Food Safety & Worker Safety & Water Quality At Risk

Dara Grumdahl, local food critic, retweeted an announcement about changes in USDA food inspection in the pork processing industry.  It warrants your review as it essentially removes USDA inspection from the early stages of processing where the health of pigs is assessed.  Employees of the processing plant will determine the impact on hogs having parasites, diseases or cancer on your food.

Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" alerted a nation which resulted in significant changes in meat processing.  Frankly, it's still a jungle and in many ways worse.

Growing up in Albert Lea it seemed that everyone had a neighbor or a relative that worked at "the plant,"  Wilson & Company.  Neighboring Austin was the home of Hormel and likewise a strong labor town.  For a good history, including the 1959 strike which resulted in a National Guard deployment I recommend "Packinghouse Daughter" by Cheri Register.

During my stint in "the plant" the meatpacking industry was on the cusp of many changes in safety, labor composition, farming and wages.

In the early 1970s wages were about $15/hour.  Fifty years later the national average is $10.48/hour.  During my time at Wilson's I believe the work force was 100% white.  Now it's 48% minorities, primarily Hispanic followed by Black and Asian.  Farmer's that raised a few hogs, living outside was pretty standard.  That's been replaced by large hog factories producing thousands of hogs per year.

Wilson & Company fell under pressure from newer, more automated plants and unfortunately burned to the ground.  Southern Minnesota and Northern Iowa have become the largest hog production areas in the country primarily due to I35 and I90 which lead directly to Hormel.

Early, Hormel was a leader in labor relations, and even in the 1970s the union held onto a one-year layoff notice for the workers.  Following the last of the family leadership Hormel began to meet the growing demand for meat in the American diet that escalated following WWII.  Automation allowed ever-faster "chain speed" the metric being the number of hogs processed per hour.

Ted Genoways' 2015 work, "The Chain: Farm, Factory and Fate of our Food" updates Sinclair's work
to today.  Not much has changed except it's much faster, still dangerous and producing consumer meat filled with antibiotics and hormones and dramatically polluting our drinking water because of huge hog operations.  Raised in containment buildings the waste is collected underneath the buildings and in massive manure pits.  In the spring and fall waste is dispersed on adjacent cropland. Runoff is unavoidable. In particular Northern Iowa and Southern Minnesota drinking water from streams and shallow wells ends up high in nitrates causing blue baby syndrome. 

Des Moines,  taking it's drinking water from the Des Moines River, now recognizes that communities must get aggressive.  While hog production defines the economy of the region much more than ever before, the pork industry continues to expand and directly and indirectly circumvent regulation, inspection and the protection of drinking water.

"The Chain..." also provides an update on pork industry labor, now dependent on a predominantly immigrant workforce and the dangers going to that $10.48/hour job.