Food chain’s weakest link: slaughterhouses
The modern American slaughterhouse is a very different place from the one that Upton Sinclair depicted in his early-20th-century novel “The Jungle.”
Many are giant, sleek, refrigerated assembly lines, staffed mostly by unionized workers who slice, debone and “gut snatch” hog and beef carcasses, under constant oversight of government inspectors. The jobs are often grueling and sometimes dangerous, but pork and beef producers boast about having some of the most heavily sanitized work spaces of any industry.
Yet meat plants, honed over decades for maximum efficiency and profit, have become major hot spots for the coronavirus pandemic, with some reporting widespread illnesses among their workers. The health crisis has revealed how these plants are becoming the weakest link in the nation’s food supply chain, posing a serious challenge to meat production.
After decades of consolidation, there are about 800 federally inspected slaughterhouses in the United States, processing billions of pounds of meat for food stores each year. But a relatively small number of them account for the vast majority of production. In the cattle industry, a little more than 50 plants are responsible for as much as 98% of slaughtering and processing in the United States, according to Cassandra Fish, a beef analyst.
Shutting down one plant, even for a few weeks, is like closing an airport hub. It backs up hog and beef production across the country, crushes prices paid to farmers and eventually leads to months of meat shortages.
“Slaughterhouses are a critical bottleneck in the system,” said Julie Niederhoff, an associate professor of supply chain management at Syracuse University. “When they go down, we are in trouble.”
The ripple effects of the virus are now being felt across the entire meat supply chain, all the way to grocery store freezers.
More than a dozen beef, pork and chicken processing plants have closed or are running at greatly reduced speeds because of the pandemic. This past week, the number of cattle slaughtered dropped nearly 22% from the same period a year ago, and hog slaughter was down 6%, according to the Department of Agriculture. The decline is partly driven by the shutdown of restaurants and hotels, but plant closings also have caused a major disruption, leaving many ranchers with nowhere to send their animals.
Even as one prominent meat executive warned on Easter that the nation was “perilously close” to a meat shortage, state and federal regulators have been sending mixed signals to the industry about how to deal with the crisis.
In South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem requested publicly that Smithfield Foods close its huge pork facility in Sioux Falls after testing revealed that the plant accounted for nearly half the coronavirus cases in the city and the surrounding county. But federal officials had been repeatedly urging the company and other meat producers to find ways to keep their plants running because of their importance to the food supply, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
By Thursday, the tests had revealed that the pork plant was the nation’s single largest hot spot, with about 16% of the 3,700 employees testing positive for the virus. The hospitalization rate among the workers has been relatively low because they tend to be younger, said Dr. David Basel, a vice president at the Avera Medical Group in Sioux Falls, who has been involved in the testing of the Smithfield employees.
Basel praised Smithfield for encouraging its employees, many of whom are refugees and immigrants from Latin America and Asia and speak 80 different dialects, to get tested. Doctors made instructional videos in Nepalese and Spanish, and tracked down and tested workers who had been in close contact with infected employees.
“The numbers are improving after the plant closed,” Basel said. “I am feeling more optimistic this week.” Still, the high infection rate raised questions about whether Smithfield had done enough to carry out social distancing protocols and to supply protective gear. At least one worker has died from the virus, according to the state.
On Thursday, officials from the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention toured the Sioux Falls plant, an eight-story facility that churned 24 hours a day alongside the Big Sioux River, to produce 5% of the nation’s pork. The agency is expected to release recommendations in the next few days on how to prevent another outbreak when the plant reopens. The company has not given a date. Some meat companies have expressed reluctance to test workers, saying such targeted testing creates the false impression that meat plants are the main culprits for the spread of the virus. The more aggressively employees are tested, the more cases emerge, putting pressure on plants to shut down.
“Everybody wants to test meatpacking employees, but nobody is testing the communities around them to show what’s the baseline,” said Steve Stouffer, the president of the fresh meats division at Tyson Foods. “And until we know the baselines, my question has always been: Are we the cause or are we just the victim of our surroundings?”