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Slaughterhouse Beautiful

You really can find anything online. While researching some technology for upcoming writing and photo projects, I quickly hopped from such simple and naïve entries, such as "meathooks" to "Slaughtering Machinery." Someone has to make and market this stuff, I suppose, if we're going to keep enjoying our Big Macs and corn dogs. Still, it's a shock to run into neatly laid out product categories such as "Gutting Systems, automatic," "Deathtraps," and "Skinning Machines."

Finding these devices is like stepping through a time machine. The names of the machines, even their physical forms contain echoes of thousands of years of organized and systematized butchery. Meat is meat, so the machines of death haven't changed much over time, they've just grown more refined. No more hammers to stun the walking beef. Now, it's "boltguns." Easier on the slaughterhouse worker and supposedly more humane for the cow. Somehow, I think that until one of us bipeds with the big brains volunteers to field test both the hammer and the gun, we're never really going to know. But it's good marketing.

Looking through these pages, I remember once being lost in Kathmandu and finding myself in the butchers' quarter. In Nepal, they still killed and worked the meat with hand tools. Don't get any ideas that being so close to the death and the animals made the butchers any more empathetic or kind to the animals. The gutters and doorsteps in the butcher's quarter were splashed like Texas Chainsaw Massacre with fresh blood. Chickens rode into the place in car trunks, popping their heads out at each stop, like some roving Whack-A-Mole game. The severed legs of a water buffalo were propped outside the front door of one shop. I still have a photo of that somewhere in my archives.

http://www.processfood.com/productLocator/meat/product1.cfm?ID1=%20Slaughtering%20Equipment%3A

Posted by Kadrey at June 4, 2003 10:10 PM

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