The meat of the matter
COVID-19 puts spotlight on animal rights, workplace conditions at processing plants
Cyndi Zawada-Baker loves animals. She also loves a burger.
“I always said I could never be a farmer, because they’d all be my pets,” laughs the financial analyst, who lives in the rural farming community of Ayr, Ont.
“But if you bring me a hamburger, I’m going to eat it — because the disconnect is real, between an animal you see living and breathing, and what you eat.”
The pandemic has shifted something for Zawada-Baker.
News of COVID-19 outbreaks at Canada’s meat-processing plants have led to more public scrutiny of the working conditions there, ripping away the curtain that usually obscures the public’s view of how its meat is produced.
Suddenly, Zawada-Baker says her decisions around what she eats have seemed connected to her world.
The largest outbreak of COVID-19 in Canada occurred at a meat-packing plant in a small town in southern Alberta that single-handedly processes almost half the beef in the country.
Critics say the spread — which has sickened almost 1,000 workers and killed three — was fuelled by crowded, even punishing, working conditions. Outbreaks have also occurred at plants across North America.
The fallout has lingered, as consumers have found themselves looking at the steak wrapped in plastic on the grocery store shelf, and wondering about the journey it took to get there.
In late April, Zawada-Baker posted to Facebook: “All this factory farming stuff has got me (thumbs down emoji).” She was flooded with support — and a few critics — who suggested local farmers she could buy meat from. Though every option comes with ripple effects on environmental impact and price.
“It becomes overwhelming. It really is so much easier just to live in denial,” she said frankly.
“Can we just stop eating meat as a society? Is it even possible? Probably not. What can I do? So what is the piece that I can do?”
It’s a debate with tangled threads, from what it means to have a safe workplace, to animal rights, to ethical eating, to what we owe to farmers and what we really think our meat should cost.
When it comes to Canadian meat production, what are we willing to stomach?
The Cargill meat-processing plant in the small Alberta town of High River is a series of cavernous white buildings ringed first by parking lot, then farmland beyond.
Every day, 4,500 cattle enter the building to be killed and dismembered — more than two per worker, and nearly half the number processed in the entire country, according to the Na
tional Farmers Union.
“It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s loud,” says Thomas Hesse, president of the union local that represents workers at the plants in High River and in the town of Brooks, two hours east.
Three large plants — the two in Alberta, plus another Cargill plant in Guelph, Ont. — process 85 per cent of the country’s beef.
The outbreaks have caused disruptions at plant that paused operations or scaled back shifts in order to allow for social distancing, which has slowly created a backlog of cattle in the country. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has warned the public that beef prices could go up as a result.
Amid outbreaks, the spotlight turned to workers, and the conditions they were facing to provide meat for the country.
“It’s super high rates of injuries, shoulder-to-shoulder people wielding razor-sharp knives, new Canadians, immigrants, temporary foreign workers,” Hesse said.
“It still sounds and feels in many ways like Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle,’” he added, referencing the 1906 novel that, by graphically portraying the exploitative conditions for workers at a Chicago meat plant, somewhat unintentionally led to some of the first American food-safety laws.
But for some, it’s hard to talk about the workers who spend their days killing animals and dismembering them, without also contemplating the animals themselves.
While experts say that processing plants have made major strides in recent years to lower the stress level of animals before they’re killed — they are stunned and then bled out — critics remain unconvinced.
Longtime animal law lawyer Victoria Shroff says it’s the rare storm in which worker’s rights and animal welfare have found themselves in the same boat. The factors that have put pressure on workers — the demand for cheap meat, and lots of it — also mean animals are moved through as quickly as possible.
“We’ve had animals and people all come to the fore, and finally recognize how interrelated we all are because of COVID,” she said. “We’re seeing these links, that show us that we’re all vulnerable.”
Cargill, which operates in 70 countries, declined an interview request, and referred the Star to a statement posted to their website on May 7, which outlined the steps the company has taken to protect workers in their North American “protein facilities,” including meatpacking plants, such as screening questions for those entering plants, temperature checks and increased sanitation.
“At Cargill, we take seriously our responsibility to feed the world,” their website reads. “But during this pandemic, that responsibility much be balanced with our first priority — our employees health and safety.”
The modern meat processing plant was built with food safety and efficiency in mind, explains Heather Bruce, a professor of carcass and meat science at the University of Alberta.
The backbone of the plant is called “the line,” where carcasses are hung by hooks as they whisk along an overhead conveyer belt of sorts, with workers removing pieces and cuts of meat as they go. It moves quickly, in part, for food safety reasons, she said.
“They have lots of workers on the line and they’re very close to each other so that the product can be swiftly processed,” she said, so the finished product can be refrigerated as quickly as possible, “to ensure that the product is safe for us to eat. So no harmful bacteria have an opportunity to grow.”
Unlike the chicken and pork industries, where developments in breeding have allowed farmers to churn out animal after animal alike in shape and size, no one has quite cracked the code for cows yet, so they arrive at the plant all slightly different sizes. That means automation of a lot of these processes are, at best, expensive and hard to implement, or, at worst, impossible.
Adding to the pressure to move a lot of cattle, and quickly, is the fact that the meat packing industry is a competitive one, where companies are fighting over increasingly slim margins — Bruce said the industry average is just two per cent — a result of the fluctuations that come with dealing with a natural resource. Over time, the result has been survival of the biggest, or plants who are able to find efficiencies by processing thousands of animals a day.
Dialing up the heat, said Simon Somogyi, an expert in food supply chains and consumer behaviour, is Canada’s quest for cheap meat.
“You know, Canadians like to grill,” said Somogyi, also the Arrell Chair in the Business of Food at the University of Guelph. “In North America, we like large cuts of meat, we like large amounts of protein. And we like a bargain. I think that frames or modifies the way that the system runs.”
That means every stop on the food chain feels that pressure — from stores offering deals on cheaper cuts to try and recoup their costs on more expensive steaks, to processing facilities scaling up to reduce costs, to farmers who have seen the price per pound offered for their cattle decline.
“The whole system of logistics and costs in the chain are very efficient to be able to provide what that consumer wants. But if you dig underneath the surface of this issue, at the bottom you’ll find a consumer that wants high quality meat at low price.” Over time, more and more plants have closed, whether due to economic pressure or outbreaks of illness, leaving the country with just a handful of big federally regulated plants.
And the competitiveness of the industry aside, farmers and advocates say the position these plants play in the food cycle is a powerful one — they can both dictate what they will pay farmers for cattle, and decide what working conditions for labour will be.
Tim Dowling is the third generation in his family to run Doublejay Farms, where his cattle graze on Howe Island, part of a chain of islands in the middle of the St. Lawrence.
He explains the life cycle of a cow, bred for meat, as a balancing act, in which you want it to be fed well, but then be slaughtered as soon as it’s big enough so nothing is wasted.
As he puts it: “You want them to have the best feed over a certain amount of time and that deposits fat in layers, which is usually called marbling. So that’s what you’re going for, and once they have that there’s no point in feeding them more.”
But whereas, as a farmer, he’s able to make a lot of decisions to that shape the life of his cattle, when they’re ready to head to slaughter, options are few.
Outbreaks at plants has reduced slaughtering capacity, which has led to a backlog of cattle across Canada. That means, Dowling said, that plants can drop their prices and still know that farmers will have to sell to them.
Dowling’s farm is a smaller one, where organic meat is sold directly to customers. Fed on grass, it takes Dowling’s cows a bit longer than grain-fed cattle for them to grow to full size, which means they’re usually ready for slaughter by the time they’re 24 to 30 months old.
His issue with the current set up is what he said is a power imbalance between those who process meat and those who grow it. The dominance of a few major processing plants means farmers don’t have much say over how much their animals are worth or how they’re slaughtered, he said.
“The idea that you can have two dollar a pound ground beef at the grocery story is based on a myth.”
“It becomes an even bigger sort of affront to the fairness side of it,” he said.
He’d like to see more support for more, smaller abattoirs.
Farmers mostly can’t legally slaughter their own cattle for food safety reasons, so when it’s time Dowling has to make a choice about where to send them. He could load them up, ferry them to the mainland, and truck them six hours to the Cargill plant in Guelph, where he would sell them for whatever price the plant is offering that week.
But mostly he tries to find a local abattoir that has space. But right now, with problems at the bigger plants, he said the smaller plants are also starting to fill up.
“There’s a domino effect that occurs when, when a system fails like this, when big plants go down, it sort of shifts where everyone all over the country is sending their animals.”
Dowling, who also chairs the livestock committee for the National Farmers Union, would like to see support for more smaller plants. But despite demand, he said local abattoirs have a hard time competing with the big guys, who can find efficiencies when dealing with thousands of cattle, and who are better equipped to handle new regulation.
He argues it should be possible to find ways to create different regulations for smaller plants, that protect food safety while making it easier for smaller operators to stay in business.
In his view, it would help if people knew more about where their meat came from — and who helped produce it along the way. To him, concerns raised by workers at plants are part of a bigger issue with agricultural workers, though usually it’s seasonal workers picking crops who are in the spotlight.
“It’s something that people are talking about now, which is this idea of like, what’s skilled labour and what is unskilled labour. You know (calling it) unskilled labour is just a way to pay people less and treat them worse,” he said.
Though Somogyi, of the University of Guelph, said there are flaws to the idea that a more local food system would have weathered COVID better than our current global system. He points out that a major advantage of our current system is that it’s set up to produce and distribute a very large amount of food, and it did so, even as a pandemic raged.
“The supply chain didn’t break, because it’s always had to adapt to rapid changes,” he said. It’s not unusual for a retailer to be reliant on one supplier for all their bananas, for example, and then suddenly have that supply dry up. “The system is incredibly flexible.”
He also points out that one in eight households in Canada is food insecure, and for them, cheap meat is no small thing.
“Some people would like to be able to buy things that are higher priced for, for humane reasons and for quality reasons, but they just can’t afford to,” he said.
But our current food system is no accident: it’s set up to satisfy the appetites of consumers — and if they’re consumers are now hungry for something else, there are way to express that, he said.
“I think that the silver lining to COVID is that it’s shown people how the food supply chain runs and that they can vote how the supply chain works by moving their dollar where they see fit.”
Mike von Massow, a food economist and an associate professor of food agriculture at the University of Guelph, isn’t sure a spotlight will prompt lasting changes in consumption patterns.
Last year, he and a couple of colleagues published a piece that charted the change in meat consumption in North America — in sum, people are eating less of it per person. It’s not because of a surge in the number of vegetarians. Instead, the average meat eater is starting to put less of it on their plate.
The average person ate almost 40 kilograms of beef in 1980, according to Statistics Canada. It’s a number that had fallen to slightly more than 25 kilograms in 2018. The mix of meat is also changing, von Massow points out, as consumption of chicken and eggs has increased over the same time period.
While both environmental and health concerns are helping drive that change according to von Massow, there is also those who are concerned about how meat is raised and processed.
“We’re blissfully oblivious to what it was like to work in a plant and now people are getting a sense of what it’s like to work in a plant. I expect that there will be some people who will say ‘Oh, that’s not great.’”
Von Massow estimates he’s probably been inside a meat plant a dozen times or so over the course of his career, and said while it wasn’t pleasant, he understood it.
“You know, I’m not a hunter. I’m, at best, a casual fisherman, so I haven’t seen a lot of instances where an animal is put down so that I could eat it. (The plant) wasn’t a place I loved being but when I saw it, I understood it,” he said.
“I understood that this is how meat happens.”
In terms of whether or not recent events will change how people think about meat, he’s not sure.
“I’m guessing probably not. This will that this will fade over time from the consciousness of Canadians, and we’ll go back to the wilful ignorance that allowed us to continue to enjoy a steak on the barbecue in the summer.”