AtDDtA1: The Stockyards

[Joseph T]

I once worked for a week in a slaughterhouse while traveling around  
the west. I scratched my hand  and it got badly infected. Too poor  
for medical help,  the hand got inflamed and I had 2 days of high  
fever. Don't know which was worse, the stench, or the sight of beef  
halves dragged across concrete floors smeared with blood, grease and  
who knows what else.

TP's picture may be gone for Chicago but it is far from a thing of  
the past.  Eric Schlosser presented the following information in a  
recent talk on NPR.. 1)The entire town of Greely Colorado is  
saturated with a rank smell from flesh, and large "lagoons" of urine,  
blood and shit. 2)Under current U.S. law there are no clear limits  
for the presence of salmonilla in a meatpacking plant.3) FDA  
inspectors cannot conduct  inspections of plants without permission   
and prior notice of the plant  . 4) He also said that best estimates  
are that about 5,000 US citizens die from contaminated meat every  
year for several years.  Isn't "deregulation"  swell?

It is more than T P who sees the parallels between recent years and  
the start of the age of the robber barons.
On Jan 25, 2007, at 9:04 PM, Joe Allonby wrote:

> I don't know if anybody here has actually ever smelled a  
> slaughterhouse, stockyard, or feedlot. I can attest that they are  
> revolting. To learn that Chicago literally means "bad smell" is  
> poetic justice. (No offense meant to Chicagoans - your bustling big  
> city does not smell for the most part.)
>
> On 1/25/07, Otto <ottosell at googlemail.com> wrote:
> "In 1670, French trader Pierre Moreau built a cabin on the site where
> the Chicago River empties into Lake Michigan (Schroeder, 1992:37). The
> area was called "Chickagou," (bad smell) by the Potawatomi Indians
> because of the skunk cabbage that choked the bogs draining into the
> river."
> http://www.ipsn.org/genesis.htm
> (from Tim's post)
>
> "When leaves are bruised or crushed, the plant releases a strong odor
> which smells like rotten meat."
> http://www.fcps.edu/StratfordLandingES/Ecology/mpages/ 
> skunk_cabbage.htm
>
> Aha!
>
> 2007/1/24, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>:
> >    "As they came in low over the Stockyards, the smell found  
> them, the
> > smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality--like the dark
> > conjugate of some daylit fiction they had flown here, as appeared
> > increasingly likely, to promote.  Somewhere down there was the White
> > City promised in the Columbian Exhibition brochures, somehwere among
> > the tall smokestacks unceasingly vomiting black grease-smoke, the
> > effluvia of butchery unremitting, into which the buildings of the
> > leagues of city lying downwind retreated, like children into sleep
> > which bringeth not reprieve from the day.  In the Stockyards,  
> workers
> > coming off shift, overwhelmingly of the Roman faith, able to detach
> > from earth and blood for a few precious seconds, looked up at the
> > airship in wonder, imagining a detachment of not necessarily helpful
> > angels." (AtD, Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 10)
> >
> >
>

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