Behind Closed Doors In The Meat Industry

The meat industry is one of the largest industries in the world, however, it is one of the leading cause of millions of illnesses and deaths every year. Because inspecting meat for foodborne pathogens is a costly, timely and difficult task, meat companies are willing to barely meet the government 's standards in order to save money. This behavior is unacceptable because millions of people are getting sick every year from tainted meats. The longer the country continues its ignorance about the meat industry, the worse the conditions are going to become. The only way to improve conditions is to have transparency within the industries.

In the picture, the viewer sees 156,500 pounds of recalled meat being dumped into a landfill. The “contaminated

The meat industry wants the public to know as little as possible about what goes on with their meat. They give the American public the false idea that their food has been properly cared for its entire life, when in reality the animal was likely given many hormones, lived in a very cramped space and quite possibly never had seen daylight its entire life. Because they try and keep the process a secret, many conditions in the factory could be unsafe. This is why it is vital for slaughterhouses to be more transparent so the conditions are actually safe and people are not just given the falsehood idea that it is. If a light is not shed on what is going on behind closed doors, conditions will only worsen because “most companies would not err on the side of safety without a potentially substantial negative impact on profits” (Simon

“American men on average eat 6.9 oz. of meat per day and women eat 4.4 oz” (Meat Institute). New pathogens are developing and finding their way into foods which is why the American people should know how their food is being handled and tested. They put so much trust into the meat industries when the public doesn’t even know what the reality is. “About 48 million people (1 in 6 Americans) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die each year from foodborne diseases” (U.S. FDA). Those numbers are far too high to accept as a statistic, thousands of people are dying from pathogens that could be prevented if meat inspection had more