I saw Naomi Klein speak last night [9/26] in San Francisco. What an impressive young [37] woman! She is intelligent, passionate, well spoken, and attractive. She should be running for President! She gave an overview of her book and then showed the short film that is also on her website. Unfortunately, she had to catch a plane, so she didn't sign books. Damn! Sometimes an event like this in SF can attract fringe groups with their own agenda, but it was all very civilized, pleasant, and informative.

The book has only been out for a couple weeks, and has the potential be a tipping point. She exposes the blueprint for disaster capitalism. Many current and past events start to make sense when considered in the context she lays out, and makes one speculate about the potential reaction and outcome of future events, like an earthquake in SF.

Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, 2006

The great variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn.

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came for dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working live indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestation of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget’s other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried.

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarkets is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fuit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup [HFCS] – after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’ll still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical name it travels under, corn is what you’ll find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is the coffee whitener and Cheez Whip, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins.

There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything form the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in the Produce on a day when there’s ostensibly no corn for sale you’ll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce’s perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard that it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself – the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built – is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

Beginning in the fifties and sixties, the flood tide of cheap corn made it profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots instead of on grass, and to raise chickens in giant factories rather than in farmyards. Iowa livestock farmers couldn’t compete with factory-farmed animals their own cheap corn had helped spawn, so the chickens and cattle disappeared from the farm, and with them the pastures and hay fields and fences. In their place the farmers planted more of the one crop they could grow more of than anything else: corn. And whenever the price of corn slipped they planted a little more of it, to cover expenses and stay even. By the 1980s the diversified farm was history in Iowa, and corn was king.

The great turning point in the modern history of corn, which in turn marks a key turning point in the industrialization of our food, can be dated with some precision to the day in 1947 when the huge munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched over to making chemical fertilizer. After the war the government had found itself with a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in the making of explosives. Ammonium nitrate also happens to be an excellent source of nitrogen for plants.

Hybrid corn turned out to be the greatest beneficiary of this conversion. Hybrid corn is the greediest of plants, consuming more fertilizer than any other crop. Before synthetic fertilizers, the amount of nitrogen in the soil strictly limited the amount of corn an acre of land could support. Though hybrids were introduced in the thirties, it wasn’t until they made the acquaintance of chemical fertilizers in the 1950s that corn yields exploded.

The discovery of synthetic nitrogen changed everything – not just for the corn plant and the farm, not just for the food system, but also for the way life in earth is conducted. All life depends on nitrogen; it is the building block from which nature assembles amino acids, proteins, and nucleic acid; the genetic information that orders and perpetuates life is written on nitrogen ink.

When humankind acquired the power to fix nitrogen, the basis of soil fertility shifted from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel. For the Haber-Bosch process works by combining nitrogen and hydrogen gases under immense heat and pressure in the presence of a catalyst. The heat and pressure are supplied by prodigious amounts of electricity, and the hydrogen is supplied by oil, coal, or, most commonly today, natural gas – fossil fuels.

Corn adapted brilliantly to the new industrial regime, consuming prodigious quantities of fossil fuel energy and turning out ever more prodigious quantities of food energy. More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn, whose hybrid strains can make better use of it than any other plants. Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn it into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food. When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it – or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn.

About five thousand head of cattle enter a High Plains slaughterhouse every day, single file, and leave in a different form. Workers on the line wear about eight pounds of chain mail beneath their white coats, shiny steel armor that covers their hands, wrists, stomach, and back. The chain mail’s designed to protect workers from cutting themselves and from being cut by other workers.

We walk up a slippery metal stairway and reach a small platform, where the production line begins. The man who welcomes the cattle to building is called the “knocker.” Cattle walk down a narrow chute and pause in front of him, blocked by a gate, and then he shoots them in the head with a captive bolt stunner – which fires a steel bolt that knocks the cattle unconscious. As soon as the steer falls, a worker grabs one of its hind legs, shackles it to a chain, and the chain lifts the huge animal into the air.

Now the cattle suspended above are upside down swinging on hooks. The sight seems unreal; there are so many of them, lifeless. For eight and half hours, a worker called a “sticker” does nothing but stand in a river of blood, being drenched in blood, slitting the neck of a steer every ten seconds or so, severing the carotid artery. He uses a long knife and must hit exactly the right spot to kill the animal humanely. He hits that spot again and again.

I see a man reach inside cattle and pull out their kidneys with his bare hands, then drop the kidneys down a metal chute, over and over again, as each animal passes by him. We wade through blood that’s ankle deep and that pours down drains into huge vats below us.

A worker with a power saw slices cattle into halves as though they were two-by-fours, and then the halves swing by me into the cooler. It feels like a slaughterhouse now. Dozens of cattle, stripped of their skins, dangle on chains from their hind legs. Cattle have a body temperature of about 101 degrees, and there are a lot of them in the room. Carcasses swing so fast along the rail that you have to keep an eye on them constantly dodging them, watch your step, or one will slam you and throw you onto the bloody concrete floor. It happens to workers all the time.

Sides of beef suspended from an overhead trolley swing toward a group of men. Each worker has a large knife in one hand and a steel hook in the other. They grab the meat with their hooks and attack it fiercely with their knives. As they hack away, using all the strength, grunting, the place suddenly feels different, primordial. Workers – about half of them women, almost all of them young and Latino – slice meat with long slender knives. You see hardhats, white coats, flashes of steel. Nobody is smiling or chatting, they’re too busy, anxiously trying not to fall behind.

At the end of the line is the fabricating room. Some machines assemble cardboard boxes, others vacuum-seal subprimals of beef in clear plastic. The workers look extremely busy, but there’s nothing unsettling about this part of the plant. You see meat like this all the time in the back of your local market.

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, 2002

In the 1980s large numbers of young men and women from Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia started traveling to rural Colorado. Meatpacking jobs that had once provided a middle-class American life now offered little more than poverty wages.

Thousands of new migrants now travel north to work in the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants of the High Plains. These migrants come mainly from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Many were once farm workers in California, where steady jobs in the fields are now difficult to find. To farm worker who’ve labored outdoors, ten hour a day, for the nation’s lowest wages, meatpacking jobs often sound too good to be true.

To sustain the flow of new workers into IBP slaughterhouses, the company has for years dispatched recruiting teams to poor communities throughout the United States. It has recruited refugees and asylum-seekers from Laos and Bosnia. It has recruited homeless people living at shelters in New York, New Jersey, California, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. It has hired buses to import these workers from thousands of miles away. IBP now maintains a labor office in Mexico City, runs ads on Mexican radio stations offering jobs in the United States, and operates a bus service from rural Mexico to the heartland of America.

The real costs of the migrant industrial workforce are being borne not by the large meatpacking firms, but by the nation’s meatpacking communities. Poor workers without health insurance drive up local medical costs. Drug dealers prey on recent immigrants and the large, transient population usually brings more crime.

The high turnover rate in meatpacking is driven by the low pay and the poor working conditions. Workers quit on meatpacking job and float from town to town in the High Plains, looking for something better. Moving constantly is hard on their personal lives and their families.

In 1990, IBP opened a slaughterhouse in Lexington. A year later, the town, with a population of roughly seven thousand, had the highest crime rate in the state of Nebraska. Lexington became a major distribution center for illegal drugs; gang members appeared in town and committed drive-by shootings; the majority of Lexington’s white inhabitants moved elsewhere; and the proportion of Latino inhabitants increased more than tenfold, climbing to over 50 percent. “Mexington” – as it is now called, affectionately by some, disparagingly by others – is an entirely new kind of American town, one that has transfigured to meet the needs of a modern slaughterhouse.

Work Safety

Meatpacking is now the most dangerous job in the United States. Despite the use of conveyor belts, forklifts, dehiding machines, and a variety of power tools, most of the work in the nation’s slaughterhouses is still performed by hand. Poultry plants can be largely mechanized, thanks to the breeding of chickens that uniform in size. The birds in some Tyson factories are killed, plucked, gutted, beheaded, and sliced into cutlets by robots and machines. But cattle still come in all sizes and shapes, varying in weight by hundreds of pounds. The lack of a standardized steer has hindered the mechanization of beef plants.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the most important tool in a modern slaughterhouse is a sharp knife. Many slaughterhouse workers make a knife cut every two or three seconds, which adds up to about 10,000 cuts during an eight-hour shift. If the knife has become dull, additional pressure is placed on the worker’s tendons, joints, and nerves. A dull knife can cause pain to extend from the cutting hand all the way down the spine.

The “IBP revolution” has been directly responsible for many of the hazards the meatpacking workers now face. One of the leading determinants of the injury rate at a slaughterhouse today is the speed of the disassembly line. The faster it runs, the more likely that workers will get hurt. The old meatpacking plants in Chicago slaughtered about 50 cattle per hour. Twenty years ago, new plants in the High Plains slaughtered about 175 cattle per hour. Today some plants slaughter up to 400 cattle an hour.

The unrelenting pressure of trying to keep up with the line has encouraged widespread methamphetamine use among meatpackers. Workers taking “crank” feel charged and self-confident, ready for anything.