Hogs
to Chops
A
Tour of the Tar Heel, NC,
The
World’s Largest Pork Packaging Operation
The following is a rendition of a tour May 24, 2006, led by Smithfield Foods Assistant Plant Manager, Geno Kerns, and Community Relations Liaison, Marvin Prioleau, with the assistance of many plant supervisors along the route. Tour participants: Rev. Graylan Hagler (UCC, D.C.) and Rev. Luther Holland (UCC, Chicago), of the national group, Ministers for Racial, Economic, and Social Justice, and myself, Barbara Zelter, Program Associate, NC Council of Churches. This tour followed a 2-hour conversation onsite with Smithfield Foods management, where the religious leaders expressed concerns of our constituencies regarding human rights violations at the plant. We listened to management information and positions and exchanged ours, as we brought questions to which they responded. Notes of this meeting are recorded separately.
Since we toured the plant in a random pattern, the order of the processes mentioned here may be slightly off. But you can gather the general progress of the meat preparation, and the roles of the laborers, from the descriptions below.
First, all honor to the 5,000 men and women, majority
brown, who stream into this cavernous complex each day. Bundled in heavy clothing and gear, they
maintain some of the most demanding jobs in the world—the harsh, hidden
slaughter that gives us meat.
PLANT BASICS
The Smithfield Foods
complex lies along Highway 87 in the town of
Several driveways lead to
an array of massive, white, plain buildings topped by a heavy layer of
circuitous ventilation pipes. It’s the
external face of industrial meatpacking in
This is a place where
humans are cogs in a finely-tuned machine.
Each motion is an industrial engineer’s design. While in earlier times, one worker might do
all the shaping to form a ham, now those tasks are parsed out by lines, for
maximum speed. The
piecework of the kill and cut.
Around 15 departments
specialize in the first-to-last order:
The parade of live pigs; the stun gun; the bloodletting by neck; the
hanging to drain; the scalding bath and flaming fire to take off the hair; the
cutting of nails; the gutting; the separation of innards; the saving of uteri
for the pharmaceutical industry; the removal of heads; the keeping of ears and
tongues; the excavation of heads for variety meat; the hacking to the sizes and
shapes of the meats we choose in the stores.
And in several sites, the U.S. Department of Agricultural inspectors,
blending in, looking for flaws, the keepers of our health.
In
the plant are the range of local colors and ethnicities, mostly brown. You don’t see too many elderly here; it’s work for the sturdy and quick.
And so, we are led through metal doors, and through
hanging plastic drapes, into the world of fresh pork in
Just before, back
in the conference room, the guides gave us rubber boots to replace our
shoes. Hair nets and plastic helmets.
Rev. Hagler got a net for his long beard.
Rings, earrings, all jewelry had to come off. Our long white coats were stitched:
“Visitor.” Disposable earplugs on
tethers held off some of the noise beyond, and became souvenirs of the
trip. We were packaged and bundled and protected
for entry into the zone of rivers of blood, soap-bubbled fat-slick floors,
high-hanging pigs, and steep stairs to mesh-metal walkways aloft.
Though the doors,
the first sense is the noise. The loud, constant cacophony of a sea of machines. Cut lines and conveyor belts, chainsaws and
steam sites, zones of specialization each with its own sounds. To speak to the guide is to put your mouth by
his ear, and shout. To listen requires
the reverse. Casual conversation between
workers seems impossible. Every now and
then, there is a space of relative quiet, where the greeting of a newly
introduced supervisor can be heard in the din.
Occasionally a
worker gives a nod, but mostly they stick to their tasks. With 18.5 hogs a minute coming down the line,
hour by hour, there’s no time for slack.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Live hogs move from outside, snout to tail, along a fenced-in belt. They howl. One by one, they take in a jolt; 1.90 amps and 6,200 megahertz delivered through a device that a worker rests on their shoulders, a metal arm to the head—the stun tool. Zap, move on, zap, move on.
Lying still, each hog in the line is flipped by strong
men, to expose the throat. A
Now dead, the hog is hoisted up on a hook. It’s an elevated line of upside-down hogs, closely packed, fluids draining out of snouts and mouths into low-lying lines of trough. Some of their legs still kick. I was told: “If the hind legs kick, it’s just reflex and they’re dead. If the front legs kick, they’re alive. See that man down there? He’s checking for that.” That man will shock the brain of any still alive with an electrical tool, to guarantee the animal is dead.
“Some people have worked this kill line for 10 years,” the Assistant Plant Manager replied, when I asked how long someone lasts at these tasks. The plant opened in 1992.
It is now time for the drained dead hogs to have their hair removed, and nails. Water 139 degrees scalds the pig, just like the boiling dunk on the family farm. Most of the hair falls away in this steamy place, settling in an ugly pile. A strange manicure-like scene is next, as someone with strong clippers snaps off the toenails of the clean and hanging hog. These nails are saved, and with the hair go to the giant mix of leftovers for rendering next door.
Before or after the nail clip, the hogs pass through a gauntlet of fire, to singe the remaining hair and leave the skin clean. Two blasts of fire, one high, one low, flame out in a stack through which the hogs pass, one flash after another. This is the most hellish part in the plant. The fire and steam combine to compound the acrid stench that permeates this whole, warm kill room. Over in the cooled sections where meat cutting occurs, the smells are more subdued, and the animals are already parts, not fully whole pigs that ride through the fire.
These externally slick hogs are now ready to chop. The preparation is done. It’s time for creation of meat. We move from the kill floor to the cutting floor. We move from hot to cold, from stench to relatively breathable air.
The hogs that leave the kill floor are stored in a chill room for one hour and 40 minutes, to make them easier to cut, and to lower the temperature to reduce bacterial growth.
When the hogs are cool enough, saw-wielding men slash their bellies as they fly down the line, still upside down and hooked from above. Their neighbors yank out guts, and others quickly separate the parts: livers here, uteri there, lungs and hearts over there. The diaphragm and gall bladder too. Each has its destination and purpose. All over the plant, as the cut-ups occur, large circular cardboard bins with plastic liners catch the parts. These parts fly out of conveyors and machinery at a furious pace. Women stand by the bins to spread the stuff as it drops in from the belts or is slung by cutters. Haul away one full bin, put in another. Everyone’s busy. It’s all still loud.
Decapitation comes next. One worker slices the neck such that the head hangs from one strip of skin near the back. The next one makes the final slice. The heads then are hung in a row along the high conveyor, just as the whole hogs had been. Two lines of workers deal with the heads. Supervisor Hovis explains. Line A is where the ears come off and are thrown in a bin. Line B is where tongues come out and are thrown in a bin. Workers slice skin off the faces, as the heads move by. That skin will be rendered down, with the fat and hair and other such strangely called “edibles” (edible by animals not human).
The rest of the head stuff will be used for “varietal meat.”
We passed a strange machine, where a woman pulled what
looked like intestine over a pole on a table.
“That’s bung,” the guide said.
Bung means rectum. The women were
emptying out the rectums and pulling them over the rod to straighten them
out. “We sell those to
In a bin nearby, odd hunks of pig body stacked up, many parts with a splash of bright indigo ink. Those are the hunks of pigs the USDA inspectors found not acceptable. I asked what happened to these. “They go for rendering.” “Even if they are diseased?” I asked. Yes, the guide explained. It’s for animals.
Now we are to torsos, cleaned of innards. These smaller hunks roll by from the elevated conveyor, and lines of workers slice off fat with ergonomic tools, rounded blades on flat handles. Scoop, scoop, scoop off the fat. Then, scoop out the rib section, for our BBQ ribs. Slice out a loin. On these specialized lines, the men and women move their knives in repetitive speed. One motion over and again.
“Do the workers change tasks?” I asked. “Yes, daily, within their zone. That man up there worked this line yesterday. They can switch off so they don’t do the same thing all the time.” Still, with about 18 hogs passing by per minute, it’s a lot of the same.
The hogs are finally done, from whole to dissected parts. It’s a miracle of efficiency, a bloody, gutty race to turn 30,000-plus live hogs each day into packaged food we buy.
My desire for meat now destroyed, I asked about whether the employees got a discount for buying what they prepared. “Yes, there’s an employee store. The deals are good—maybe $10 for a box of back ribs.” I internally applauded the workers who come here day after day and stand strong, with stamina for the job and appetite still for their product.
As we went out, I asked about injuries from this sea of regular people who do extraordinary work. “We average 3 or 4 a day. Many of them are slips and falls up the stairs.”
Still, at the plant’s in-house clinic we saw a young, small Latino whose arm was cased in gauze. “What happened?,” one of our delegation asked in Spanish. “It’s cut.”
A final room we saw was the knife-sharpening room, the only area open all three shifts. Two men washed the knives in sterile cases and sharpened them in a sparking machine. Clean and sharp knives are the key to relative safety on the job. Each worker has two knives. When one becomes dull, they can ask for a new one.
At the end of the tour, a few questions remained. How does one take a bathroom break? “A supervisor relieves the person on the line for that time.”
When do the workers eat? An afternoon worker comes in at 3, and has time off at 6 and 9. They get an hour total, to split between a mealtime and another break; they choose. The company pays for 15 minutes of the hour, considering it a gift. They only are required to pay for time on the floor. Lunch time is unpaid. Employee lunch rooms feature pictures of Employees of the Month. Jugs of Gatorade are on the floor for sipping on break. But other than this time down, it’s unremitting.
“It’s tough work, for sure,” said a manager near the end. That’s true.
I had pork barbecue at our lunch meeting before this
tour. I’m not sure when that meal will
appeal again. If it does, the 5,000 of