ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

ut I said, I’ll get a company car, and my kit.” And I’ll go up to South St. Paul, which was the largest meat
packing plant in Swift and Company then. They had 240 of them, and that was the biggest. And that’s where
those livers were shipped from. Went up there and found that--I sampled the liver, as it came out of the cow,
when they did the ventral cut on the cow and opened it up, and they took out the organs, then they have three
round tubes that go down to the next fl oor. See, in the food industry, the cheapest form of energy is gravity. So
you dump something in a hole in the fl oor and it slides down to the next fl oor. Then they take what they want
off of it and dump the remains in another hole in the fl oor and it goes down to the next fl oor. By the time they
get down to the basement, there’s nothing left but the hides. So when they take the livers out, there was nothing
wrong with the livers. Cattle don’t normally have salmonellosis. Pigs, poultry [do]. Cattle don’t. I tag the
liver and the liver is clean as a baby’s bottom. It goes down that slide to the next fl oor and comes out on a long
table, a 20-foot long table, fi ve feet wide. Guys working on each side, taking apart what’s called the tracheal
tree. It has the trachea, the lungs, the liver, the spleen, the gall bladder, etc. all attached. At the bottom of the
slide, I sample the same liver that I just put my red tag and my name on. Then I dash around and come down
the steps and get over there. When it comes down there, they’re holding it out for me cause it’s red tagged.
I sample it. Every one of them had salmonella on them. Then what do they do with them? They have big
bathtubs which hold maybe 600 pounds of livers. And they pull them off. They inspect them, stamp them with
the government approved on it and drop them in this bathtub. And it fi lls up, and as it fi lls up, it squeezes, the
weight squeezes the blood out of the liver, and by the time you get up to the top, the whole thing is swimming
in blood, four inches of blood on top of the thing. Then it is taken over to the elevator and taken down to the
basement to the cold room. And they have vertical, eight-foot-high racks with every foot and a half or so [there
are] hooks on it. And they take them out of there and hang it on a hook, hang it on a hook, hang it on a hook.
And then the next row of hooks and the next row of hooks, and the next row of hooks. Each one is dripping
blood from the top and down onto the second layer. Then the two bloods down to the third layer, etc. So if you
didn’t have a hundred percent [contaminated], now you have a hundred percent of them contaminated.
I said, “Your system has got to stop.” [And they said], “Where are we getting the contaminate on the slides?
We wash those slides down every couple of hours with Clorox solution.] I said, “Okay. Plant manager,” I
said, “I’m gonna have dinner, and I said about, about 8, 8:30 or 9:00 o’clock tonight, meet me at the plant with
fl ashlights. And be sure to tell the guard so we won’t get shot while we’re trying to get into the plant, okay?”
I met him. We walked in. I said, “Don’t turn on the lights.” And we just hit the fl ashlight beams around and
we hit the lights. The eyes of rats. I says, “The rats eat the little snippets of fl esh that are snipped off as a liver
goes over the joints in the tube--they’re open sided, they’re half, halfway, the little snippets of fl esh taken off of
the livers as they slide over. And what’s left there, the rats are climbing up on those slides at night and eating
that liver. And they’re depositing their thank you cards after they’ve had their meal. And so as long as you’ve
got rats in the plants, you’re always going to have that.” And I said, “If you don’t have rats, there’ll probably be
something else that will go around those slides later on in the day that do have salmonella, and they’ll be contaminated
anyway.” So, I solved the problem [in his work at Swift & Company]: I devised an A-frame with the
hooks on it, so that when you took the liver out of the cow on the top shelf, you put it right then and there on the
A-frames, let the government inspectors inspect those livers hanging on the A-frame, and stamp them, and then
put the A-frame on the elevator and take them down to the basement to the cold room, and push them up, and
stack them up against the wall overnight. And then the morning, they were packed. No salmonella problem.
As clean as they could be, right out of the cow.
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Life Science