The Smell Of Blood

Some of you know that I worked in two very well known packing houses where meat was processed.  The first job, in the engineering department of a processor that has a first name (wink), was a job where I did a bit of traveling and did electrical surveys of several of their plants and also worked on two that they were building.  I worked on the electrical layout of grow-out facilities and on fiber optic communications backbones for plant automation.  This was a good job, and interesting, but it was the second packing house job that was the most fun.  This job was actually a subsidiary job that followed the first one.  I had been in the plant I ended up at full time several times as an engineer and got what I considered to be a very good job as a maintenance supervisor because of the first job.  Some of the stories that I told on that other site occurred while working this job.  I actually met my wife there.  I joke many times that the smell of blood could not overcome the smell of romance…or perhaps it enhanced the romance.

Overall, the guys and gals I worked with at this plant were a good group.  Fun loving, hard working people.  It was always in my nature to start early and work late and I covered all three shifts during my tenure, working double shifts most weekends.  We ran 7 days a week.  The first year, I worked 362 days and as I said, most weekends I worked doubles on Saturday and Sunday.  It honestly never seemed like work, because we had a lot of fun on the job.

Contrary to popular myth, the packing houses I worked in were spotless facilities.  The quality of the products, both raw and processed, was excellent.  The whole “lips and assholes” premise is bullshit.  I still eat the products made in those facilities and have absolutely no qualms about it.

My wife worked on the line “molding” meat.  Essentially what this means, is that she worked on a high speed packaging machine loading stacks of bologna, ham, turkey and whatnot into the formed packages prior to them being vacuum packed.  Yes, those packages of lunch meat that you buy in the grocery store are loaded into the package by hand.  Many times slices must be counted and inspected as part of the process.  The packaging machine would evacuate and seal either two or four packages at a time and would run 80-100 cycles per minute.  On our particular lines, 4 “molders” would be working in order to keep up with production requirements.  The lines were moving!  When I first started, one of the mechanics who worked for me asked, “want to see something funny?”  “Sure,” I replied.  He reached up and pushed the emergency stop button.  The line quit moving and all the gals that were loading meat started leaning in the opposite direction of the movement of the line and two of them actually fell over.  The brain and perception is an amazing thing.  They were pissed and swearing.  We were laughing.  My wife was one of those gals.

As I said, the people working were always up for fun.  By today’s standards, the sexual harassment lawyers would have a field day…for both the men and the women. If a line was down and you needed to work on it, it was standard practice to determine who was working on the line and on what side.  That way you could avoid being groped and likely slamming your head into the bottom of the equipment when you crawled under it.  Anyone who worked there, soon became “stump broke” in short order and you learned not to flinch when someone grabbed or fondled because that just ended up in a lump on the head or the whole room laughing.  I remember standing at the toolroom window, waiting for the attendant to bring me a part I needed to repair a line and having one of the the mechanics who worked for me come up behind me, stick his hands in my pockets and begin to dry hump my ass.  The attendant coming to the window witnessed this and witnessed my non reaction and laughed and said to me, “well, you are officially an old timer now.”  This sort of “insubordination” would never be tolerated in some of the places I worked later and quite frankly, it is a shame because it really did build camaraderie and mutual respect in spite of its appearance.  I was still the boss, but I was not a stuffed shirt who could not be trusted.  We really were a team.

When I started, I went through the usual orientation and paperwork routine that is common on most first days.  Sign up for insurance, fill out W4, figure out where the bathrooms are….the usual.  The second day, I started in what was called the “Turkey University” (and now you may be able to guess who I worked for).  Every salaried employee was required to go through this session, which lasted one to two weeks.  You started out on the live dock unloading live birds from the semi trailers and worked your way through the plant on most (not all) jobs and at the end of the session you were loading finished product onto the trucks and had a forklift license.  It was an excellent program that gave every salaried individual a taste of what it was like to work the line jobs.  Taste is actually an excellent pun, because when working in further processing, where the meat was actually cooked, the knock ends that oozed out of the casings when the bologna and other products were cooked were quite delicious warm!

Basically, in a nutshell, the process was as follows:  Live birds are stunned, killed and bled out.  Feathers are plucked, the birds are inspected by the USDA (at many stages during the process), eviscerated (gutted), cleaned, cooled, trimmed and cut.  The meat is then processed depending on what final product is being made by being ground, spiced, cured, mixed and then finally stuffed into what looks like a 6ft long hot dog the diameter of your average slice of lunch meat.  These hotdogs are put on racks and cooked.  Once cooked, they go to a cooler, and then a blast freezer (-40 deg F, which puts about a ½ inch crust on the outer ring to make them slice easier).  From the blast freezer the racks of meat are brought to the slice/pack room and are sliced by a Formax hydraulically operated slicing machine (wicked blades!).  Stacks of meat are then weighed, inspected, sometimes counted and installed in the vacuum formed pockets and then sealed and boxed and shipped to your supermarket.  There are many sub processes and variations depending on the product being packaged and made.  For instance, the deli sliced meats are folded before packaging and then only a partial vacuum is placed on the package (so as not to crush the meat) and CO2 is injected into each package to displace O2 which will cause the meat to turn green.  It is all a complex process that very efficiently blends automation with good old fashioned hand labor.  Quality and Cleanliness is always at the top of the list.

It could be a dangerous place to work as well.  Sharp knives, moving equipment and high production can lend themselves to accidents and injury.  More than once I was the guy searching through turkey necks or a tub of meat for someone’s finger.  Finding it and putting it on ice and rushing to the hospital hoping it could be reattached.  One accident that I will never forget (and will not go into great detail here for obvious reasons) was when a fellow in the offal (gut) department decided to unplug a Hobart grinder with his foot and got sucked in.  We had to cut his leg out of the machine with a plasma cutter.  He did not lose it and recovered.  It was an awful situation.

One time, the Hobart grinder that was used to pump offal (guts) into the rendering truck came apart and turkey guts were covering the floor of the truck garage.  This was second shift and because production could not be stopped and no one from a further processing area or cooked product area could be in a raw area, 3 of us supervisors spent the whole shift and into third shift shoveling turkey guts up and into the rendering trailer.  Not a fun job.

I had been working there for over 2 years and was on third shift at the time.  I was walking through the live and evisceration area, making sure that all the maintenance projects that I had assigned my guys for the evening were complete.  The cleanup crew was busy spraying caustic on the floors and then following that with highly chlorinated water and then finally a steam rinse.  The floors were steaming as I watched the cleanup guys dragging their hoses away and the lines were starting.  Already birds had been loaded onto the freshly cleaned and sanitized shackle conveyors and were making their way through the evisceration process.  Once the birds were eviscerated, the carcass was dumped into what was called a chiller.  It was full of cold water and paddles moved the carcasses from one end to the other where they went up a short conveyor and slid down a chute to be rehung in shackles for a trip through the boning process.  The purpose of the chiller was to bring the carcass temperature down to approximately 46 deg F because the meat could be removed from the bone much more completely and efficiently with the carcass at that temperature.  At any given time there was approximately 3000lbs of birds in each of two chillers.

As I was walking around the exit end of one of the chillers, floors still steaming beneath my feet, a slight misalignment of the exit conveyor caused two turkey carcasses to drop to the floor right in front of me.  Thinking nothing of it (the floor was steaming and had just been sanitized with chlorine), I bent over and picked up the birds and threw them back in the chiller.  No sooner had I done this than I felt a small hand on my shoulder and spun around to be face to face with the USDA chief veterinarian who was in charge of all inspection in the facility.  She reached in her pocket and pulled out a tag and handed it to me and told me to shut down the chiller and tag it out.  The tag said, “do not operate by order of the United States Government.”  Her day was just beginning and mine was coming to a close with a kick to the head.  I did as I was told and as I was doing so, she was paging the plant manager, the plant engineering manager and the production manager and summoning them to the scene.  Once they arrived, we headed to her office.  As all of this is going on, I am certain that I will be fired.  I am hoping that when they fire me, they will not dock my pay for the 3000 lbs of birds that I am certain the USDA will order to offal and disposal.

Once we all reach her office, she proceeds to read all involved the riot act.  I think the words “idiots” and “lack of training” was used quite a number of times.  I am still certain that I am fired.  She turns to me and demands, “Explain yourself! Why would you do something so ignorant and blatantly against proper procedure?”  I could only be truthful and say, “The floor had just been sanitized and was still steaming.  I was the first person to walk through and I could see the cleanup crew dragging their hoses out.  I would eat mashed potatoes off that floor (this got some raised eyebrows from my bosses who were sitting there silently staring – glaring at me).  I never thought a thing of it.  Those birds were just as clean as they were when they fell off the conveyor.  I was wrong, I am sorry.”

She was silent for a moment and finally replied, “and that is exactly the reason and the only reason why I am going to let you off the hook.  Don’t ever do something so stupid again or you will be responsible for a whole lot of meat being tanked and a complete drain and reclean of a chiller!”  She looked at the production manager and said, “you can start the line.”  He practically jumped out of his chair and ran down to remove her tag and get the line started again.

We all got up to leave and I am relieved at not being responsible for a loss of product, but I am figuring that I will still be fired for doing something so boneheaded.  As we are walking down the steps, the Engineering Manager, my boss, pushes past me without a word and heads for his office.  I plan to follow.  The Plant Manager, who is directly behind me on the stairs, puts his hand on my shoulder, stops me and leans in to whisper in my ear, “next time, look around before you do that.”  He pushes past me also and heads back to his office.  I am floored.  It is never mentioned again.

I had lots of interesting experiences in the packing house and quite frankly a whole lot of fun.  When I moved on from that job, it was bitter sweet.  Some of the friends that I made there have died.  Some of the friends have drifted away due to distance.  Some of the friends I am still in contact with.  Every once in a while, someone will stop in to see me here, some that I barely remember.  They have come here as part of a vacation and decided to look me up.  I guess I made an impression.  Whether I remember them or not, they all made an impression on me.  I left there with a new wife.  There are stories about how that relationship developed that I could tell, but perhaps I will save them for another time.  I left there with a whole raft of experiences and new skills.  I left there with the smell of blood still fresh in my mind.  It remains there to this day.