NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 28, 2003 - (5)

April 28, 2003 cont'd
What does a rendering plant do? It takes dead animals that have been hauled off the farm in various states of ripeness and turns them into pet food or feed meal. The fellow who drove a rendering truck worked for himself. He picked up dead farm animals across his territory and took them to a rendering plant, he got paid per hundred weight of carcass he hauled in.

Who doesn't know what I'm talking about here? A cow dies on a hot July Saturday morning and "cooks" in the sun until Monday when the rendering truck arrives to pick it up and haul it away. The carcass cooks and bloats and gurgles and stinks, and the fellow with the rendering truck hooks a cable around the spongy cow and winches it up into the box of the truck. The dead cow farts and groans as it is moved and pulled into the truck, as liquid drips from its nose. Once the cow is up in the truck, the driver unhooks the cable, he'll need it again down the road, there's another farm, another dead cow or dead hog or dead horse that will have to be winched up into the truck.

This is tough work if you are not used to it. It is tough work even if you're used to it. The smell of death will gag you if you aren't accustomed to it, sometimes it gags you even when you're used to it. The sight of flies crawling in and out of nose holes. The baked glaze of the dead cow's unseeing eye. It is tough work, yet work that must be done. Honorable work that the rest of us would rather not think about.

The driver hauls his ripe cartage to the rendering plant where it gets unloaded. Dead cows and calves have to be skinned before the carcasses are turned into meal. Sheep have to be skinned.

Bud and Cliff were a team skinning cows at the West Point rendering plant. Cliff would always start at one end of the cow, skinning, and Bud would start at the other, and they could do the job start to finish in four minutes. Four minutes from the first slice into the skin til the carcass was naked as a steak in the meat counter. Nobody much liked skinning sheep because it was hard getting the knife blade down through the wool to make a cut, so Bud skinned most of the sheep that came into the plant. He could skin a sheep by himself in three minutes, a calf in two minutes. Cow and calf skins were salted and saved, to be tanned for leather.

The carcass gets cut into manageable chunks so it can be put into the cooker. A hog will get quartered, for instance, and tossed along with pieces of cow, horse, sheep, into a huge pressure cooker. The heat reduces the fat and much of the grease is siphoned off during cooking. Both grease and moisture get cooked out of the meat; as that happens, the meat becomes powdery. A good operator can tell by how the cooked meat feels when it is ready for pressing. Pressing squeezes the very last grease out of the meat. The result is a cake that can be put into the hammermill and turned to meal that is sold to manufacturers who make chicken feed and hog feed mainly. The protein content of the meal coming out of the West Point rendering plant was always about 50%, which was higher than competitors' meal; West Point paid attention to the mix of carcasses going into the cooker, and squeezed out more of the grease.

What happens to the grease? Most of the grease is sold to soap-makers and goes into soap like that you use to wash your face, Cliff and Bud told me.

Rather than being cooked down for meal, the fresher dead animals would be boned and cut up for pet food. After I'd turned off the tape recorder, Cliff told about the time he was called to Washington to testify about the proper labeling of meat scraps from rendering plants, scraps that were meant to be pet food but ended up being fed to humans. All across a swath of the middle part of the continent, from Canada down to Texas, Cliff had investigated what was happening to meat that was supposed to be dog food, and he had gathered signed affidavits from people who knew what was happening to the meat - some boned meat from some rendering plants was ending up on human tables, not in dog bowls, and Cliff was not happy about it. He could understand how people got away with it: take the labels off a can of stew meat and a can of dog food you might not be able to tell which is which. Cliff's evidence and his testimony helped get legislation for tougher labeling of such meat - "Not For Human Consumption."

So - how do you deal with the aspects of the work that most people consider disgusting?

"I know there are people who will tell you," Bud said, "that out at the rendering plant we'd sit on bloated carcasses to eat our lunch. That is not true. We never did that."

[Note added later: Indeed, I had someone from West Point tell me, as if he'd seen it himself, that the men at the rendering plant would sit around on the dead animals eating their lunch.]

To be continued....