The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret

[lakhota]

First Hormel gutted the union. Then it sped up the line. And when the pig-brain machine made workers sick, they got canned.

Garcia had gotten on at QPP only 12 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 line snaking down the middle of a J-shaped bench [DC] called the "head table." Every hour, more than 1,300 severed pork heads go sliding along the belt. Workers slice off the ears, clip the snouts, chisel the cheek meat. They scoop out the eyes, carve out the tongue, and scrape the palate meat from the roofs of mouths. Because, famously, all parts of a pig are edible ("everything but the squeal," wisdom goes), nothing is wasted. A woman next to Garcia would carve meat off the back of each head before letting the denuded skull slide down the conveyor and through an opening in a plexiglass shield.

On the other side, Garcia inserted the metal nozzle of a 90-pounds-per-square-inch compressed-air hose and blasted the pigs' 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 say the goo looked like Pepto-Bismol; others describe it as more like a lumpy strawberry milkshake.) When the 10-pound barrel was filled, another worker would come to take the brains for shipping to Asia, where they are used as a thickener in stir-fry. Most days that fall, production was so fast that the air never cleared between blasts, and the mist would slick workers at the head table in a grisly mix of brains and blood and grease.

Much More: motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/hormel-spam-pig-brains-disease

[ed1066]

LOL! I thought we were finally going to find out who you work for, Lakhota!

[billisonboard]

Have to admit I was surprised when the topic was actually Spam instead of spam.

[pappyjohn99]

Or, rather, Matthew Garcia is not his name. It's the made-up name I've given him to shield him from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I don't know his real name anyway, not the name his mother cooed when she cradled him in her arms. All I know is the name on his driver's license, his I-9 and ITIN, his medical records and workers' comp claim. There is no Matthew Garcia in Austin, Minnesota, and if you go looking, you won't find him, but then there's no Emiliano Ballesta or Miriam Angeles either. Not really. Because many QPP employees are working under a fake name with false papers and a phony address.

Fake person. Evil corporation. HO-HUM Why should we believe any of this?