If your operation is running at the proper speed — 105 chickens crated by a single worker in 3.5 minutes is the expected rate according to several catchers I interviewed — the birds will be handled roughly and, as I was also told, the workers will regularly feel the birds’ bones snapping in their hands. (Approximately 30 percent of all live birds arriving at the slaughterhouse have freshly broken bones as a result of their Frankenstein genetics and rough treatment.) No laws protect the birds, but of course there are laws about how you can treat the workers, and this sort of labor tends to leave people in pain for days afterward, so, again, be sure you hire those who won’t be in a position to complain — people like “Maria,” an employee of one of the largest chicken processors in California, with whom I spent an afternoon. After more than forty years of work, and five surgeries due to work-related injuries, Maria no longer has enough use of her hands to do the dishes. She is in such constant pain that she spends her evenings soaking her arms in ice water, and often can’t fall asleep without pills. She is paid eight dollars an hour, and asked that I not use her real name, for fear of retribution.
Load the crates into trucks. Ignore weather extremes and don’t feed or water the birds, even if the plant is hundreds of miles away. Upon arrival at the plant, have more workers sling the birds, to hang upside down by their ankles in metal shackles, onto a moving conveyer system. More bones will be broken. Often the screaming of the birds and the flapping of their wings will be so loud that workers won’t be able to hear the person next to them on the line. Often the birds will defecate in pain and terror.
The conveyer system drags the birds through an electrified water bath. This most likely paralyzes them but doesn’t render them insensible. Other countries, including many European countries, require (legally, at least) that chickens be rendered unconscious or killed prior to bleeding and scalding. In America, where the USDA’s interpretation of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act exempts chicken slaughter, the voltage is kept low — about one-tenth the level necessary to render the animals unconscious. After it has traveled through the bath, a paralyzed bird’s eyes might still move. Sometimes the birds will have enough control of their bodies to slowly open their beaks, as though attempting to scream.
The next stop on the line for the immobile-but-conscious bird will be an automated throat slitter. Blood will slowly drain out of the bird, unless the relevant arteries are missed, which happens, according to another worker I spoke with, “all the time.” So you’ll need a few more workers to function as backup slaughterers —“kill men” — who will slit the throats of the birds that the machine misses. Unless they, too, miss the birds, which I was also told happens “all the time.” According to the National Chicken Council — representatives of the industry — about 180 million chickens are improperly slaughtered each year. When asked if these numbers troubled him, Richard L. Lobb, the council’s spokesman, sighed, “The process is over in a matter of minutes.”
I spoke to numerous catchers, live hangers, and kill men who described birds going alive and conscious into the scalding tank. (Government estimates obtained through the Freedom of Information Act suggest that this happens to about four million birds each year.) Since feces on skin and feathers end up in the tanks, the birds leave filled with pathogens that they have inhaled or absorbed through their skin (the tanks’ heated water helps open the birds’ pores).
After the birds’ heads are pulled off and their feet removed, machines open them with a vertical incision and remove their guts. Contamination often occurs here, as the high-speed machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing feces into the birds’ body cavities. Once upon a time, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with such fecal contamination. But about thirty years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a “cosmetic blemish.” As a result, inspectors condemn half the number of birds. Perhaps Lobb and the National Chicken Council would simply sigh and say, “People are done consuming the feces in a matter of minutes.”
Next the birds are inspected by a USDA official, whose ostensible function is to keep the consumer safe. The inspector has approximately two seconds to examine each bird inside and out, both the carcass and the organs, for more than a dozen different diseases and suspect abnormalities. He or she looks at about 25,000 birds a day. Journalist Scott Bronstein wrote a remarkable series for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about poultry inspection, which should be required reading for anyone considering eating chicken. He conducted interviews with nearly a hundred USDA poultry inspectors from thirty-seven plants. “Every week,” he reports, “millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers.”
Next the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled. Tom Devine, from the Government Accountability Project, has said that the “water in these tanks has been aptly named ‘fecal soup’ for all the filth and bacteria floating around. By immersing clean, healthy birds in the same tank with dirty ones, you’re practically assuring cross-contamination.”
While a significant number of European and Canadian poultry processors employ air-chilling systems, 99 percent of US poultry producers have stayed with water-immersion systems and fought lawsuits from both consumers and the beef industry to continue the outmoded use of water-chilling. It’s not hard to figure out why. Air-chilling reduces the weight of a bird’s carcass, but water-chilling causes a dead bird to soak up water (the same water known as “fecal soup”). One study has shown that simply placing the chicken carcasses in sealed plastic bags during the chilling stage would eliminate cross-contamination. But that would also eliminate an opportunity for the industry to turn wastewater into tens of millions of dollars’ worth of additional weight in poultry products.
Not too long ago there was an 8 percent limit set by the USDA on just how much absorbed liquid one could sell consumers at chicken meat prices before the government took action. When this became public knowledge in the 1990s, there was an understandable outcry. Consumers sued over the practice, which sounded to them not only repulsive, but like adulteration. The courts threw out the 8 percent rule as “arbitrary and capricious.”
Ironically, though, the USDA’s interpretation of the court ruling allowed the chicken industry to do its own research to evaluate what percentage of chicken meat should be composed of fouled, chlorinated water. (This is an all-too-familiar outcome when challenging the agribusiness industry.) After industry consultation, the new law of the land allows slightly more than 11 percent liquid absorption (the exact percentage is indicated in small print on packaging — have a look next time). As soon as the public’s attention moved elsewhere, the poultry industry turned regulations meant to protect consumers to its own advantage.
US poultry consumers now gift massive poultry producers millions of additional dollars every year as a result of this added liquid. The USDA knows this and defends the practice — after all, the poultry processors are, as so many factory farmers like to say, simply doing their best to “feed the world.” (Or in this case ensure its hydration.)
What I’ve described is not exceptional. It isn’t the result of masochistic workers, defective machinery, or “bad apples.” It is the rule. More than 99 percent of all chickens sold for meat in America live and die like this.
In some ways factory systems may differ considerably, for example in the percentage of birds that are accidentally scalded alive each week during processing or in the amount of fecal soup their bodies absorb. These are differences that matter. In other ways, though, chicken factory farms — well run or poorly run, “cage-free” or not — are basically the same: all birds come from similar Frankenstein-like genetic stock; all are confined; none enjoy the breeze or the warmth of sunlight; none ar
e able to fulfill all (or usually any) of their species-specific behaviors like nesting, perching, exploring their environment, and forming stable social units; illness is always rampant; suffering is always the rule; the animals are always only a unit, a weight; death is invariably cruel. These similarities matter more than the differences.
The vastness of the poultry industry means that if there is anything wrong with the system, there is something terribly wrong in our world. Today six billion chickens are raised in roughly these conditions each year in the European Union, over nine billion in America, and more than seven billion in China. India’s billion-plus population consumes very little chicken per capita, but that still amounts to a couple billion factory-farmed birds annually, and the number of birds they raise is increasing — as in China — at aggressive, globally significant rates (often double the growth of the rapidly expanding US poultry industry). All told, there are fifty billion (and counting) factory-farmed birds worldwide. If India and China eventually start consuming poultry at the rate the United States does, it would more than double this already mind-blowing figure.
Fifty billion. Every year fifty billion birds are made to live and die like this.
It cannot be overstated how revolutionary and relatively new this reality is — the number of factory-farmed birds was zero before Celia Steele’s 1923 experiment. And we’re not just raising chickens differently; we’re eating more chickens: Americans eat 150 times as many chickens as we did only eighty years ago.
Another thing we could say about fifty billion is that it is calculated with the utmost meticulousness. The statisticians who generate the figure nine billion in the United States break it down by month, state, and the birds’ weight, and compare it — each and every month — to the death toll in the same month a year before. These numbers are studied, debated, projected, and practically revered like a cult object by the industry. They are no mere facts, but the announcement of a victory.
Influence
MUCH LIKE THE VIRUS IT names, the word influenza comes to us by way of a mutation. The word was first used in Italian and originally referred to the influence of the stars — that is, astral or occult influences that would have been felt by many people at once. By the sixteenth century, though, the word had begun mixing and blending with the meanings of other words and come to refer to epidemic and pandemic flues that simultaneously strike multiple communities (as if the result of some malevolent will).
At least etymologically speaking, when we talk about influenza we are talking about the influences that shape the world everywhere at once. Today’s bird flu or swine flu viruses or the 1918 Spanish flu virus are not the real influenza — not the underlying influence — but only its symptom.
Few of us any longer believe that pandemics are the creation of occult forces. Should we consider the contribution of 50 billion sickly, drugged birds — birds that are the primordial source of all flu viruses — an underlying influence propelling the creation of new pathogens that attack humans? What about the 500 million pigs with compromised immune systems in confinement facilities?
In 2004, a collection of the world’s experts on emerging zoonotic diseases gathered to discuss the possible relationship between all those compromised and sick farm animals, and pandemic explosions. Before getting to their conclusions, it is helpful to think about the new pathogens as two related but distinct kinds of public-health concerns. The first concern is a more general one about the relationship between factory farms and all kinds of pathogens, like new strains of campylobacter, salmonella, or E. coli. The second public-health concern is the more particular one: humans are setting the conditions for the creation of the superpathogen of all superpathogens, a hybrid virus that could cause a repeat, more or less, of the Spanish flu of 1918. These two concerns are intimately related.
Each case of food-borne illness cannot be traced, but where we do know the origin, or the “vehicle of transmission,” it is, overwhelmingly, an animal product. According to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), poultry is by far the largest cause. According to a study published in Consumer Reports, 83 percent of all chicken meat (including organic and antibiotic-free brands) is infected with either campylobacter or salmonella at the time of purchase.
I’m not sure why more people aren’t aware of (and angry about) the rates of avoidable food-borne illness. Perhaps it doesn’t seem obvious that something is amiss simply because anything that happens all the time, like meat (especially poultry) becoming infected by pathogens, tends to fade into the background.
In any case, if you know what to look for, the pathogen problem comes into terrifying focus. For example, the next time a friend has a sudden “flu” — what folks sometimes misdescribe as “the stomach flu” — ask a few questions. Was your friend’s illness one of those “twenty-four-hour flus” that come and go quickly — retch or shit then relief? The diagnosis isn’t quite so simple, but if the answer to this question is yes, your friend probably didn’t have the flu at all — he or she was probably among the 76 million cases of food-borne illness the CDC estimates occur in America each year. Your friend didn’t “catch a bug” so much as eat a bug. And in all likelihood that bug was created by factory farming.
Beyond the sheer number of illnesses linked to factory farming, we know that factory farms are contributing to the growth of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens simply because these farms consume so many antimicrobials. We have to go to a doctor to obtain antibiotics and other antimicrobials as a public-health measure to limit the number of such drugs being taken by humans. We accept this inconvenience because of its medical importance. Microbes eventually adapt to antimicrobials, and we want to make sure it is the truly sick people who benefit from the finite number of uses any antimicrobial will have before the microbes learn how to survive it.
On a typical factory farm drugs are fed to animals with every meal. In poultry factory farms, as I explained earlier, they almost have to be. Industry saw this problem from the beginning, but rather than accept less-productive animals, they compensated for the animals’ compromised immunity with feed additives.
As a result, farmed animals are fed antibiotics nontherapeutically (that is, before they get sick). In the United States, about 3 million pounds of antibiotics are given to humans each year, but a whopping 17.8 million pounds are fed to livestock — at least that is what the industry claims. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has shown that the industry underreported its antibiotic use by at least 40 percent. The UCS calculated 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics were fed to chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals, only counting nontherapeutic uses. They further calculated that fully 13.5 million pounds of those antimicrobials would currently be illegal within the EU.
The implications for creating drug-resistant pathogens are quite straightforward. Study after study has shown that antimicrobial resistance follows quickly on the heels of the introduction of new drugs on factory farms. For example, in 1995, when the Food and Drug Administration approved fluoroquinolones — such as Cipro — for use in chickens against the protest of the Centers for Disease Control, the percentage of bacteria resistant to this powerful new class of antibiotics rose from almost zero to 18 percent by 2002. A broader study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed an eightfold increase in antimicrobial resistance from 1992 to 1997, and, using molecular subtyping, linked this increase to the use of antimicrobials in farmed chickens.
As far back as the late 1960s, scientists have warned against the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in farmed-animal feed. Today, institutions as diverse as the American Medical Association, the Centers for Disease Control, the Institute of Medicine (a division of the National Academy of Sciences), and the World Health Organization have linked nontherapeutic antibiotic use on factory farms with increased antimicrobial resistance and called for a ban. Still, the factory farm industry has effectively opposed such a ban in the United States. And, unsurprisingly, the limited bans in other countries are only a limited so
lution.
There is a glaring reason that the needed total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn’t already occurred: the factory farm industry (in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry) currently has more power than public-health professionals. The source of the industry’s immense power is not obscure. We give it to them. We have chosen, unwittingly, to fund this industry on a massive scale by eating factory-farmed animal products (and water sold as animal products) — and we do so daily.
The same conditions that lead 76 million Americans to become ill from their food annually and that promote antimicrobial resistance also contribute to the risk of a pandemic. This brings us back to the remarkable 2004 conference in which the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) put their tremendous resources together to evaluate the available information on “emerging zoonotic diseases.” At the time of the conference, H5N1 and SARS topped the list of feared emerging zoonotic diseases. Today H1N1 would be pathogen enemy number one.
The scientists distinguished between “primary risk factors” for zoonotic diseases and mere “amplification risk factors,” which affect only the rate at which a disease spreads. Their paradigmatic examples of primary risk factors were “change to an agricultural production system or consumption patterns.” What particular agricultural and consumer changes did they have in mind? First in a list of four main risk factors was “increasing demand for animal protein,” which is a fancy way of saying that demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is a “primary factor” influencing emerging zoonotic diseases.