Author: Justin

…this is the best meat to eat.

 

I am obviously biased because we sell this grass-fed beef. Having gotten that disclaimer out of the way, I was so impressed by how humane, hygienic and efficient the New Zealand Grass-fed Beef production is. If you are conscious about your consumption, I am authoritatively and unequivocally telling you that New Zealand Grass-fed product is the best product by just about any measure.

A recent visit to a New Zealand meat packing plant was impressive, interesting, and a walk down memory lane. This first post is mostly about the memory lane part…

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I was raised in a Veal Slaughterhouse & Meat Packing Plant in New Jersey

I don’t mean that I lived in one, but my father owned one and I spent quite a bit of time in a veal slaughterhouse in New Jersey. That’s three nouns, any of which all by itself might make someone cringe depending on their politics and preferences and such. Veal. Slaughterhouse. New Jersey. Add them together and it is difficult to imagine a less idyllic environment to visit your father at work. Set it in the 1980s before the modern animal rights and food safety movements really took hold and, well, it’s what I knew so it all seemed normal. My father and grandfather and so on grew up similarly.

My father, the 4th generation in our family business ran the abbatoir. And when I was very young and the business was small, he actually did the slaughtering … and as a young child I apparently used to hang out on the kill floor with him and watch him slaughter livestock.

At age 11-14, I worked in the slaughterhouse during the summer in the mornings. Not sure if I have formed my own mythology about those days, but I remember my job functions as follows: the first summer was spent with a hose in my hand. I bounced back and forth between the holding pens in back where I would hose the shit off of live calves and the room next door where I would hose blood off the inside of the body cavity. The next summer I held a hose again, this time rinsing organ meat on the kill floor drain table. The latter two years I was mercifully moved to the packing area where I helped bag, cryovac, label, box, and move meat cuts. The mercy in this move is only apparent in retrospect. I don’t think I minded the dirty work and I certainly didn’t know any different.

Those days formed my work ethic. There are few jobs that are stinkier and dirtier than hosing shit off calves. And, few jobs are colder or harder on the hands and face than stacking boxes in a -10 degree freezer. My father paid me for my work and expected me to work just as hard as anyone else. The only break I was given was that I was allowed to leave at lunch, when my mom picked me up to take me to the beach. You can look at it as favoritism, but keep in mind that I was younger than the legal working age and most certainly the youngest plant worker by a margin of many years.

It has been 20 years (7 of which I didn’t eat meat) since I have been in a slaughterhouse. Recently, I toured an uber-modern facility in New Zealand, not knowing what it would feel like or whether I could handle the sight of it. I knew however that I wanted to see everything. Apparently, many visitors don’t want to see the actual kill floor, but only want to see the boning room where primal cuts are broken down into retail and food service cuts. I wanted to see it all.

New Zealand facilities are reputed to be among the world’s most hygienic, humane and technologically sophisticated. That reputation is for good reason.

In the coming posts, I will try my best to articulate what it is like to be in a slaughterhouse in the first place, but will also explain why New Zealand is the class of the world in terms of animal husbandry and meat processing.

Next Post in This Series:
A Slaughterhouse Without the Things From My Memory

Post Written by Justin Marx

My recent visit to a New Zealand meat packing plant was intense, insightful and a walk down memory lane. What struck me most was the sounds and smells from my memory that were not there. Warning: this might be graphic; I can’t tell because I’m desensitized. But, I don’t want to hold anything back since one of my goals with this blog is to share my experiences, especially those that few people see.

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The Missing Smells
My strongest memory of slaughterhouses in the 80s was the hot, steamy, smelly kill floor. In my youth, the act of cleaning cattle in the back pens with a hose was almost pointless. The holding pens were dingy, dirty, shit- and ammonia-smelling, closed-air affairs. The calves came to the kill floor with shit all over their hooves, tails and rumps regardless of how much we sprayed a hose at them.

Here in New Zealand, the holding pens are clean, free of shit and they are very well ventilated open-air environments. And, this cleanliness is before the cattle are cleaned one by one in a giant shower as they make their way up the chute.

In the 80s, our kill floor was hot and steamy. In this New Zealand facility, the smell was almost benign. The strongest odor was a subtle smell of bleach. Sure, this New Zealand kill floor was warm and many of the workers had only shorts and a t-shirt on behind their smocks, but the humidity was fine and the temperature was moderate.

Hygenically, I can recall a dirty environment from my youth. I remember barrels of organs being dragged around and lots of product held in racks on the slaughterhouse floor itself. In this New Zealand facility, the different non-meat parts almost immediately leave the kill floor via a panoply of chutes and conveyors. The hooves are lopped off by giant scissors and down a chute they go. The hide is pulled off and drops right through a hole in the floor. The guts drop to a giant conveyor where they are separated and down various chutes they go. Aside from the exact spot where throats are slit, there’s hardly any blood at all on the kill floor. I was surprised by the absence of blood on the kill floor and blown away by the lack of odor.

The Missing Sounds
Notably absent in the New Zealand facility was mooing and the sound of kicking. In the old days, our slaughterhouse was full of bovine crying. It is sad to think about. Back then, the veal calves were shackled, stunned and hoisted upside down by a chain wrapped around a hind leg. The panicked cries of the calves must have spread fear among the rest of the animals because it was a cacophony of bawling. Once upside-down their throat was cut and I can remember the sound of them trying to breathe for some time and the sound of them kicking the wall for awhile after that.

Today, slaughter facilities are designed to minimize stress on that animal and this New Zealand facility was the most progressive I have ever seen. In this New Zealand facility, the animals walk through a chute single file and at the end, they are stunned electrically to make them pass out. They fall over through a hole in the wall onto their backs. Their throat is slit while they are passed out and THEN they are hoisted. They don’t know what hit them and they are out of view from the live animals. Here there is no mooing, no struggled breathing, no kicking.

The Missing Buckets and Barrels of Stuff
Certainly the lack of odor has something to do with the fact that product simply does not stay in one place. In the old days as the animals were disassembled, the hide went in this lug. The stomach drops in that one. The heart goes in this bucket, the spleen in this one, the liver in the other one, etc. The lugs on racks ultimately got wheeled off the kill floor and into a cooler or outside, where they waited for the gut truck. All of the non-muscle meats, hides, testicles, etc. would be held in racks on the slaughterhouse floor.

In this New Zealand facility, all of those parts completely left the room as soon as they were cut from the carcass. I don’t know where all of them went, but they certainly left the meat area immediately. In one room that I did see, was a completely separate packing area that received the items that came down the various chutes. Brains immediately dropped into a box, the entire box still pulsing, before it was labeled and moved to the freezer. The tongues were individually saran wrapped and placed neatly in a slotted box. That box was immediately labeled and moved to the freezer. And on and on. In this New Zealand facility, cuts and parts did not sit anywhere. They were immediately cleaned, processed, packed, frozen.

As for the meat cuts, I remember lug after lug of meat cuts on racks in the old days. A major innovation that I saw in New Zealand is that the facility was so sophisticated that it didn’t have to process one cut at a time before moving to the next cut. As the carcass got cut up, all of the products went on the same production line. In the past, the parts would have waited in open-air lugs in the cooler before each individual cut was bagged, labeled and boxed. Here in New Zealand, the cuts just moved down the line together. When they got to the place where they were to be bagged, an operator punched in a code that corresponded to the cut. The automated labeling system did the rest. So, instead of the cuts having to sit around and collect bacteria, they were immediately vacuum sealed, boxed and chilled.

Next Post in This Series:
What It’s Like in a Slaughterhouse

Related Posts:
I Grew Up In a Slaughterhouse
A Disassembly Factory

Post Written by Justin Marx

The easiest analogy to describe what it is like in a meat slaughter and processing facility is to imagine a car factory.   Imagine a car production line where a car chassis is suspended by a hook from the ceiling and it moves from station to station as this part and that part are added and attached and ultimately the car is assembled.

Now imagine the opposite of that.  Rather than assembling a car, a meat plant is disassembling an animal.  After it is slaughtered, the animal hangs from a hook by its leg and moves along the disassembly line.  Each butcher along the way has a specific job.   The blood is drained, the feet are cut off, the head is removed, the hide is mechanically pulled off, the belly is opened and the guts are released, the side of beef is split with a giant handheld bandsaw/chainsaw, and a few dozen other various things happen that I can’t explain because I don’t know the names of the parts.  And, that’s just on the kill floor.

The sides of beef then move on rails to the chiller to chill down.  When it comes out of there, it is separated to hind and fore, both of which move down separate disassembly lines.  A progression of butchers separate the bones and the larger cuts and put them in various chutes.  From there, the meat gets cut up into smaller and smaller pieces by other butchers until it is in a more familiar form to us.  Nothing is wasted.  The aorta goes here.  The jowl goes there.  In addition to the whole muscle cuts, the blood gets used by the medical/pharma industry, bones get made into pet food and the trimmings which are a mix of fat and meat get graded by percentage of fat content and ultimately become ground beef.

In the New Zealand Grass-fed Beef plant that I just toured, there must have been 300 workers each with their own very specific job.

I have a lot to share, but wanted to get this post out today.  More to follow tomorrow hopefully…

Next Post in This Series:
I Grew Up in a Slaughterhouse