Below are some quotes from a book I've been reading--"Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Houghton Mifflin 2001). A New York Times bestseller, it is well-researched and well-written. If you read one non-fiction non-Islamic book this year, it should be this one. I sincerely wish that Muslims in America would take time to learn about what the meat industry in the US is really like, and not find comfort in the "ignorance is bliss" approach that seems to be so pervasive these days. Similarly, I've found that many Muslims from abroad are totally clueless to the fact that meat from the US is very different than the home-grown products they would find in the markets back home. People should realize that there is a bit more to the meat in America issue than simply debating whether one needs to say Bismillah while slaughtering. Please do skim the quotes below. And note that the examples are not simply peculiarities...rather, they demonstrate the typical behavior of how the US meatpacking industry operates, even today. And this is where most of the meat in Safeway comes from: "Today the top four meatpacking firms--ConAgra, IBP, Excel, and National Beef--slaughter about 84 percent of the nation's cattle." p137 ------------------------------------------------------------------- I've taken the time to slowly type the quotes below with my tiny, thin, red and sore, two index fingers. So please do at least skim them. OL p202 "The rise in grain prices has encouraged the feeding of less expensive materials to cattle, especially substances with a high protein content that accelerate growth. About 75 percent of cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes -- the rendered remains of dead cattle -- until August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year, purchased from animal shelters. The FDA banned such practices after evidence from Great Britian suggested that they were responsible for a widespread outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as "mad cow disease." Nevertheless, current FDA regulations allow dead pigs and dead horses to be rendered into cattle feed, along with dead poultry. The regulations not only allow cattle to be fed dead poultry, they allow poultry to be fed dead cattle... The waste products from poultry plants, including the sawdust and old newspapers used as litter, are also being fed to cattle. A study published a few years ago in 'Preventative Medicine' notes that in Arkansas alone, about 3 million pounds of chicken manure were fed to cattle in 1994." p221 "The current high levels of ground beef contamination, combined with the even higher levels of poultry contamination, have led to some bizarre findings. A series of tests conducted by Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, discovered far more fecal bacteria in the average American kitchen sink than on the average American toilet seat. According to Gerba, 'You'd be better of eating a carrot stick that fell in your toilet than one that fell in your sink.'" p169-171 "One night I visit a slaughterhouse somewhere in the High Plains. The slaughterhouse is one of the nation's largest. About five thousand head of cattle enter it everyday, single file, and leave in a different form. Someone who has access to the plant , who's upset by its working conditions, offers to give me a tour... On the kill floor, what I see no longer unfolds in a logical manner. It's one strange image after another. A worker with a power saw slices cattle into halves as though they were two-by-fours, and then halves swing by me into the cooler. It feels like a slaughterhouse now. Dozens of cattle, stripped of their skins, dangle on chains from their hind legs. My host stops and asks how I feel, if I want to go any further. This is where people get sick. I feel fine, determined to see the whole process, the world that's been deliberately hidden. The kill floor is hot and humid. It stinks of manure. Cattle have a body temperature of about 101 degrees, and there are a lot of them in the room. Carcasses swing so fast along the rail that you have to keep an eye on them constantly, dodge them, watch your step, or one will slam you and throw you onto the bloody concrete floor. It happens to workers all the time. I see: a man reach inside cattle and pull out their kidneys with his bare hands, then drop the kidneys down a metal chute, over and over again, as each animal passes by him; a stainless steel rack of tongues; Whizzards peeling meat of decapitated heads, picking them almost as clean as the white skulls painted by Georgia O'Keefe. We wade through blood that's ankle deep and that pours down drains into huge vats below us. As we approach the start of the line, for the first time I hear the steady POP, POP, POP of live animals being stunned. ...We walk up a slippery metal stairway and reach a small platform, where the production line begins. A man turns and smiles at me. He wears safety goggles and a hardhat. His face is splattered with gray matter and blood. He is the "knocker," the man who welcomes cattle into the building. Cattle walk down a narrow chute and pause in front of him, blocked by a gate, and then he shoots them in the head with a captive bolt stunner -- a compressed-air gun attached to the ceiling by a long hose -- which fires a steel bolt that knocks the cattle unconscious...For eight and a half hours, he just shoots. As I stand there, he misses a few times and shoots the same animal twice. As soon as the steer falls, a worker grabs one of its hind legs, shackles it to a chain, and the chain lifts the huge animal into the air. I watch the knocker knock cattle for a couple of minutes. The animals are powerful and imposing for one moment and then gone in an instant, suspended from a rail, ready for carving. A steer slips from its chain, falls to the ground, and gets its head caught in one end of a conveyor belt. The production line stops as workers struggle to free the steer, stunned but alive, from the machinery. I've seen enough." p218-219 "A 1983 investigation by NBC news said that the Cattle King Packing Company -- at the time, the USDA's largest supplier of ground beef for school lunches and a supplier to Wendy's -- routinely processed cattle that were already dead before arriving at its plant, hid diseased cattle from inspectors, and mixed rotten meat that had been returned by customers into packages of hamburger meat. Cattle King's facilities were infested with rats and cockroaches. Rudy "Butch" Stanko, the owner of the company, was later tried and convicted for selling tainted meat to the federal government. He had been convicted earlier on similar charges. That earlier felony conviction had not prevented him from supplying one-quarter of the ground beef supplied to the USDA school lunch program." p172 "Knocker, Sticker, Shackler, Rumper, First Legger, Knuckle Dropper, Navel Boner, Splitter Top/Bottom Butt, Feed Kill Chain -- the names of job assignments at a modern slaughterhouse convey some of the brutality inherent in the work. Meatpacking is now the most dangerous job in the United States. The injury rate in a slaughterhouse is about three times higher than the rate in a typical American factory. Every year about one out of three meatpacking workers in this country -- roughly forty-three thousand men and women -- suffer an injury or work-related illness that require medical attention beyond first aid. There is strong evidence that these numbers, compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, underestimate the number of meatpacking injuries that occur." ----------------------------------------- And last but not least... p230 "...when a McDonald's opened in Kuwait, the line of cars waiting at the drive through window extended for seven miles. Around the same time, a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Saudi Arabia's holy city of Mecca set new sales records for the chain, earning $200,000 in a single week during Ramadaan, the Muslim holy month." |