Our slaughterhouses are not just for animals

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BAD OLD DAYS: Slaughterhouse scene in Cincinnati, Ohio. A man kills pigs with a sledgehammer, as others bleed and clean bodies. From Harper’s Weekly, February. 4, 1860.

n Sam Pizzigati Our slaughterhouses are not just for animals

Some businesses make us feel all warm and cuddly. Like bakeries. Who can resist smiling just thinking about the smell of newly baked bread? But other businesses – like meatpacking – we do our best to ignore. Who wants to think about blood and guts and squealing pigs?

But think we must. Unsavoury enterprises can reveal basic truths about our times we’d rather not consider.

Back in the early 20th-century, for instance, a young writer forced Americans to confront inconvenient truth with a blockbuster novel about the meatpacking industry. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle detailed slaughterhouse horrors that endangered workers and consumers alike. The resulting public outrage would inspire the legislation that created what became the federal Food and Drug Administration.

Meatpacking, Americans came to realise generations ago, needed government oversight. We could not trust the moguls who ran the industry to do the right thing. Indeed, we could not trust any moguls. Their business empires needed to be regulated and broken up, their incomes taxed, their power curtailed.

Over the past 50 years, Americans have unlearned all those lessons. Now we face meatpacking empires bigger than any Upton Sinclair ever contemplated. More powerful, too. Our modern-day emperors of meat, pork, and poultry have enough might to imperil the