Day Eleven: Salt Lake City and Factory Tours

One of the most anticipated activities of the trip was our tour at Sweet's Candy Factory.  We learned about this place during the month we had cable.  We signed up for cable in order to watch the World Cup; but, soccer was only on so many hours of the day and the Food Network was on otherwise.  So, the Food Network had a show called "Kid in a Candy Factory" which promoted the Salt Lake City company that has been run by the Sweet family for five generations.  We had to wear hairnets -- Rob had to even wear a beard net -- and were not permitted to bring our camera into the plant.  This is the only photo we have from the tour.

Make no mistake:  Factory work is difficult, even if in a candy factory.  We saw the employees standing on thin pads over cement floors at their respective stations for -- presumably -- an eight-hour shift.  They were tasked with doing the same thing, over and over, for the entire shift.  Although the factory was clean, well-ventilated, and brightly-lit, the employees were little more than human cogs in the daily production of thousands of pounds of confections.

Having spent a great deal of time on the road, we have passed 18-wheelers brimming with cows, piglets, and sheep.  One cattle track had "The Last Ride" painted on the the back hatch.  These animals were on their way to slaughterhouses.  Driving past, the children inquired as to the animals' destinations.  We told them.

But, the slaughterhouse is not just about the end of these animals' lives; it is also very much about the human cogs working there.  Instead of pouring sugar into large mixing bowls and adding color and flavor to make taffy, these workers are loading exhausted animals into chutes to bring each individual to the front of the line to be "harvested."  Then, another worker is charged with draining the fluids, another with skinning, another with boning, another with butchering, etc., etc., etc.

From Wikipedia:
In the United States, around ten billion animals are slaughtered every year in 5,700 slaughterhouses and processing plants employing 527,000 workers. On average, 28.1 billion pounds of beef were consumed in the U.S. alone.  Slaughtering animals on a large scale poses significant logistical problems and public health concerns, with public aversion to meat packing influencing the location of slaughterhouses. 

There has been criticism of the methods of preparation, herding, and killing within some slaughterhouses, and in particular of the speed with which the slaughter is sometimes conducted. Investigations by animal welfare and animal rights groups have indicated that a proportion of these animals are being skinned or gutted while apparently still alive and conscious.  There has also been criticism of the methods of transport of the animals, who are driven for hundreds of miles to slaughterhouses in conditions that often result in crush injuries and death en route.

We are raising the children as vegetarians.  We have decided that each of them may make their own choice as to eating animals after a full understanding of the methods of getting the meat onto a plate.  We imagine that the day will never come that one of them will be able to order a Big Mac after reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or after taking a virtual tour -- real ones are not permitted due to the dangerous conditions -- through a slaughterhouse.