The Chain
Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A powerful and important work of investigative journalism that explores the runaway growth of the American meatpacking industry and its dangerous consequences
“A worthy update to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and a chilling indicator of how little has changed since that 1906 muckraking classic.” — Mother Jones
“I tore through this book. . . . Books like these are important: They track the journey of our thinking about food, adding evidence and offering guidance along the way.” —Wall Street Journal
On the production line in American packing-houses, there is one cardinal rule: the chain never slows. Under pressure to increase supply, the supervisors of meat-processing plants have routinely accelerated the pace of conveyors, leading to inhumane conditions, increased accidents, and food of questionable, often dangerous quality.
In The Chain, acclaimed journalist Ted Genoways uses the story of Hormel Foods and its most famous product, Spam—a recession-era staple—to probe the state of the meatpacking industry, from Minnesota to Iowa to Nebraska. Interviewing scores of line workers, union leaders, hog farmers, and local politicians and activists, Genoways reveals an industry pushed to its breaking point—while exposing alarming new trends, from sick or permanently disabled workers to conflict between small towns and immigrant labor. A searching exposé in the tradition of Upton Sinclair, Rachel Carson, and Eric Schlosser, The Chain is a mesmerizing story and an urgent warning about the hidden costs of the food we eat.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this cautionary tale of a leading meat producer, the former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review and contributing editor of Mother Jones delves into the inner workings of Hormel Foods, a company struggling to meet America's insatiable hunger for hog products while keeping prices down. Hormel, with major plants in the nation's heartland, keeps its conveyor belts operating full speed, processing all edible parts of the hog, including severed hog heads, sliced ears, clipped snouts, sliced cheek meat, and cut-out tongues. While hams, sausages, and Spam are processed at breakneck speed, Genoways discovered that the meatpacking giant often put profits over people, interviewing former and current workers, with fingers lost to saws or disabled by unrelenting illnesses. A medical team found plant workers wear little protective gear, which leaves them exposed to the inhalation of illness-causing aerosolized brain matter, but when sick employees filed for disability, they were rejected. Residents of town near Hormel plants also feel threatened by the company's workers (largely illegal), as well as by water and soil contamination in small towns from plant runoff. Comparable to Sinclair's classic expose, The Jungle, Genoways's blistering account of the meatpacking industry makes the case for tighter monitoring of this powerful sector of American agribusiness.
