The Food Chain's Weakest Link: Slaughterhouses

The modern American slaughterhouse is a very different place from the one that Upton Sinclair depicted in his early-20th-century novel, “The Jungle.”

Many are giant, sleek refrigerated assembly lines, staffed mostly by unionized workers who slice, debone and “gut snatch” hog and beef carcasses, under constant oversight of government inspectors. The jobs are often grueling and sometimes dangerous, but pork and beef producers boast about having some of the most heavily sanitized work spaces of any industry.

Yet meat plants, honed over decades for maximum efficiency and profit, have become major “hot spots” for the coronavirus pandemic, with some reporting widespread illnesses among their workers. The health crisis has revealed how these plants are becoming the weakest link in the nation’s food supply chain, posing a serious challenge to meat production.

After decades of consolidation, there are about 800 federally inspected slaughterhouses in the United States, processing billions of pounds of meat for food stores each year. But a relatively small number of them account for the vast majority of production. In the cattle industry, a little more than 50 plants are responsible for as much as 98 percent of slaughtering and processing in the United States, according to Cassandra Fish, a beef analyst.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/the-food-chains-weakest-link-slaughterhouses/ar-BB12Q3Yo?li=BBnbfcN

While they may not be as bad as those portrayed in "The Jungle" it sounds like there's still room for improvement.