Chapter 9 blog post

Chapter 9 talks about many different health related issues that are ignored in these factories and also many diseases and illnesses that are the outcome of these factory's irresponsibility. One of the bigger problems that struck me while reading the chapter was the whole "gutter". In these factories meat is run through a conveyor belt at a certain speed, most of the time being very fast and some of the workers can't keep up. As a gutter, one of the more important responsibilities is to make sure the knife you use to cut the animals with is not contaminated, therefore workers are told to clean the knife every few minutes or so but the speed of these machines are sometimes so overwhelming that they either forget or have no time to because if not production will be cut back. This part of the chapter interested me the most because this is what consumers buy whenever they go to the supermarket, but no one really knows how sometimes the meat they buy is covered in feces. As described in the book most of these mistakes are only fixed with practice meaning that it happens to everyone.

"The increased speed of today's production lines make the task much more difficult... A single worker at the "gut table" may eviscerate 60 cattle an hour. A former IBP "gutter" told me that it took him six months to learn how to pull out the stomach and tie off the intestines without spillage. At best, he could gut two hundred conscutive cattle without spilling anything." (Schlosser 203). This quote from the book gives a more descriptive overview of the problem where the employees basically throw manure around. When the employees first begin they have no experience at gutting, so it takes them about half of a year in order to master it. In that 6 months many mistakes can happen and just imagining the built up is probably a ridiculous amount. To even take this a little deeper, this is only one employee, many people are hired all the time making room for more and more mistakes.