The Chain Page 3

  Lachance consulted several neurologists at Mayo and developed a battery of tests to rule out known illnesses. He brought the affected workers in, one by one, and crossed off items from a laundry list of diseases and disorders. It wasn’t mad cow or trichinosis, the two most common slaughterhouse illnesses. It wasn’t a simple muscular disorder like carpal tunnel syndrome or any known autoimmune response like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. It wasn’t cancer or a virus. It wasn’t bacteria or a parasite. Lachance concluded that the slaughterhouse illness was likely some kind of autoimmune disorder, but he couldn’t identify the exact vector—and couldn’t yet rule out the possibility that it was food-borne and transmissible to anyone who was eating Hormel products. All he could say for certain was that the illness was somehow triggered by recent increases in the speed of the chain on QPP’s production line.

  “The line speed, the line speed,” Lachance said when recounting those patient interviews later. “That’s what we heard over and over again.”

  Chapter 2

  HAVE A CUP OF COFFEE AND PRAY

  When Upton Sinclair published his novel The Jungle at the end of February 1906, he hoped to shock readers with his account of the mistreatment of immigrant workers in Chicago’s slaughterhouses. Instead, his book created instant public outcry over the unsanitary conditions it described—how workers put out poison for rats, then swept their carcasses into the sausage grinders; how tripe and cartilage were dyed and flavored with spices, then sold as deviled ham; how men in the cook room occasionally fell into open vats and sometimes went undiscovered for days, their flesh mixed into cans of lard. Sinclair groused that the book became a bestseller “not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef.”

  For regulators, however, the horror felt by Sinclair’s readers couldn’t have come at a better time. At that very moment, there was legislation before Congress calling for the establishment of federal meat inspection by the USDA. President Theodore Roosevelt, who had supported the bill as part of his reelection platform, wrote to Sinclair, promising that “the specific evils you point out shall, if their existence be proved, and if I have power, be eradicated.” He appointed labor commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds to carry out a government probe. When the Neill-Reynolds Report turned out to be even more damning of industry practices than The Jungle, Roosevelt pressured Congress into passing sweeping reforms. The Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 mandated individual examination of all livestock before slaughter, postmortem rechecks of each carcass to ensure health before processing, compliance with new sanitary standards, and agreement to submit to constant monitoring by federal inspectors. Most important, the act authorized the USDA to condemn any meat determined to be unfit for human consumption—and even empowered the department to close down the operations of repeat violators.

  Sinclair, for his part, was unimpressed by the new legislation. He saw the federal inspectors, with their blue uniforms and shining brass buttons, as nothing more than political cover for a corrupt industry, claiming that “the laws regulating the inspection of meat were written by the packers” and “paid for by the people of the United States for the benefit of the packers.” He warned that federal meat inspection laws were a diversion and anticipated that the industry would make sure that inspection addressed only the barest concerns about the deadliness of a product. There would be no supervision, he predicted, of chemicals used to color meat or harsh additives used to preserve it; there would be no regulation against cooking adulterated meat to make it safe for consumption or tests for trace amounts of contamination. Nothing, in short, would slow down the line.

  Sinclair knew firsthand the unstoppable momentum of production. He had seen the hog-killing floors of the Armour and Swift packinghouses adjoining the great Union Stock Yards in Chicago. Each room had a supervisor with a watch, and work there was “determined by clockwork.” Another man was paid to press the gang to move faster, to slaughter more hogs. But then, each day, the expected speed was slightly higher—and cutters farther along the line, paid as pieceworkers, suffered regular reductions in wages, because, the bosses observed, their jobs took less and less time to perform. Sinclair knew that the industry would make up the extra costs in establishing sanitary conditions in exactly this way—and the public, so long as they were assured that their meat was safe, would care little for the welfare of the workers in the packinghouses. Later in life, Sinclair would famously lament, “I aimed at the public’s heart, but by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

  Still, for the better part of a century, the Federal Meat Inspection Act formed the basis for Washington’s authority to supervise and regulate the meat industry under the USDA—and later the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). It was a commonsense system in which an increased number of carcasses dictated an increased number of inspectors, and the time needed to carry out proper examination created an unofficial throttle on line speed—as production could go only as fast as inspection would allow. But then there arose an opportunity to reduce the number of hands prodding and squeezing the glands and lymph nodes of each carcass. All it took was a nationwide panic—and the right man to make the most of it.

  “I grew up in a Hormel family,” Richard Knowlton wrote more than a decade after he had retired as the company’s chief executive in 1995. His father had worked at the Austin plant, scaling and weighing livestock as it arrived by rail. Knowlton grew up just a few blocks away with six brothers and sisters in a four-room house. His blue-collar neighborhood was a cluster of tiny clapboard houses built in the 1920s to accommodate the swelling ranks of Hormel workers and their growing families. George A. Hormel’s brother, John, personally paid to build the Crane Community Chapel so that the neighborhood kids would have a place to attend Sunday school. And the plant was close enough that Knowlton’s father could walk. “Especially in the fall of the year, I remember him going back to work after dinner and after having already put in a full day beginning at 6 a.m. Every other Sunday, he would also do full-day shifts, and I remember him taking me along to watch him weighing the hogs. He did this to earn $11 to $12 a week. With seven children, my dad was desperate for work and considered himself lucky to have a job. Believe me, at a tender age, I understood the reasoning of unions.”

  In June 1948, when he turned sixteen, Knowlton hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps. He went to the plant before the start of the morning shift and put in his name for a summer job. But he was turned away—so he went back the next day and then the next. “I showed up at 5 a.m. at the employment office for three weeks hoping to land an opening,” he remembered. Finally, one morning, the employment manager took pity on him. “Knowlton, I’m sick and tired of looking at you,” he said. “Go out and go to work.” After a brief training period, Knowlton landed on second shift in the gelatin department, dipping hog skins into acid baths to extract aspic as a thickener for commercial ice cream and cake frosting.

  One day, Knowlton came barreling into the plant. “I was rushing through the side door,” he wrote, “trying to get an early punch on the time clock for the afternoon shift. Jay Hormel was coming out. I didn’t see him and knocked him back into a corner of the entryway. I quickly brushed off his clothes. When I realized who he was, I was sure I would be fired. He said, ‘Why don’t you lift up your head and watch where you’re going, kid?’” In later years, Knowlton made clear what reverence he held for Jay Hormel, often pointing out that they were the only two company CEOs to have been born and raised in Austin. But as Knowlton went away to college, returned to a sales job, and steadily rose through the management ranks, he eventually came to regard many of Jay Hormel’s worker incentive programs as outdated. When Hormel died of a heart attack at age sixty-one in 1954, the presidents who immediately followed him regarded it as their responsibility to caretake his vision for the company, but Knowlton had other ideas.

  “Hormel’s labor practices co
ntinued pretty much as he established them for the next fifteen years after his death,” Knowlton remembered. “What Jay Hormel couldn’t foresee . . . was that technology would also be a major factor to change the meat sector and the entire food sector just as it has the automotive industry.” Knowlton first came around to this belief after taking over as plant manager in 1959. Determined to reexamine line operations from top to bottom, he decided to seek out a solution to a long-standing problem in the production of Spam.

  For more than two decades, removing carpal bones and connective tissue from the pork shoulders had been the most time-consuming part of the process, because it required careful knife work by numerous skilled meatcutters. Knowlton was determined to automate this step of production. He found a Dutch manufacturer at the annual convention of the American Meat Institute to build a prototype deboner and then spent more than a year working with Hormel engineers adjusting the apparatus. The technical challenge was significant, but once they had conquered it, Knowlton wrote, the “resulting bone-free pork shoulder along with boneless ham made a nice can of Spam, with substantial labor savings.” In no time, it was possible to reduce one of the most heavily staffed portions of the plant to a crew of just twenty workers.

  When Knowlton was promoted to vice president of operations in 1974, he reasoned that the entire plant could be reconceived in exactly this way. He went before the board and made the case that $100 million for a new factory was a worthwhile investment. Not only would profits rise but the initial cost could be recouped in just three years by adjusting worker wages to match the downward slide of their competitors. Knowlton knew the union would fight the maneuver, but he told the board that a “wholesale retrenchment in hourly wages” was now “an indisputable fact of life in the meat-processing industry.” If the company bought out the contracts of senior workers, they could slash Jay Hormel’s incentive programs and offer lower wages to new employees, who would be low-skill machine operators, rather than skilled meatcutters. This would drastically reduce the number of workers needed to operate the new plant (from 2,950 to 1,150) while still upping output. All they would need to do “to meaningfully increase production volume” was run the line at much higher speeds. To make this dream reality, Knowlton would first have to contend with one of the strongest labor unions in the country. And even if he could beat them, he would have to convince the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service that faster lines did not necessarily equal a threat to food safety. He would have to wait nearly two decades for the right opportunity.

  In 1993, Knowlton finally got the crisis he needed. Over the course of that January, 623 Americans, most of them in the state of Washington, were sickened by a rare strain of E. coli. Four of those affected, all children, died as a result of their infections. The outbreak was soon traced back to tainted hamburgers sold at Jack in the Box restaurants, touching off questions about the safety of ground beef and calls for stricter meat inspection. Amid this heightened concern about microbial contamination, the American Meat Institute (AMI) proposed implementation of microbiological testing as part of what they termed Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) inspection. J. Patrick Boyle, longtime president of AMI, touted the program by explaining that it was based on the inspection system developed by NASA and Pillsbury for assuring food safety aboard American-manned spaceflights going back to the 1950s. Within months of the Jack in the Box outbreak, Boyle petitioned the Department of Agriculture to implement an HACCP-based inspection models program (HIMP). The argument was that meat inspection needed to rely on microbiological testing, rather than traditional organoleptic inspection, which producers derided as “poke and sniff.”

  The idea for the program sounded convincing enough: if plants hired their own quality assurance officers to sort out diseased animals in the livestock area and carcasses in the kill room before they ever reached government inspectors, then, in theory, there would be improved inspection. That weeding-out process would reduce the chance of cross-contamination, and inspectors could focus on likeliest problem spots along the line, where they would conduct random scientific testing. Meanwhile, plant supervisors would have the flexibility to devise their own inspection processes, rather than being forced to adhere to rigid cookie-cutter requirements. Best of all, these efficiencies would streamline production, reducing the cost of meat for consumers without sacrificing food safety. At the heart of the American Meat Institute’s campaign in support of HACCP was the axiom that microbiological testing of carcasses is always superior to merely inspecting carcasses by hand.

  But doubters pointed out that the AMI is a lobbying organization for large meat producers. It was founded as the American Meat Packers Association in 1906, after the publication of The Jungle, for the purpose of resisting implementation of Theodore Roosevelt’s meat inspection reforms. Food safety advocates and the meat inspectors’ union alike worried that HACCP was just a newer, more sophisticated way of reducing “friction points”—the industry term for anything that slows production, including inspection. They cited a requirement in the Federal Meat Inspection Act mandating manual inspections of all carcasses by trained federal inspectors, while the HACCP model would rely on spot-checking select carcasses. (That’s why inspectors joked sardonically that HACCP stood for “Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray.”) More important, this nonstandard model meant that producers would take the lead on inspection, while the USDA was relegated to double-checking. Therefore, the question was not whether microbiological testing was superior to physical inspection but whether self-regulation with occasional spot-checking was superior to universally applied government inspection. In 1997, the USDA decided to find out; for the pork industry, they agreed to allow a test in five processing plants.

  Instrumental in that victory was a man named Joel W. Johnson. Hired as the executive vice president of Hormel in 1992, Johnson had a well-earned reputation as smart and hard-charging. A Harvard MBA, he had also taken a one-year leave from General Foods in 1967 for a tour in Vietnam, where he had served as a captain in the U.S. Army and been awarded a Bronze Star. At Oscar Mayer, he rose to the top on his belief in ready-to-eat, prepared dinners (so-called value-added lines). After Kraft Foods bought the company in 1988, he had launched the hugely successful Lunchables line—a clever repackaging of Oscar Mayer bologna with Kraft cheese and Kraft-owned Ritz Crackers.

  Richard Knowlton hoped that Johnson could work similar magic with the Spam line, which had seen downward trending sales figures for years. In the early 1980s, American Can, the principal supplier of Hormel’s metal containers, had even conducted an internal study, concluding that the public’s growing concerns over eating foods high in fat and sodium meant that Spam would be dead within a decade. Knowlton remembered thinking, “Like heck it will.” He believed that Johnson’s brash style could reimagine and revitalize the brand, but even Knowlton was a bit taken aback by Johnson at first. “I was interviewing Joel,” he remembered years later. “It had gone on all day, so I finally said, ‘Why don’t we go shoot a quick nine holes?’ Well, he shot a perfect thirty-six at me. I thought, ‘This is a guy who plays too much golf—when does he work?’ I also thought, ‘He must have a lot of gumption to come here and shoot a thirty-six at his future employer—and take my money for it!’”

  Johnson quickly applied that audacity by suggesting that the Jack in the Box scare presented a marketing opportunity for Hormel. He wanted to create what he called a “novel usage occasion”—a fun new way of eating Spam that also exploited people’s doubts about ground beef. He proposed encouraging consumers to slice Spam blocks longways into a trio of quarter-pound squares that they could grill and eat on a bun. Pitched as the perfect alternative to “messy” ground beef, the Spamburger was given a $14 million print and television ad campaign as “the only hamburger made with ham.” At the same time, Johnson made a major push to get Spam into state fairs and grocery displays; he held a recipe contest through the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and even negotiated a deal to get Spam on the
shelves at Kmarts nationwide. Still recovering from the early 1990s recession, blue-light shoppers happily chose precooked Spam over more expensive hamburger that they worried might be tainted. Sales of Spam rose by nearly 35 percent in less than two years.

  For his efforts, Johnson was appointed to succeed Knowlton as CEO in October 1993—and the company name was officially changed from George A. Hormel to Hormel Foods, signaling the end of the company’s transition from family-owned business to corporate entity. At the same time, Johnson was climbing the ranks of the American Meat Institute. “Once he joined the executive committee,” AMI president Boyle later remembered, “he was quickly recognized for his leadership.” Johnson was elected treasurer in 1994, secretary in 1995, vice chairman in 1996, and chairman in 1997. All the while, he was becoming convinced of the value that reduced manual inspection and higher line speeds would have for keeping up with production of Spam. Boyle later remembered that Johnson was “among the first” to support the HACCP-based inspection models program—and enrolled Quality Pork Processors, the in-house cut-and-kill operator for Hormel in Austin, Minnesota, and the Hormel plant in Fremont, Nebraska, as two of the first three HIMP plants for pork. “Joel was fully behind it,” Boyle said.

  Under the program proposal unveiled in 1997, the number of on-line USDA inspectors in each pilot plant would be reduced from seven to four, and participating companies could increase line speeds beyond the limits otherwise imposed. In addition to the two Hormel plants, the model was scheduled for testing at Excel Corporation in Beardstown, Illinois; Hatfield Quality Meats in Hatfield, Pennsylvania; and Farmer John in Vernon, California. But before it could be fully put into place, the meat inspectors union sued, arguing that the program violated the Federal Meat Inspection Act. After five years of legal battles, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed, ruling that delegating the task of inspecting carcasses to private employees did, in fact, violate the legal requirement that determination of meat safety be carried out by trained federal inspectors.