Visit To An Animal Rendering Plant

The following is a description of a "rendering" plant. WARNING: very graphic
You may not be familiar with the idea of rendering plants. The dead animal and discarded flesh disposal industry. Yet rendering represents a multi-billion dollar business, and these facilities operate 24 hours a day just about everywhere in America, and they've been in operation for years.

Here is an article entitled “The Dark Side of Recycling” from the Fall, 1990, Earth Island Journal to learn about rendering plants:

“The rendering plant floor is piled high with ’raw product’: thousands of dead dogs and cats; heads and hooves from cattle, sheep, pigs and horses; whole skunks; rats and raccoons --all waiting to be processed. In the 90 degree heat, the piles of dead animals seem to have a life of their own as millions of maggots swarm over the carcasses.

“Two bandana-masked men begin operating Bobcat mini-dozers, loading the ‘raw’ into a 10-foot-deep stainless steel pit. They are undocumented workers from Mexico, doing a dirty job. A giant auger grinder at the bottom of the pit begins to turn. Popping bones and squeezing flesh are sounds from a nightmare you will never forget.

“Rendering is the process of cooking raw animal material to remove the moisture and fat. The rendering plant works like a giant kitchen. The cooker, or ‘chef,’ blends the raw product in order to maintain a certain ratio between the carcasses of pets, livestock, poultry waste and supermarket rejects.

“Once the mass is cut into small pieces, it is transported to another auger for fine shredding. It is then cooked at 280 degrees for one hour. The continuous batch cooking process goes on non-stop 24 hours a day, seven days a week as meat is melted away from bones in the hot 'soup.’ During this cooking process, the soup produces a fat of yellow grease or tallow that rises to the top and is skimmed off. The cooked meat and bone are sent to a hammer mill press, which squeezes out the remaining moisture and pulverizes the product into a gritty powder. Shaker screens sift out excess hair and large bone chips. Once the batch is finished, all that is left is yellow grease, meal and bone meal.

“As the American Journal of Veterinary Research explains, this recycled meat and bone meal is used as ‘a source of protein and other nutrients in the diets of poultry and swine and in pet foods, with lesser amounts used in the feed of cattle and sheep. Animal fat is also used in animal feeds as an energy source.’ Every day, hundreds of rendering plants across the United States truck millions of tons of this ‘food enhancer’ to poultry ranches, cattle feed-lots, dairy and hog farms, fish feed plants and pet food manufacturers where it is mixed with other ingredients to feed the billions of animals that meat eating humans, in turn, will eat.

“Rendering plants have different specialties. The labeling designation of a particular ‘run’ of product is defined by the predominance of a specific animal. Some product label names are: meat meal, meat by-products, poultry meal, poultry by-products, fish meal, fish oil, yellow grease, tallow, beef fat and chicken fat.

“Rendering plants perform one of the most valuable functions on Earth: they recycle used animals. Without rendering, our cities would run the risk of becoming filled with diseased and rotting carcasses. Fatal viruses and bacteria would spread uncontrolled through the population.

“Death is the number one commodity in a business where the demand for feed ingredients far exceeds the supply of raw product. But this elaborate system of food production through waste management has evolved into a recycling nightmare. Rendering plants are unavoidably processing toxic waste.

“The dead animals (the ‘raw’) are accompanied by a whole menu of unwanted ingredients. Pesticides enter the rendering process via poisoned livestock, and fish oil laced with bootleg DDT and other organophosphates that have accumulated in the bodies of West Coast mackerel and tuna.

“Because animals are frequently shoved into the pit with flea collars still attached organophosphate-containing insecticides get into the mix as well. The insecticide Dursban arrives in the form of cattle insecticide patches. Pharmaceuticals leak from antibiotics in livestock, and euthanasia drugs given to pets are also included. Heavy metals accumulate from a variety of sources: pet ID tags, surgical pins and needles.

“Even plastic winds up going into the pit. Unsold supermarket meats, chicken and fish arrive in Styrofoam trays and shrink wrap. No one has time for the tedious chore of unwrapping thousands of rejected meat packs. More plastic is added to the pits with the arrival of cattle ID tags, plastic insecticide patches and the green plastic bags containing pets from veterinarians.

“Skyrocketing labor costs are one of the economic factors forcing the corporate flesh peddlers to cheat. It is far too costly for plant personnel to cut off flea collars or unwrap spoiled T-bone steaks. Every week, millions of packages of plastic wrapped meat go through the rendering process and become one of the unwanted ingredients in animal feed.

“The most environmentally conscious state in the nation is California, where spot checks and testing of animal feed ingredients happen at the wobbly rate of once every two-and-a-half months. The supervising state agency is the Department of Agriculture's Feed and Fertilizer Division of Compliance. Its main objective is to test for truth in labeling: does the percentage of protein, phosphorous and calcium match the rendering plant's claims; do the percentages meet state requirements? However, testing for pesticides and other toxins in animal feeds is incomplete.

“In California, eight field inspectors regulate a rendering industry that feeds the animals that the state's 30 million people eat. When it comes to rendering plants, however, state and federal agencies have maintained a hands off policy, allowing the industry to become largely self regulating. An article in the February 1990 issue of Render, the industry's national magazine, suggests that the self regulation of certain contamination problems is not working.

“One policing program that is already off to a shaky start is the Salmonella Education/Reduction Program, formed under the auspices of the National Renders Association. The magazine states that ‘...unless US and Canadian renders get their heads out of the ground and demonstrate that they are serious about reducing the incidence of salmonella contamination in their animal protein meals, they are going to be faced with new and overly stringent government regulations.’

“So far, the voluntary self testing program is not working. According to the magazine, ‘...only about 20 per cent of the total number of companies producing or blending animal protein meal have signed up for the program...’ Far fewer have done the actual testing.

“The American Journal of Veterinary Research conducted an investigation into the persistence of sodium Phenobarbital in the carcasses of euphonized animals at a typical rendering plant in 1985 and found ‘... virtually no degradation of the drug occurred during this conventional rendering process...’ and that ‘...the potential of other chemical contaminants (e.g., heavy metals, pesticides and environmental toxicants, which may cause massive herd mortalities) to degrade during conventional rendering needs further evaluation.’

“Renderers are the silent partners in our food chain. But worried insiders are beginning to talk, and one word that continues to come up in conversation is ‘pesticides.’ The possibility of petrochemicals poisoning our food has become a reality. Government agencies and the industry itself are allowing toxins to be inadvertently recycled from the streets and supermarket shelves into the food chain. As we break into a new decade of increasingly complex pollution problems, we must rethink our place in the environment. No longer hunters, we are becoming the victims of our technologically altered food chain.

“The possibility of petrochemicals poisoning our food has become a reality.”

That article is one of the most disgusting things we have ever read.

Meat consumption leaves an acidic residue and a diet of acid forming foods requires the body to balance its pH by withdrawing calcium from the bones and teeth. So even if we consume enough calcium, a high protein, meat based diet will cause calcium to be leached from our bodies.

As children we were taught to eat from the "Four Food Groups". This was merely a marketing concoction by the joint efforts of the Meat and Dairy Associations (which are VERY BIG business) to sell their products.

According to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton’s article, “The US ‘Mad Cow’ Cover-Up.” Stauber and Sheldon write, “For seven years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the multi-billion dollar animal livestock industry have cooperated in a PR cover-up of huge health risks to U.S. animals and people.

“For ten years preceding the outbreak of Mad Cow Disease in Britain, the USDA had scientific evidence that a version of the disease existed in U.S. cattle. Yet government and industry have failed, even at this late date, to ban the practice of ‘cow cannibalism.’

“The practice, prohibited in Britain for years, continues throughout the U.S. It is, in fact, more widespread in the U.S. than in any other country. And, as USDA researcher Dr. Mark Robinson points out, ‘the rendering processes employed in the UK and the US are virtually the same.’ The USDA confirms that, for decades, scrapie-infected sheep have passed through U.S. rendering plants.’

“After a decade of official denials, the British government finally admitted that Mad Cow Disease -- responsible for the deaths of more than 160,000 British cattle -- appeared to have migrated into humans who ate contaminated beef and are now dying of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD).

“The British government's acknowledgment that infected beef was the likely cause of death for ten unusually young CJD victims came as grim vindication to Dr. Richard Lacey, a leading British microbiologist whose increasingly desperate warnings that the BSE threat was ‘more serious than AIDS’ have been officially dismissed for the past six years.

“Dr. Lacey predicts that the government's failure to act sooner, combined with the disease's long latency period, could produce 5,000-500,000 human deaths per year in Britain sometime after the year 2000.

“Internal documents and PR plans obtained by PR Watch, via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) investigation, show that the U.S. government has sought to protect the economic interests of the powerful meat and animal feed industries, while denying the existence of risks to animals and human.

“In a 1991 internal PR document, the USDA advised officials to use the technical name for the disease. ‘The term “Mad Cow Disease” has been detrimental,’ the document explained. ‘We should emphasize the need to use the term “bovine spongiform encephalopathy” or “BSE.”’

“Mad Cow Disease apparently became an epidemic in England as a result of ‘rendering plants’ -- factories that melt carcasses and waste meat products into protein used in animal feeds, cosmetics, nutritional supplements, medicines, and other products. As little as one teaspoon of feed derived from infected cattle can transmit the disease to another cow.

“In the U.S., plants process billions of pounds of protein from dead cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and other animals into animal feed each year.

“In 1990, the USDA and FDA convened a committee dominated by the cattle, dairy, sheep, and rendering industries. They launched a ‘voluntary ban’ on feeding rendered cows to cows. This was simply a PR maneuver. A similar voluntary ban failed miserably in Britain. The feeding of ruminant protein to cows continues at a rate of millions of pounds per day.

“U.S. government and industry representatives still insist that Mad Cow Disease does not exist in the U.S. Unfortunately, this party line is based on wishful thinking, rather than scientific proof.

“A major U.S. outbreak seems plausible, even likely, unless the U.S. government acts swiftly to outlaw the practice of feeding rendered by-product protein to cows.

“Has a meat borne form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease already spread into the U.S. human population? Despite denials from the federal government, a number of statistically alarming clusters of CJD already have been reported in the U.S.

“In the past, victims of CJD have been misdiagnosed with Alzheimer’s -- a disease afflicting some four million Americans. The beginnings of a CJD epidemic could, therefore, already be hidden within the country's huge population of dementia patients.”

As usual, though, in this country, the bottom line boils down to money and not the public good. In another USDA internal document from 1991, entitled “BSE Rendering Policy,” we read: “There is speculation... that a spongiform encephalopathy agent is present in the U.S. cattle population.” The report concluded that “prohibit[ing] the feeding of sheep and cattle origin protein products to all ruminants... minimizes the risk of BSE. The disadvantage is that the cost to the livestock and rendering industries would be substantial.”

In Michael Greger’s groundbreaking article, “The Public Health Implications of Mad Cow Disease,” we learn: “With scientists like Marsh saying, ‘The exact same thing could happen over here as happened in Britain,’ and with beef consumption already at a thirty-year low, the USDA is justifiably worried. There was even a complaint filed with the FDA concerning a woman with CJD who had been taking a dietary supplement containing bovine tissue. Like England, we have been feeding dead cows to living cows for decades. In fact, here in the U.S. a minimum of 14% of the remains of rendered cattle is fed to other cows (another 50% goes on the pig and chicken menu). In 1989 alone, almost 800 million pounds of processed animal were fed to beef and dairy cattle. Partly because of this, the USDA has conceded that ‘the potential risk of amplification of the BSE agent is much greater in the United States’ than in Britain.

“... Four million Americans are affected by Alzheimer's; it is the fourth leading cause of death among the elderly in the U.S. Epidemiological evidence suggests that people eating meat more than four times a week for a prolonged period have a three times higher chance of suffering a dementia than long-time vegetarians. A preliminary 1989 study at the University of Pennsylvania showed that over 5% of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's were actually dying from a human spongiform encephalopathy. That means that as many as 200,000 people in the United States may already be dying from mad cow disease each year.”

The cattle that so many folks eat every day not only fatten on the flesh of their fellows, but they also feed on the manure of other species. Feast your eyes on this information from the U.S. News and World Report: “Chicken manure in particular, which costs from $15 to $45 a ton in comparison with up to $125 a ton for alfalfa, is increasingly used as feed by cattle farmers despite possible health risks to consumers... more and more farmers are turning to chicken manure as a cheaper alternative to grains and hay.”

The same story quotes farmer Lamar Carter, who feeds to his 800 head of cattle a witches’ brew of soybean bran and chicken manure: “My cows are as fat as butter balls. If I didn't have chicken litter, I’d have to sell half my herd. Other feed's too expensive.”

Farmer Carter doesn't mention this, but reporters Satchell and Hedges do: “Chicken manure often contains campylobacter and salmonella bacteria, which can cause disease in humans, as well as intestinal parasites, veterinary drug residues, and toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury. These bacteria and toxins are passed on to the cattle and can be cycled to humans who eat beef contaminated by feces during slaughter.”

If they're not being fed on rendered by-products or chicken manure, according to the Satchell and Hedges article, “Animal feed manufacturers and farmers also have begun using or trying out dehydrated food garbage, fats emptied from restaurant fryers and grease traps, cement kiln dust, even newsprint and cardboard that are derived from plant cellulose. Researchers in addition have experimented with cattle and hog manure, and human sewage sludge. New feed additives are being introduced so fast, says Daniel McChesney, head of animal feed safety for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, that the government cannot keep pace with new regulations to cover them.”

Cattle and hog manure and human sewage sludge as possible foods for the animals eaten by human beings.

Words fail me.