It's NOT a "Jungle" in There

   This last week I had the privilege to tour several meat processing facilities, and I was utterly amazed at what I saw.  If I had any notions of dirty, dank, blood-flecked rooms, they quickly vanished on the first tour.  Such unsanitary conditions would not be in harmony with the respect every decent meat product business holds for the needs of consumers.  After all, who wants to make food that makes a person sick?  This attitude of respect has caused a great revolution in the meat industry since the days of the infamous Chicago stockyards.  Now, companies strive to attain the greatest levels of cleanliness to ensure high-quality products are made on their grounds.  At each stage of meat processing, from procuring ingredients to shipping products, the highest standards of care are followed to optimize product wholesomeness.

  Prior to each tour through the facilities, my group’s tour guides provided us with attire meant not only to keep us safe but also to avoid contaminating the facility and meat products.  We removed our jewelry and watches and donned hairnets, hard hats, ear plugs (safely attached to the hard hats by a cord), safety glasses, frocks, and rubber overshoes.  We took every tour backwards: first we saw the shipping department, then packaging, then cooking, and lastly formulation.  If any little buggies happened to hop on us at the shipping department and hopped off in the formulation area, they would be killed as they ventured on raw product through the cooking process.  At strategic points we washed our hands and shuffled through white sanitation foam or across boot-scrubbing machines.  We DID NOT touch the machinery or products as we followed our guides through the plant.  As products moved from one phase to the next, they were scrutinized by trained workers looking for defects.  At certain stages, ingredients or products were removed for quality tests.  Quality assurance teams were on site to check for both product quality and safety.  Products were frozen or stored in modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) to ensure their safety as they traveled to consumers.  If a product looked suspicious at any stage in this process, it was removed from the line and dealt with accordingly.

   In addition to striving for product safety and quality, we saw that companies are making great efforts to reduce waste, be environmentally friendly, and treat workers fairly.  No company wants to make a person sick, and at each facility we saw innovations to improve the wholesomeness of meat products.  These clean, well-lit, inspected places were far cries from the filthy and foul factories portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.  Modern facilities are filled with personnel and equipment to ensure that every product made will nourish and satisfy the customer.  Also, consumer handling instructions are applied to every package to inform the consumer on how best to prepare the product.  When companies respect the consumers’ needs for safe products and consumers follow the companies’ advice, everybody wins.