by Ted Genoways
When Hormel submitted the blueprints for the nearly $30 million building permit application, a reporter for the Dubuque Telegraph Herald discovered that most of the design schematics were labeled “Bacon Bits Relocation”—but one was labeled “Spam.” Upon closer inspection, he found that several of the bacon bits documents also contained production equipment and structural elements for the “Spam project.” Rick Williamson, Hormel’s manager of external communications, confirmed that Phase 2 of the project would be a Spam production line and that the product would join “the plant’s exports.” The news spread instantly. Hormel had not expanded Spam production into a new facility since the acquisition of the Fremont plant in 1947; this development indicated that the brand was continuing to thrive despite the downturn and showed that export demands were growing too rapidly for Fremont and Austin to keep up.
More than that, the shift of production to Dubuque may signal a new era of plant design—one where the linear design demanded by traditional meat inspection is no longer required. Mark Zelle, the plant manager at Progressive Processing, has been with Hormel for thirty years, running the Stockton, California, plant before taking over in Dubuque. But most of Zelle’s experience has been in Hormel’s labs and serving as a quality control manager, both in Stockton and at the plant in Beloit, Wisconsin. In that time, he had begun to imagine a production model where the cut line was replaced by a modular system of interconnected but independent rooms, where independent processes could be sped up according to demand. “By separating operations,” he told an industry magazine, “the plant can potentially run 24/7,” without having to shut the entire production line down for cleaning.
But decentralizing production also implied something significant. It meant that production at the Dubuque plant would be too spread out to be covered by traditional inspection by the USDA. Did Hormel know something they weren’t saying publicly? Were the elevated line speeds that had confined production of Spam to two plants about to be implemented more broadly?
In an emailed statement to reporters, Hormel’s spokesman Williamson would only say, “The timing for the Spam operation is still in process, and we anticipate production to begin in early 2015.” A USDA spokeswoman, meanwhile, said the department would not comment until completion of its evaluation of HIMP for pork was made public in March 2014. When that deadline came and went, I filed a FOIA request for materials used to prepare the report. I got a letter from the USDA approving the request, but I never received any materials. Another spokeswoman said I could sue if I was dissatisfied, bit I was advised against it by Adina H. Rosenbaum, part of the litigation group at the watchdog group Public Citizen in Washington, D.C. She said Public Citizen had successfully sued FSIS in the past and still not gotten access to the documents they had requested. “If the USDA is committed to keeping documents from you,” she said, “you won’t be able to get them.”
My last morning in Austin, I parked across the road from the plant and rolled down the windows. It was still cold, the snow piled along the sidewalks turning gray and pitted. As the day shift started up, the smell was unmistakable: fresh pig shit and baking ham. Along the access road, marked Hormel Drive, eighteen-wheelers came barreling in, pulling livestock trailers. They took the corner through the chain-link gate and reversed into the loading docks, all but concealed by the barrier wall. But as each new truck arrived, I could hear the beeping of the backup warning, then the rattle of rear doors opening. And then there was the sound of sizzling electric prods, the clatter of cloven hooves on metal grating, and the guttural, almost human, screeching of hogs.
I saw the QPP security guard trundle out to his pickup truck and begin circling the block, driving by again and again. But he couldn’t touch me. I was on a public street, next to Horace Austin Park with its clear view of the Cedar River. I sat and watched as evidence of our national industry and know-how arrived by the truckload. Our whole history of conquering the West, industrializing agriculture, and turning hog slaughter into a “custom meat operation” arrived right there at QPP’s door. And, in that moment, an illness like PIN and all the other social ills brought on by Hormel in their quest for increased output seemed an inevitable by-product of an industry that has grown too large and gained too much momentum to ever stop or even slow down.
I rolled up the windows and turned the key in the ignition. More than nineteen thousand hogs were processed at QPP that day. It was a day like any other.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Portions of this book originally appeared as:
“Cut and Kill,” Mother Jones, July–August 2011
“Why Big Ag Loves the Drought,” onearth.org, December 10, 2012
“This Land Is Not Your Land,” Harper’s, February 2013
“Spam’s Shame,” slate.com, May 31, 2013
“Gagged by Big Ag,” Mother Jones, July–August 2013
“Who Belongs in Fremont, Nebraska?” harpers.org, November 1, 2013
“The Truth about This Pork Chop and How America Feeds Itself,” Bloomberg Businessweek, December 5, 2013
“The City of No,” harpers.org, February 14, 2014
“Hog Wild,” OnEarth, Spring 2014
An excerpt in The Nation, September 2014.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Brad Wieners, Christopher Cox, Jeremy Keehn, George Black, Scott Dodd, Betsy Reed, and John Swansburg for their editorial input. Special thanks to Clara Jeffery for her early support—giving tough feedback but also ample room within the pages of Mother Jones. Thanks to Ryann Liebenthal, Maddie Oatman, Zaineb Mohammed, and especially Joe Kloc for their fact-checking, research, and additional reporting. Particular gratitude to Don Fehr at Trident Media Group, for seeing a book here from the start, to Tim Duggan at HarperCollins for making it happen, and to Calvert D. Morgan Jr., Emily Cunningham, and Kathleen Baumer for getting me across the finish line. Last but not least, my thanks to Mary Anne Andrei for her co-reporting and her photographs.
NOTES
PROLOGUE
Maria Lopez will never forget that day: Interview with “Maria and Fernando Lopez” (not their real names) was conducted in Fremont, Nebraska, November 2013.
the line had jumped recently, from 1,000 hogs per hour to more than 1,100: Line speeds throughout the book are derived from a variety of sources; they come, most often, from worker recollection and have been verified against union records whenever possible.
“reduce the speed of the processing line to minimize the severe and systemic risks”: Petition filed on September 3, 2013, http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/splc_osha_poultry_worker_safety_petition.pdf.
an extensive study of packinghouse employees conducted by Nebraska Appleseed in 2009: “‘The Speed that Kills You’: The Voice of Nebraska’s Meatpacking Workers,” Nebraska Appleseed, 2009, http://boldnebraska.org/uploaded/pdf/the_speed_kills_you_030910.pdf.
PART I
1: The Brain Machine
Matthew Garcia felt feverish and chilled: Interviews with “Matthew Garcia” (not his real name) were conducted in Austin, Minnesota, and via telephone throughout 2010 and 2011.
a J-shaped, steel-encased bench called the “head table”: Line speeds and working conditions at QPP between 2000 and 2006 are well documented. A map of the cut line and detailed descriptions of the plant operations, as prepared by the Minnesota Department of Health, were published in Stacy M. Holzbauer, Aaron S. DeVries, et al., “Epidemiologic Investigation of Immune-Mediated Polyradiculoneuropathy Among Abattoir Workers Exposed to Porcine Brain,” PLoS ONE, March 2010, e9782.
On December 11, Garcia awoke to find he couldn’t walk: Garcia provided access to his medical file, maintained by his caseworker Roxanne Tarrant at Employee Development Corporation in St. Paul. All medical records are derived from Tarrant’s monthly reports.
“They are state-of-the-art facilities (nothing to be squeamish about!) but media tours are not available”: Email communication from Julie Henderson Craven, Vice President, Corporate Communications, Hormel Foods
, February 26, 2010.
Litchfield Building on Mill Street in November 1891: Details of Hormel’s early years of operation derive from Richard Dougherty, In Quest of Quality: Hormel’s First 75 Years (St. Paul: North Central, 1966).
By the turn of the century, the plant was processing 120 hogs per day: From 1948 to 1952, socialist Fred H. Blum conducted groundbreaking work in Austin, Minnesota, studying how Jay C. Hormel’s Guaranteed Annual Wage Plan affected company productivity and worker satisfaction. His findings, from which I have taken numerous details, were published in Fred H. Blum, Guaranteed Annual Wages: A Case Study (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952); and Fred H. Blum, Toward a Democratic Work Process: The Hormel-Packinghouse Workers’ Experiment (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953).
“benevolent dictatorship”: Blum, Toward a Democratic Work Process, 4.
six hundred Hormel workers to sign up on the spot: Roger Horowitz, Negro and White, Unite and Fight! A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–90 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 42.
“I am not going to get mixed up in a fight in my hometown”: Austin Daily Herald, September 23, 1933, 1, quoted in Blum, Toward a Democratic Work Process, 10.
“He suggested that we go out and organize”: Horowitz, Negro and White, Unite and Fight!, 42.
“I couldn’t lick you, so I joined you”: Frances Levison, “Hormel: The Spam Man,” Life, March 11, 1946, 63.
“red capitalist”: “The Name Is HOR-mel,” Fortune, October 1937, 138. A decade later, Frances Levison wrote that Hormel had been “labeled everything from pale pink to red.” Levison, “Hormel: The Spam Man,” 63.
Just as Emiliano Ballesta’s shift at QPP was ending: Interviews with “Emiliano Ballesta” (not his real name) were conducted in Austin, Minnesota, throughout 2010 and 2011.
Hormel employees told the New York Times: Andrew Martin, “Spam Turns Serious and Hormel Turns Out More,” New York Times, November 15, 2008, B1.
Julius A. Zillgitt went to the Square Deal Grocery on Main Street in Austin: Carolyn Wyman, Spam: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 7.
“the can, the solder, the seam, the fill, the mix”: Wyman, Spam: A Biography, 7.
“along about the fourth or fifth drink they began showing some imagination”: Dan Armstrong and Dustin Black, The Book of Spam: A Most Glorious and Definitive Compendium of the World’s Favorite Canned Meat (New York: Atria Books, 2008), 63.
To launch the product, Hormel’s marketing team: Description of the marketing strategies derive from Dougherty, In Quest of Quality: Hormel’s First 75 Years, 163.
“If they think Spam is terrible”: Brendan Gill, “The Talk of the Town: Spam Man,” New Yorker, August 11, 1945, 15.
“I ate my share of Spam along with millions of other soldiers”: Dwight D. Eisenhower’s signed letter of June 29, 1966, to H. H. “Tim” Corey, president of George A. Hormel & Company, is on display at the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota. An unsigned file copy, retained by his staff, is at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum (Post-Presidential Papers, 1961–1969: 1966 Principal File, Box 27) in Abilene, Kansas.
Richard Schindler, a family care physician: Interview with Daniel Lachance was conducted at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, February 2010. See also Howard Bell, “Inspector Lachance,” Minnesota Medicine, November 2008, 22–27.
Schwartz and Hidalgo noticed the similarity of symptoms: Interview with Walter Schwartz was conducted in Austin, Minnesota, April 2010.
Carole Bower, the plant’s occupational nurse, who reported that she had been noticing: Interview with Carole Bower was conducted in Austin, Minnesota, February 2010.
“The line speed, the line speed”: Chris Williams, “Mayo Confirms Cause of Slaughterhouse Illnesses,” Associated Press, November 30, 2009.
2: Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray
“not because the public cared anything about the workers”: More than a decade after the publication of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair published a detailed—and typically scathing—account of the “condemned meat industry” and his “adventure with Roosevelt” as part of his diagnosis of all that was wrong with American newspapers and magazines. Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism (Pasadena, CA: Author, 1920), 47.
“the specific evils you point out shall, if their existence be proved”: Theodore Roosevelt to Upton Sinclair, March 15, 1906, in Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 178–80.
“the laws regulating the inspection of meat”: Upton Sinclair, “The Condemned-Meat Industry: A Reply to Mr. J. Ogden Armour,” Everybody’s Magazine, May 1906, 613.
“determined by clockwork”: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, introduction by Eric Schlosser (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006), 123.
“I aimed at the public’s heart, but by accident I hit it in the stomach”: Sinclair, The Brass Check, 47.
“I grew up in a Hormel family”: Richard L. Knowlton with Ron Beyma, Points of Difference: Transforming Hormel (Garden City, NY: Morgan James, 2010), 27.
“Especially in the fall of the year, I remember him”: Knowlton, Points of Difference, 153.
“I showed up at 5 a.m. at the employment office”: Knowlton, Points of Difference, 28.
“I was rushing through the side door”: Knowlton, Points of Difference: 28.
“Hormel’s labor practices continued pretty much as he established them”: Knowlton, Points of Difference, 35.
“resulting bone-free pork shoulder along with boneless ham”: Knowlton, Points of Difference, 65.
“wholesale retrenchment in hourly wages”: Knowlton, Points of Difference, 151.
The outbreak was soon traced back to tainted hamburgers: In January and February 2013, online publication Food Safety News ran an outstanding series of articles reconstructing the events of the Jack in the Box case and its impact. Attorney Bill Marler, publisher of Food Safety News, represented one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit brought against Jack in the Box.
Boyle petitioned the Department of Agriculture: On February 10, 1994, J. Patrick Boyle, testifying before the U.S. Senate, stated, “Today, AMI has formally petitioned Secretary [Mike] Espy to initiate similar rulemaking to mandate HACCP programs in all meat and poultry plants in the United States, and I would like to submit for the record a copy of the letter, that I sent to Secretary Espy today, urging him to go forward immediately, and make this proven system a mandatory part of our Nation’s meat and poultry inspection requirements.” The Federal Meat Inspection Program: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Agricultural Research, Conservation, Forestry, and General Legislation of the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, United States Senate, One Hundred Third Congress, Second Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994), 11.
“Have a Cup of Coffee and Pray”: This was the back-derivation that caught on among meat inspectors across the country, but trade magazines in the 1990s also suggested “Hard, Agonizing, Complicated, Confusing Paperwork” and “Hire a Consultant and Confuse People.”
Instrumental in that victory was a man named Joel W. Johnson: In 2004, when Joel W. Johnson was awarded the Richard L. Knowlton Award, industry magazine Meatingplace conducted an interview with Johnson and quoted from interviews with colleagues, including Richard L. Knowlton and J. Patrick Boyle. “The Spam Master,” Meatingplace, December 2004, 19–33, http://www.meatingplace.com/Print/Archives/Details/2877.
“Like heck it will”: Knowlton, Points of Difference, 98.
The National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals filed a complaint: United States, Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service, Washington, D.C. (Respondent) and American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO and National Joint Council of Food Inspection, Locals, AFGE (Charging Parties), August 29, 2003, https://www.flra.gov/decisions/v59/59-013ad.html.
Nick Rinaker vowed never to work at Hormel Foods: Due t
o illness, Nick Rinaker preferred to conduct our interviews by email. His quotations are taken from an extensive correspondence in February and March 2014.
“all animal tissue has some commercial value”: George A. Hormel & Company, Patent for Apparatus for Splitting Animal Heads (US 4662028 A), http://www.google.com/patents/US4662028.
in 2004, Excel and Hatfield achieved: “Pork Processors Boost Capacity,” National Pork Producers Council, September 30, 1994, http://www.porknetwork.com/pork-news/pork-processors-boost-capacity-114010229.html.
“There are the obvious things we read about over and over”: Interview with Joel W. Johnson, “The Spam Master,” Meatingplace.
Between 2006 and 2013, Hormel increased: Adam Harringa, “Skippy Leads the Way at Shareholders Meeting,” Austin Daily Herald, January 30, 2013.
Pablo Ruiz speaks with a heavy accent: Interviews with Pablo Ruiz (his real name) were conducted in Austin, Minnesota, and via telephone throughout 2010, 2011, and 2012.
3: Alter Egos
Aaron DeVries, an epidemiologist at the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) in St. Paul: Interview with Aaron DeVries, Stacy Holzbauer, and Ruth Lynfield was conducted at the Minnesota Department of Health, St. Paul, Minnesota, April 2010.
“Let’s stop harvesting brains”: When I interviewed Lynfield in April 2010, she was reluctant to reconstruct the exact exchange she had with Wadding. More than two years earlier, however, she recounted these when speaking to the New York Times. Denise Grady, “A Medical Mystery Unfolds in Minnesota,” New York Times, February 5, 2008.