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Comment by aebtebeten | Hacker News Reader

... and meat production is only at risk if you have working conditions of the sort Upton Sinclair wrote about in "The Jungle" (1906). Meatpacking here is a skilled trade that is done without conveyor belts, so our meat packers have had no problem keeping 2m distance.

(Rice and beans are yummy, but the pastafarians have better comics: https://xkcd.com/2287/ )

Edit: (please bear with me for replies, I hit the rate limit so it may be a while)

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Since meatpacking plants are trouble spot in the US that would imply that meatpacking plants in the US have the same conditions as The Jungle but that seems somewhat counterintuitive as The Jungle is often pointed to as having changed the US meatpacking industry for the better.

The Jungle was about a rendering plant no? It's been a while. In the Jungle, people died regularly. In meatpacking these days (pre-covid) it's a dirty/gross job with low pay and physically hard work but (pre-covid) there weren't a lot of deaths from meatpacking. OSHA kind of frowns on that sort of thing, at least during Democratic administrations.

Yes, it's back. US Immigration enforcement has been soft on the meat industry. Part of this was the political backlash after there was an ICE raid on a meat plant in Iowa in 2008, and a prominent Jew went to prison.[1] (Trump recently pardoned him.) ICE enforcement against employers has never been strong, and was even weaker after that. There hasn't been a big raid like that since.

In countries without cheap labor, much meat processing is automated. The technology is available. Lamb: [2] Beef: [3] Chicken [4]. "Against Brazil, USA and Asia, we're a high cost manufacturer" - Australian plant manager putting in automation. Right now, lamb deboning can be totally automated, chicken deboning almost is, and beef is coming along. (This reflects the technology coming from Australia, where the sheep industry is huge.)

Possible area for a startup.

(Videos not safe for vegetarians.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postville_raid

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za2dsB0qrMg

[3] https://youtu.be/jqs2PWmbuus

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isdKEo_qMqY

It's good to hear that at least the beef carcasses can be processed in a wide range. One problem meat finishers had in the pandemic US was that even despite the lack of automation, packers would only take animals in a narrow weight range, so simply waiting for packing plants to come back up wasn't an option.

(speaking of options, I understand there are some goods so perishable that even the notoriously imperfect commodities exchanges won't touch them: when both sellers and buyers can store goods, it's much more difficult to manipulate markets)

  (Trump recently pardoned him)

No,he wasn't pardoned. His sentence was commuted. He remains a convicted felon.

Right, although some press reports say "pardon", it was just a commutation to time served.[1] There's not that much difference in practice.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/09/politics/kushner-rubashkin-tr...

The Jungle was about the safety of the products (to consume) far more than about the safety of the workers.

Chicago meatpacking was safer work than, say, railroad grades or West Virginia coal mines.

I guess the progression in various jurisdiction's* meat laws tends to go: 1. protect consumers 2. protect workers 3. protect animals

* food is well labelled here. My pistachios tend to alternately come from California and from Iran; my potato chips are tracked back to the farm from where the potatoes came; and restaurants generally have the sources of their meats printed on the menu (if not, no one is surprised to be asked)

The exceptions in food labeling confound me. I keep assuming that some behaviors have to be illegal, but Federal rulemaking changes have been spottily reported for over 20 years.

One example is nuts. There are off brands (I see mainly among Grocery Outlet and store brands) which will say things like "may contain nuts from (list of 8 countries)". How can that be legal? When there is any recall, how could any of these not need recalling? etc.

Plus, obvious errors go unresolved. For example, the Hoodys peanuts in shell at Costco. The nutritional information assumes ~10% shell content by weight, but the number of servings times serving size = 110+% of the item weight. Math just ain't that hard. I actually reported this to Costco over a year ago; it remains unchanged.

The Jungle was also a novel, where the author did not need to cite any facts.

It’s back. As they say, if you got the money, honey, we got your disease. In The Jungle, welcome to The Jungle. Watch it bring you to your shun n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n knees, knees!

Kind of a weird theme song for the book now that I think about it.

Where is "here" for you?

Switzerland. This is a safety publication of ours (not safe for vegetarians) https://www.ekas.ch/download.php?id=7869 Even if you don't read german, I think the pictures show why we haven't had the same problems (compare to an image search of conveyer-belt-driven meatpacking in, say, germany) with social distancing and meat.

It probably helps that even though we are a politically third world country, we are an economically first world country: people are expensive and machines are cheap.

For nerds: the slogan on the front page, «Unfall – kein Zufall!», means "Accidents are not happenstance", and the graph on p.8 shows the close relationship between improvement on safety assessments and accident rates.

p.19 is also an interesting workplace safety observation, but that's a different topic.

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