The meat industry is a dark, closed institution that jealously guards its secrets--mind-numbing cruelty to animals, disregard for its workers, lax safety that results in death and sickness from tainted meat. Just how jealously does it guard these secrets? Just as if she were infiltrating the Mob or the IRA, investigative reporter Gail Eisnitz had to go undercover, assuming a false identity and befriending people on the inside. She was almost murdered for her efforts and has been threatened with violence numerous times. Luckily she survived her journey into the world of slaughtered animals and wrote one of the most damning exposes of an industry ever published.

Naturally, turning live animals into dead meat has never been a pleasant process, but an increased worldwide demand for meat, streamlined production processes, industry consolidation, deregulation, and an ineffective governmental oversight agency have combined with greed and corruption to create an industry that mistreats animals, employees, and consumers in an effort to keep production humming and cash flowing.

Esinitz interviewed dozens of workers and inspectors from all over the country. They consistently told her of skinning live, conscious cows, lowering live hogs into tanks of scalding water, beating animals to death with lead pipes, and whipping, kicking, strangling, and repeatedly shocking the animals. They also tell of the dangers presented by the struggling animals, who break the workers' bones, cut them, and even trample them. Workers are very reluctant to complain about these and other dangerous conditions, though, because they know they'll lose their jobs if they speak up. When they do complain, nothing at all is done about the problems.

In one of the most nauseating moments, a worker tells of taking out his frustrations on a pig by cutting part of its nose off and rubbing salt into the bloody stump. Another worker tells of having "fun" by beating the hogs with a led pipe or forcing them to jump into the scalding tanks.

At one point, Eisnitz talks to Dave Carney, who not only has spent almost 20 years as a USDA inspector but is also chairman of the federal meat inspectors' union, which has 6,000 members. Carney tells her of the brutal treatment the animals--cows, pigs, lambs, horses, chickens, etc.--suffer: "'To keep that production line moving,' he continued, 'quite often uncooperative animals are beaten, they have prods poked in their faces and up their rectums, they have bones broken and eyeballs poked out, suspects [ie, 'Live animals that appear to be afflicted with a disease or condition that could make them unfit for human consumption'] are left unattended for days. Sometimes animals are simply beaten to death out in the pens before being slipped into the slaughtering process. Some even reach various stages of the slaughtering process alive. They have their hooves cut off, parts of their bung and their cavities opened.' For the next several minutes he talked about beating, dragging, prodding, and hit-or-miss stunning.'"

Carney explains that most inspectors are not even allowed to see the actual slaughtering taking place. It's a violation of government rules to leave their inspection stations, which are always located far away from the killing area. Also, the safety of the meat is a much higher concern than the treatment of the animals, but even so, the inspectors' superiors frown on the stopping of a line because of health concerns. Carney explains: "If you stop a mass-production line, where you have sixty, seventy, a hundred plant employees standing around, your boss, the USDA veterinarian in the plant, is going to make your life hell. He feels he's got to answer to the company for lost production. He'll ridicule you, chew you out. Inspectors are often disciplined for sticking to regulations and stopping production for a contamination problem . . ."

Eisnitz also looks at E. coli, salmonella, and other types of food poisoning from meat that have skyrocketed since the USDA cut its number of inspectors, eliminated the final carcass inspection ("where inspectors used to watch for contaminants such as feces, hair, dirt, and grease"), and established levels of how many visible flecks and smears of shit are allowable on a carcass. A worker at Carolina Foods talks about the floor being littered with 12-inch roundworms that live in the intestines of most of the pigs she works with. That same worker also has holes eaten into her skin caused by the acid in the pigs' intestines.

Eisnitz uses the last section of the book to chronicle the detached limbs, crushed hands, miscarriages, and deaths that have occurred in the slaughterhouses. Information from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals that "meat packing is the most dangerous industry in the United States. In fact, a worker's chances of suffering an injury or an illness in a meat plant are six times greater than if that same person worked in a coal mine."

In the end, Dave Carney sums it up with two statements. The USDA is basically worthless because, "We're dictated to by the industry we regulate." (This book points out evidence of collusion between the meat industry and the highest level of government.) That industry, in turn, is heartless: "It's as if they're not even killing animals. They're 'disassembling' them, processing raw materials in a manufacturing operation."