Meat: Is It Really Worth Eating?

By: Noah Canales

 Meat: Is It Really Worth Eating?

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegan. These were the

words of famous musician Paul McCartney while narrating a documentary about raising

the awareness of the proclaimed cruelty and abuse brought upon many common livestock

animals we eat every day. There are always going to be the activists writing biased blogs

on saving the animals from a torturous death and such. And there are those involved with

the accused slaughter houses that will deny everything just to keep people buying their

products without question. There’s no point in trying to stop all major meat producing

companies from dong what they do (which is making meat). The main question flying

around is whether the processes that take place in order to mass produce the meats we eat

everyday healthy and humane for both livestock and consumer. A majority of the world

who have done their homework know that it isn’t.

How it’s Made

Before we take a look on the grueling facts about what today’s processes are like

and how it affects consumers, we should go back in time when major companies were

first selling to rising fast food chains around the 1900s. Back then, many farmers were

trying to find ways to naturally cure pork and other meats due to not having refrigerators

like we do today. It was around this time that major companies began to use chemicals in

the everyday meats like bacon (Living History Farm) Mass production meats were

becoming especially popular among the 40’s and 50’s, so companies needed to find a
 Meat: Is It Really Worth Eating?

way to fatten up livestock by any means necessary. Sadly the again turned to chemicals

for the answer. Consumers would never notice until side effects of constant nausea and

increasing cholesterol levels. It was at this time where the demand really didn’t leave the

producers many other choices even with their current stronghold on meat marketing

prices (Peta). It may seem bad, but these methods are actually much healthier than those

that are being used in our time now.

It’s shocking enough how unhealthy some of the meats that we eat almost every

day, but it’s even worse to find out how that meat made it all the way to the freezer isle.

The basic process seems pretty simple: a major slaughter house company give the cow’s

owner a date to bring is or her cow there, sign some liability forms and send your cow of

to be turned into the many frozen meats you may see at your local grocery store less than

a few weeks later. That’s only the surface of what happens, and the most gruesome parts

of the process is what slaughterhouses don’t want you to see. Here are the noted words of

New York Times author Michael Pollan:

“…they will get on another truck and travel 100 miles to Liberal, Kansas, to a

National Beef plant there. They will be put in a pen in a parking lot and wait their

turn, and go up the ramp, and through a blue door. I was not allowed to go

through the blue door. The kill floor is not something that journalists are allowed

to see, even if you own the animal, I learned.

 Meat: Is It Really Worth Eating?

But I have reconstructed what happens on the other side of the blue door. What

happens is that the animals go in single file. At a certain point, they pass over a

bar, their legs on both sides, and the floor slowly drops away, and at that point

they're being carried along sort of on that bar, which is a conveyor belt, and they

then pass through a station where there's a man on the catwalk above. He's

holding an object that looks like a power nailing gun or something. It's a

pneumatic device called a stunner.

This essentially injects a metal bolt. It's about the size and length of a thick pencil

into its brain, right between the eyes, and that should render the animal brain

dead.

At that point, chains will be attached to his rear legs. He will be lifted up by the

chains. The chains are attached to an overhead trolley, and then he will be bled.

Another person in another station will stick a long knife in and cut his aorta and

bleed the animal. And then he will be completely dead.

And from there he goes through a series of stations to clean him and to remove his

hide. One of the real problems is that the animals have spent their [lives] lying in

their manure, are smeared and caked with the stuff, and they're entering the food

plant. And so many steps are taken to make sure that the manure doesn't infect the

meat, which can happen very easily…(Pollan)”

It seems pretty clear that the way that massively produced meats like beef have changed

quite a bit over the years in the name of convenience and efficiency. There are still many
 Meat: Is It Really Worth Eating?

arguments about how humane meat production should be, let alone if it’s possible for it to

be considered a humane process at all (Arguments For and Against “Humane Meat”)

Speaking of the common debate of meats “humanity”, there are several points

supporting its humanity, or the lack of it. To illustrate, most slaughterhouses raising and

killing pigs tend not to use anesthesia when cutting off the tails of the swine before

killing them. The breeding sows (mothers) are held in pens so small it allows them no

range of motion, and is just big enough for the mother and newborn piglets. Supporters of

making the pig’s lifestyle more humane propose creating more free range cage along with

anesthetics to be injected before they are put down for a less painful death. (Arguments

For and Against “Humane Meat”) On the opposite side, the main point of the argument is

that there is no such thing as humane meat when all farms / slaughterhouses will kill the

male offspring because they cannot birth offspring and are useless due to artificial

insemination. Another point they have proven is that some of the standard that are to be

considered humane are becoming highly unrealistic, even for animal standards. Cost is a

very important factor as well. With the processes that are used now it may be impossible

for some companies to afford even changing some of their ways even if they wanted to.

(Arguments For and Against “Humane Meat”) It’s easy to conclude that the processes

used are and will remain to be considered inhumane.

Effects on the Consumer

Walking into the local grocery store, the average consumer sees nothing but a

surplus of food, right there for that person to take home with ease, no harm done except
the loss of a little time. Did that consumer ever stop to think about that packet of ground

beef he or she was holding really got there? Though the idea that ran through his or her

head may be a small farm where all these cute little animals are raised and nurtured with

a perfect life, it’s an entirely different story. It’s the one that major food industries don’t

want you to hear in order to keep the unknowing consumer buying without question. Ever

since the industrial revolution, many new entrepreneurs strove to find the fastest and most

inexpensive ways to get their product made (Peta). The consumers expense was and is

still irrelevant. There have been cases upon cases suing companies for accounts of food

poisoning, poor working qualities for the staff of the companies and many more such as

fighting for pay above minimum wage. You may not know about it, but Tyson Meats, one

of the world’s top produces in meat has been sued for numerous fast food companies has

been sued for hiring of illegal immigrants and unacceptable work conditions for those

working in the factory slaughter houses. (Slaughterhouse Cases) thre was also a recent

uproar about videos claiming that groung beef in major meat production companies used

a “pink slime” to make their ground meats , which the publisher was later sued for by

Tyson Meats to prove this to be untrue(Pink Slime Lawsuit).The processes that many of

these major producing factories have often been considered inhumane, but is there really

a humane way to kill livestock? Lots of undercover research has taken place in order to

find more answers on these possible myths that most of the time have been proven to be

true.

Let’s take for example the research of federal studies performed by the National

Cancer Institute to see which major factors of the average lifestyle increase the chances

of developing cancerous diseases. The studies that were conducted included keeping
track of more than 500,000 men and women over the course of ten years and their health

records. 47,976 men and 23,276 women died over that given time, which was between

the years of 1995 and 2005 (Eating Meat Kills More People Than Previously Thought).

The group studying the massive amounts of deaths all had quite similar causes. There

were the usual things like excessive smoking and other drugs, lack of nutrition, etc.

Surprisingly the leading cause of cancer was the over-consumption of red meats which

increased chances of fatal cancers of all sorts (20% higher for women and 27% for males

on risk to cancer according to the test results). The results also showed that white meats

have the same effect to a certain extent; the percentages are just slightly lower. The study

team’s records revealed that 11% of men’s and 16% of women’s deaths could have been

prevented if it weren’t for the life threatening diets. Consequently, the U.S. government

has provided many new health plans in order to compensate for these claims in order to

get the same required nutrients that the red meats would normally supply in the average

diet. It would seem that veganism would really be the only option to be truly healthy,

which is what the National Cancer Institute was trying to promote all along, as the last

few pages were only ways to plan your own vegan diet.

With the given information, we can assume that there are many unsupervised points in

the production line that possibly caused the poisoning of this group of tested individuals

and what led some of them to their deaths. It shows yet another possible way that

consumers are never truly going to have such a thing as healthy and humane meat.
 The results of just the consumption of meat may seem terrible and is a perfect reason

to why veganism is a much healthier option. There are some conflicts with the cancer

project. Other companies looked closer into the project and realized that there was a

possibility that the study may have been biased. After more research was put into the

specific topic, it was found out that the group leading the project was a vegan and

animal rights group with very close ties with like groups like PETA, which stands for

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.( Cancer Prevention and Myth: Meat

and Cancer Hypothesis - Fact & Fiction) What was also discovered was that the team

overlooked several important factors while conducting their research. For example

one of the facts that was never considered was that Harvard studies had proven with

the same set of subjects who had fatefully passed had no connection between the

death causing colon cancer and the meats that they were consuming on an almost

daily basis. There were no other scientific bodies that supported the Cancer Projects

studies due to its biased and inaccurate conclusions due to the inadequate amount of

thought put into the proof of this project.

The way that food production is carried out, especially the processes used in

producing common meats has drastically changed over the years. Machines have

revolutionized the efficiency of the process but the so called humanity that so many

activists and vegan supports ask for isn’t really a thought on the company’s mind. A lot of

people believe that just asking will change, but development is irreversible when it comes

to this topic. Many companies cannot afford such requirements even if they wanted to

due to lack of time money and space. In short, producers want the cheapest,
fastest, and easiest way to get their meat out the door and into your shopping cart. Little

attention is paid to all negative externalities and underpaid employees who disregard

weakly enforced protocols. Its arguable that there is really no such thing as humane meat,

but it really depends on the company. Is it really possible to revert to the ways of the

olden days just to keep a few activists happy? Will this destructive path lead to the point

of a world full of vegans? It is said that if all slaughterhouses had glass walls everyone

would be vegan.