events. As millions of kettles are switched on at the same moment, the sudden spike in demand for electricity sends a huge, sweeping surge across the grid.

  When a massive jolt of power is required that’s beyond the base capacity of the National Grid, its operators must turn to an additional source of power that is ready to go at short notice. But at peak capacity, you can’t just “switch on” an additional power plant, because they are slow. If you think powering up a computer sucks up precious time, you’ll appreciate it’s a problem when fossil fuel generators take about half an hour to gear up, and nuclear power plants take even longer. During a commercial break and the national rush for the kettle, there’s no time for this lag; it all has to happen immediately. So, the engineers turn to pumped-storage reservoirs. That is, at times when electricity demand is typically low, they pump water up to a reservoir at the top of a hill. Then, when demand spikes, they let it rush back downhill so that it spins a hydroelectric turbine along the way.

  On this particular occasion, the credits had begun rolling for The Great British Bake Off, a hugely popular show, and so the grid control centre was at the ready, prepared as usual for the commercial break. But they had not anticipated what the BBC had programmed next: a nature documentary featuring baby pandas. As a result, nobody made tea, because nobody got up. According to a representative from the National Grid, “There was no pickup at all.” The mass migration to the kitchen for a cup of tea had stalled, because people sat awed by the bundles of black and white cuteness and sat glued to their TV screens.

  We don’t tend to think of our electricity as being made fresh to order, but it is. It’s made the moment we request it. When you charge your phone, as Gretchen Bakke writes in her book The Grid, the power you use is “so fresh, that less than a minute ago, if you live in wind farm territory, that electricity was a fast-moving gust of air. And if you live in coal country, it was a blast of pulverized coal dust being blown into a ‘firebox’—a huge, industrial, fl
ash-combusting furnace. If you live in hydro country it was a waiting rush of water dammed up by a massive concrete wall. Picture it. The electricity you are using right now was, about a second ago, a drop of water.”

  Most of us never think about electricity, let alone the grid. It is the biggest and most powerful machine in almost every nation, but we ignore it even when it’s right in front of us.

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the grid’s relationship to our daily lives was a little harder to ignore. That’s because utility companies’ black, messy swaths of wire tangled up city centres like out-of-control spiderwebs. Not only were there the newly installed telephone and telegraph lines, but electricity cables were also attached to tall poles, and the wires were not neatly subdivided. Aesthetically and functionally, it was a nightmare. In London, the wires of sixty-five different electric utilities were strung above the streets. As technology historian Thomas Hughes writes in Networks of Power, “Londoners who could afford electricity toasted their bread in the morning with one kind, lit their offices with another, visited associates in nearby office buildings using still another variety, and walked home along streets that were illuminated by yet another kind.”

  In America, hundreds of patents were being issued for different types of dynamos used to generate direct current, or DC, electricity. In the 1890s, Chicago alone had forty-five different electrical utility companies and had dedicated DC power lines at 100, 110, 220, 500, 600, 1,200, and 2,000 volts. Needless to say, it was a mess.*1