The Chain Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Jack

  EPIGRAPH

  The speeding-up seemed to be growing more savage all the time.

  —Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART ONE Chapter 1. The Brain Machine

  Chapter 2. Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray

  Chapter 3. Alter Egos

  PART TWO Chapter 4. Little Mexico

  Chapter 5. They Threw Me Away Like Trash

  Chapter 6. This Land Is Not Your Land

  PART THREE Chapter 7. From Seed to Slaughter

  Chapter 8. Don’t Be Afraid to Hurt Them

  Chapter 9. Ag Gag

  PART FOUR Chapter 10. I Thought It Was Fishy

  Chapter 11. You Are Not Welcome

  Chapter 12. Brother, Are You Okay?

  PART FIVE Chapter 13. A Clean Bill of Health

  Chapter 14. Lay of the Land

  Chapter 15. Water Works

  PART SIX Chapter 16. The City of No

  Chapter 17. Inspection

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  Maria Lopez will never forget that day.

  It was 2004, the middle of an ordinary shift on the line at Hormel Foods—a sprawling brick-and-concrete complex, just across the Union Pacific tracks on the southern edge of Fremont, Nebraska. The worker beside her fed pork shoulders one after another into a spinning saw, just as he did every other day of the week, while Lopez gathered and bagged the trimmed fat to go into Spam. The facility in Fremont was just one of two plants in the world where Hormel made its signature product, so the pace of work had always been steady. But the speed of the line had jumped recently, from 1,000 hogs per hour to more than 1,100, and Lopez was having trouble keeping up. As her coworker reached for another shoulder, she rushed to clear the cutting area—and her fingers slipped toward the saw blade. Lopez snatched her hand back, but it was too late. Her index finger dangled by a flap of skin, the bone cut clean through. She screamed as blood spurted and covered her workstation.

  Later, a surgeon was able to shorten both ends of the bone and stabilize it with a screw before delicately repairing the tendons and reattaching the nerves and blood vessels. A month after that, Lopez needed another surgery to insert a second pin to straighten a crook in the bone. In the end, she lost all feeling in her finger—but missed just two months of work. It was only after she returned to Hormel that Lopez discovered a stomach-turning truth: that while she sprinted to the nurse’s station and was taken to the Fremont Area Medical Center, while she waited, finger wrapped, in the emergency room for the surgeon to drive in from Omaha, the cut line at Hormel continued to run. That hour, like virtually every working hour, without interruption, the plant processed 1,100 hogs—their carcasses butchered into parts and marketed as Cure 81 hams or Black Label bacon, the scraps collected and ground up to make Spam and Little Sizzlers breakfast sausages. Her coworkers were instructed by floor supervisors to wash the station of her blood, but the line never stopped.

  Maria remembered all this while she fried papas in the kitchen of her home on the outskirts of Fremont, her index finger pointed straight as she gripped the spatula. She told me that her numb finger made her clumsy at her job at Hormel, and she grew worried that her fumbling might lead to a more serious injury. In 2006, when the speed increased yet again—this time to more than 1,200 hogs per hour—Maria quit. Her husband, Fernando, who still worked at the plant, told me that the line was now moving at more than 1,300 head per hour, and the injuries were increasing and becoming worse. He had a friend who was a “gut snatcher,” tasked with pulling innards from swinging carcasses. One day, when he took too long clearing an abdominal cavity, the backsaw cut through the spine and sliced off four of his fingers. “I think he lose two of these,” Fernando said, pointing to his middle and ring finger. Then, as if an afterthought, Fernando added that he too had lost part of a finger—the tip of his left pinkie to a rib cutter. In every case, he said, “they washed it up but never stopped production. It’s terrible to work on the line.”

  Workers’ rights advocates agree. In September 2013, a coalition of civil rights groups, led by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest, called on the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to “reduce the speed of the processing line to minimize the severe and systemic risks” faced by American meatpackers, such as repetitive stress injuries and cuts and amputations, which affect meatpacking workers at “alarming rates.” They pointed to an extensive study of packinghouse employees conducted by Nebraska Appleseed in 2009, which found that 52 percent of all workers felt that conditions had become less safe in the last twelve months, with “the vast majority” citing line speed as the cause. Despite the report, all of the plants studied had seen further speedups in the intervening years.

  But only a handful of packinghouses in the entire country have been permitted to run as fast as the Hormel plant in Fremont. Thanks to a special program piloted by the USDA more than a decade ago to test the effects of reduced inspection on food safety, five pork processing facilities nationwide have been allowed to set their own line speeds. And Hormel managed to get all three of the slaughter operations that it owns or operates into that select handful. This increase in work speed positioned Hormel to capitalize on the coming economic crisis and the demand it created for budget-friendly meat like Spam. But this seemingly minor change in plant operation—upping the speed of slaughter on just three kill floors and speeding butchering and processing in just the two plants where Hormel manufactures Spam—also set off a wide-ranging and sometimes disastrous series of events.

  What follows, then, is not just the tale of what happened when Hormel decided to speed up production but also an examination of the knock-on effects of that decision, over a period of years, up and down the supply chain—from the confinement facilities where high-density hog farming increasingly threatens environmental quality and animal welfare to the packinghouses where workers face some of the most dangerous working conditions in the country and hostility from the communities where they live to the butcher counter at the supermarket, where the safety and wholesomeness of the food supply have been jeopardized. It is a portrait of American industry pushed to its breaking point by the drive for increased output but also a cracked mirror in which to see our own complicity, every time we choose low-cost and convenience over quality. It is, in short, an attempt to calculate the true price of cheap meat.

  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 g
reatest 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.”