[applause] is there a Nonfiction Author of book you would like to see is featured to max and an email treat us post on our wall. The state of the american meatpacking industry next on. An indepth an indepth look at the production of its most popular product. This is about an hour and a half. Good afternoon. Thank you for coming. It is a major breach of etiquette to have an event at 1215 without serving lunch but i guarantee in about 20 minutes no one will have an appetite, that is for sure. We will lose our appetites for good cause today. My name is chris leonard. Of book called the meat racket which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, the story of how few companies to control of our Meat Industry. As a journalist who journalist who has written about the meat business for a long time i am excited to have our guest year today the author and journalist. I followed his work for a long time. He has done a number of really important and revelatory articles about the Meat Industry that have been published in out words such as Bloomberg Business needs. He has really been on the speed in the midwest and breaking a lot of Important News which is culminated in his new book which has someone in israel about this for a long time and have a lot in here that surprised me and we we will get through it. But i want to say, after we set up this event i discovered ted is a pretty big deal. He was editor of the virginia quarterly review from 2003 until 2012 at a time when that magazine really exploded in terms of size and influence, 16 National Magazine awards. Also a celebrated poet. His work has appeared in several volumes of poetry and his most recent book amazingly is a biography of walt whitman during the early years of the civil war he then shifted to the meatpacking industry and wrote this wrote the chain. Thank you for being here. Thank you all for coming. [applause] so to start ted like i said, there was a lot that surprised me. We are going to walk through it all. He followed this from beginning to end bring in a lot into this book, but book, but i walked away feeling like youre booked into critical things. First of all, and profiled this company, not just any company a real harbinger of things that we will come a lot of important reasons, sort of like a canary in a coal mine that really affects anybody and could become the knew norm. And and so we we will talk about that. But i also feel like your book was a really jaded and frankly kind of troubling portrait of the Meat Industry and agribusiness in general during a time of recession and an economic downturn, and i had not really seen that before the mole was going on. So we we will walk through all of this, unpack it all but i want to start at the beginning and asked as asked, as we said, you are a poet, a guggenheim fellow commode is a nice guy like you doing . The easiest answer to that questions our grandfather worked in the swift packing house in omaha during the depression. Then the center of all walls meatpacking industries. I grabbed the stories of what things of been like for him when he was working there. The other part of the command is really informed the approach that i took was that once he had worked in the plans for a while and could not do that work anymore he went to western nebraska where he made again was a farmer. And he was able to keep his family afloat but was never really able to get ahead. And those things were always connected in my mind, the ways in which the systems that he had tried to escape when he left the packing plants were connected to the same problems that he encountered when he went over to the supply side is a farmer. So you know to me it does not actually seen that strange. Strange. These are the stories of the locales that i grew up with. My 1st book was almost entirely about that sort of dual subject as well. And really this book grew out of discovering that the things that i had grown up thinking were a product of the depression and a much earlier still going on in the middle of the countries. That is what is really shocking to me. How much the Meat Industry today is starting to resemble the Meat Industry of almost a hundred years ago. Were all familiar with this book. Really horrific conditions in terms of workers being entered. I was working from the assumption we had gone past that this food Safety Inspection regime osha to protect workers and different from the slaughterhouse of yesteryear. Lets talk about why that is changing changing, the company hormel which is at the center of your book. The most important invention has been antibiotics ipad and spam. So talk about this company, where it came from and how it became as big as it yesterday. The families still pronounce the name hormel. It is a german name, not a french name as the company was sort of rebranded in the 70s at the time when americans were discovering french cuisine. So founded the company and really found it originally as a Small Business where he was processing a few hearts in a week and supplying the local market in austin. Austin. But interestingly right from the beginning the company sort of had a way of taking advantage of economic downturns when there was a Major Economic downturn in 1893 that had to do with overbilling of railroads or melt recognize this was an opportunity because it meant that they were going to be lower prices for shipping. And so he could not only bring in hearts from farther away but to take advantage of the refrigerator car that was recently developed, and as his competitors focused on that refrigerated meat he said well, i think that there is also a market there for people who cant afford that meet smoked meats and eventually encampments. But that economic downturn interesting to me, george came up with the idea of taking the back meet a set of just the pork belly and selling that as canadian bacon, which is where that comes from. We have a lot to be grateful for. Absolutely. But his son was the one who looked at that as a a kind of model when the depression came around for finding ways to take what had been treated as waste product and find a way a way to market it and improve your Profit Margins at a time when maybe they were lean years for the company. And so is borne spam, it becomes ubiquitous. It is this huge product. What is really germane to our conversation today is that carmel becomes this pioneer for sort of knew system of Food Production new Regulatory Regime about how fast you can run the plan. So talk to us. This really started strangely enough with the Food Poisoning scare. At jackinthebox Food Poisoning scare. What happened, and what Regulatory Regime came from that . As he may not recall the jackinthebox outbreak was an outbreak of a new strain of e. Coli that spread among people who had been undercooked beef patties at jackinthebox or in some cases have had contact with people who had. And and the spread a great deal of fear about the safety of ground beef. And so it was at that moment that the at carmel said, you know this is a market opportunity. And they came up with the simple idea of encouraging consumers to take kansas spam and slice them long ways so that you can get three quarter pound patties of spam out of it that you can grill and they started for the spammer campaign. And if you look the socalled spammer is still on the can. That that is the sort of emphasis is placed as a way of consuming the spam. Up until that. That have not been the case. The other thing that is interesting is that that is the moment that there campaign started emphasizing spam as an alternative to what they called messy ground beef. The message, of course, is that ground beef was not too far that it did not just make a mess but that there was hazard there. And the seals of spam skyrocketed climbed about 20 percent in a couple of years. And with that incredible new market spam started for mel started shopping around for ways that they could increase production. Now, certainly the easiest way to increase production is to do more building building do more hire more people, that sort of thing, but the cheapest way to do that is simply to increase the output of the existing plant that you have so what they were looking for was something that would allow them to increase the speed of production within their plants. Very soon they get exactly what they wanted in the form of a Pilot Program that was instituted by the usda was testing out reduced inspection with an packing plants. So it is important for a couple of reasons. The 1st is that when you reduce inspection you are able to increase the speed of production as sort of a natural outcome of that. Up until that. Really the speed of inspectors is what set the speed of production. You can only run the line as fast as an inspector could physically inspect each carcass, but with this new model they said we are going to do microbiological testing it we will allow us to be much more accurate. Wont be what they derided polk and smith so what is left out of the discussion is what they are really doing is handing over most of the inspection to the companies themselves that are in the Pilot Program and doing spot checking. So there is microbiological testing but is carried out by fewer inspectors which means that the line is able to go much faster. Running the alliance at 20 faster 20 percent faster than any other packing plant, pork packing plant in the country. And and hormel becomes the case study because two of their plants were in that group of five and then they bought one of the other three. The three main and kill operations are part of that group. So what we what we see is the usda has a Pilot Program to try out a knew form of Safety Inspection, safety net and it is going to incorporate ramping up wind speeds, line speeds, wrapping up the speed of production and then shifting how the tests that meat instead of having the usda inspector which is a crazy site. New line fewer people standing on line. And let me say quickly, ramping up line speeds is the holy grail. I remember one time in missouri i was at a tyson foods plant sitting in the skys office and we are chatting. Behind him his computer goes into sleep mode command we see his screensaver and is this one sentence going biases run the bone. The. The line where workers are cutting apart chicken carcasses. That was this guys mantra. This giant expensive slaughterhouse. The stock about what life looks like inside one of these plants. Shall have some more. The plan in austin, minnesota which is the subsidiary that exists inside the fence of hormel food and supplies them what you see is that the line speeds over the last decade during this Pilot Program have increased by about 50 percent. At the same time yes, their are jobs that have been added, but the number of workers is somewhere between ten and 15 percent. And some of this there is no denying everyone is working off the plan is working faster. There was always a great deal of anxiety going into those meetings. Everybody knew that the line speed only goes in one direction. Direction. The intention is always to make it faster and faster and faster. Your aware that you are working faster and harder. To me to me that is where this becomes much more of a much more than just a story about the meatpacking industry. Its a story about the american recession and the american recovery. Yes,. Yes, we can say that the company has added jobs since the economic downturn which seems like a positive indication but the reality is their income is determined by how prices are doing. And Companies Like all no the stock prices are soaring everyone is always advising this is a recession proof company. Lets talk run numbers are for 2nd. 950 hogs in our up to a thousand dogs in our which is Something Like 15 hogs a minute. Were talking about manual labor. Reaching 1300 hogs in our. So at the. Where this all began with a reduced inspection model learning about 900 hogs an hour. They got up to 1350. Even now depending on the supply and what has happened recently with the viruses that have gone through and affected supplies the speed of the line is been adjusted but at peak times its running over 1300 our. And so that is really the intention intention, to try to move the line just that much faster. And as much as an increase that is i have been amazed talking to some of the people who work at all know for decades you can remember when they were processing fewer than 500 now. And so the increase in speed is hard to fathom. And tragically you. Out as someone works of the plant like this for years theres a 5050 chance they we will be injured. You injured. You interview a woman who lost a finger injuries like that. And this is where everyone we will lose their appetite. About 20 minutes and just as i said. Lets talk about the brain machine. You uncovered that uncovered that when you ramp up line speed like this you have some unexpected effects and consequences. What happened to mac. Okay. So and chris has already warned you good yourself a little bit there is a section of the production line that is called the head table which is where the heads of the hogs are processed. Its where the user moves the snout the cheek meat is removed the times are removed, they even scraped the pilot meet out from all of that sort of thing. And some of this is done with straight knives some with what are called wizard knives which are these power knives that are circular blades and so everything is moving very fast. And also everything in that area is is powered by a pneumatic system. So there is lot of airflow. At the at the end of the head table, the very last spot is where the denuded school lines up. And at the time where the book is set at the beginning or mel was harvesting the brains from the hogs and selling them to the korean market as a thickener for stirfry. And the way that they collected them at the plant in austin the qb p plan there was by inserting a brass nozzle into the opening at the back of the school where the spinal column was going and there was a pen on the nozzle that would trigger automatically and release a blast of pressurized air which was enough to liquefy the brain inside which would then be poured into a catch pocket and the skull was then dropped down the chute where the bones were taken and ground for bone marrow. They discovered that just enough of the brain matter the worker works inhaling the brain matter. And so because of the air currents through the plan it was not just affecting the person who ran the brain machine the drifting down the head table and actually drifting in other directions as well to the supervisors who regularly came through the area were affected and they did not no what was happening really until the 1st worker started complaining about extreme pain in their extremities hands and feet, and then people actually collapsing on the plant floor. And what they eventually figured out the 1st clinic was involved in the Minnesota Department of health as they inhale the brain matter what triggered an autoimmune response. In the workers bodies were not only killing the neural tissue that they had mailed from the pigs within their bodies started attacking their own neural tissue. It started with protecting the long nerves that run to the extremities and that was what was causing the hand and feet pain. But in the more extreme cases especially the people who actually ran the brain station they were people who had permanent spinal damage and even brain damage you know the brain machine is running at full speed, so their are more and more harris lies brain in the atmosphere. Breathing in a lot more than they used to. What what really bothered me about this passage in the book and what chief of the story was to the whole book is that these employees are discovering to follow the want to say that they are guinea pigs in a lab that they are discovering it by accident, being challenged in the authenticity of what they are saying. As you say i dont think that this is something that could have been for scene in particular but the reaction to it the initial reaction is sort of denial that there is anything going on. A lot of active effort to separate the workers so that they did not give up most of them did not no that anyone else in the plan had been affected until they started seeing each other at the dr. s office. And the way that it was actually eventually pieced together was by a translator and the driver who did translation for the medical center. And they had been translating the same symptoms to doctors from enough people that they started to realize there was something going on. And so and then once there was concern from the mayo clinic and in the department of health there was this kind of public reaction of saying where going to do everything we can. We want to take care of our workers, but behind the scenes qb p is a company was engaged in a squabble with aig over who would have to pay for the medical bills and denying workers comp. Claims and eventually they were a number of workers who were called in and an immigration status was questioned almost all of the workers affected for undocumented workers, and the number of them fearing that they were facing deportation simply fled. And so many of them even the people that i interviewed for the book many of them are simply gone because they were working under false identities in the 1st place you know its its not a matter of tracking them down someplace else. Wherever they are their almost certainly still suffering from the symptoms but they are someplace where they have no way to get medical assistance. And were going to save the talk about undocumented workers for a little bit later, but it was infuriating to read these passages about these this post just trying to basic workmans coverage for these terrible injuries that they did not get. I would like to talk a little bit about the Safety Inspection element of this and whether or not the food we are eating from the implant is safe. There is a great line from the jungle. Interviewing a food safety inspector and did not want to. Out that their were dozens of carcasses running behind them that were not even inspected. The inspector was perfectly happy to support talk to him. Yeah. And so you. Out the usda itself did a large survey study of these plants. Plants. An oig rep