Rhet writing homework - Essay Example

While Europe was busy slaughtering animals potentially infected with Foot-and-Mouth disease and Mad Cow Disease, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tried to curb the outbreak of BSE in the U.S. by expediting new rules that prohibited the use of certain proteins in cattle feeds (Schlosser 272). Stakeholders fought the FDA’s decision arguing that the body’s linking of the animal diseases to human infections was “totally unsupported by any scientific evidence” (Schlosser 273). They, therefore, somehow found a way to bring British meat into the American market.

What followed was the death of ten young people who had contracted a previously unknown ailment but later called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), which effectively destroyed their brains. Some of the victims had been “keen consumers of beef burger” (Schlosser 199). This disease was later established to be the human form of BSE. Indeed, Meat packing companies are effectively shown to play a crucial role in spreading these forms of pathogens. The conditions of work in most of the meat packing companies do not allow for aseptic handling of these products.

As such, the meat is often contaminated with pathogens such as Salmonella and E. coli among others (Schlosser 202). Their tendency to ignore the swabbing and testing of the meat products for these pathogens before distribution to the market, as required by law, is seen as the main loophole through which pathogens get to end-point consumers. Their argument, of course, has to do with the economics of performing these procedures, which had previously condemned thousands of tons of meat products.

Perhaps the most captivating was the rejection of Bauer Meats, with the government declaring them “unfit for human consumption,” after an eleven-years-old child got seriously ill (Schlosser 219). However, the most recent scandal involving the meatpacking industry has to do with the detection of Horse meat in Findu’s beef Lasagna. According to the FSA, “Findus analyzed 18 of its beef lasagna meals and found 11 contained between 60% and 100% horsemeat” (Sky News). Investigations revealed that it was a case of mislabeling, a role that is entirely undertaken in the meatpacking companies.

Consequently, Findu’s 320g, 360g and 500g meals were withdrawn from supermarket shelves (Sky News). Crime in the Meat packing companies do not end there though. Approximately over a century after Upton Sinclair discredited that apparently large slaughterhouse complex in Chicago as a “jungle,” numerous studies have been conducted. These studies have documented numerous negative effects of slaughterhouses on workers and communities (Fitzgerald, Kalof, and Dietz 1). Starting from the poor working conditions in these companies to the unnatural acts that happened behind their walls, meat packing companies participate in criminal activities that negatively affect the society.

Indeed, most of the workers interviewed in Fast Food Nation confirm that this is the worst job an individual can be doing. Reiterating that meat packing companies always operated on profit margins, these workers quoted the 1999 survey that established injury rates in these companies as being “…26.7 per 100 hundred workers. For the rest of U.S. manufacturing, it was 9.2 per hundred workers” (Schlosser 172). The injuries mainly resulted from the sharp knives whole the ailments resulted from the cold working