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Meatpacker's Impeccable Research

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Over the years, Americans have heard the catchy slogans, “America Runs on Dunkin’”, “Yo Quiero Taco Bell”, “Have It Your Way”, and “I’m Lovin’ It” through television and radio advertisments. These slogans are used by the fast food industry to entice their customers into ordering the newest item on the menu, prompting parents and children to head to the nearest McDonald’s for the newest Happy Meal toy, or to simply just eat a hamburger. Fast Food consumption has become a way of life for many in the United States and across the world, yet many do not know the truth and the reality about this growing industry. Eric Schlosser, an investigative journalist exposes the truth about the success of this industry through his impeccable research and bold …show more content…

Much like the McDonald brothers who applied the principles of Taylorism and division of labor to food preparation, the meatpacking industry such as the Iowa Beef Packers followed suit. They applied “the same labor principles to the meatpacking that the McDonald brothers had applied to making hamburgers…The new IBP plant was a one-story structure with a disassembly line. Each worker stood in one spot along the line, performing the simple task over and over again, making the same knife cuts thousands of times, during an eight-hour shift” (199). Like the workers in both the fast food restaurants and the automobile industry, IBP employees were de-skilled as the executives designated their employees to perform one skill. Schlosser’s visit to a slaughterhouse, he witnesses first hand the de-skilling of workers through the division of labour. He states, “I see: a man reach inside cattle and pull out their kidneys with his bare hands, then drop the kidneys down a metal chute, over and over again, as each animal passes by him … For eight and half-hours, a worker called a ‘sticker’ does nothing but stand in a river of blood, being drenched in blood, slitting the neck of a steer every ten seconds or so, severing its carotid artery. He uses a long knife and must hit exactly the right spot to kill the animal humanely. He hits that spot again and again” (219-220). What Schlosser saw in the slaughterhouse is proof of what the Iowa Beef Packers’ owner A.D. Anderson boasted and that is they try to take away the

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