Ravenous by Henry Dimbleby

Author:Henry Dimbleby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

And then there’s the inescapable fact that in order to eat meat we have to sanction the mass slaughter of animals.

Even the most well-run slaughterhouses are disturbing for the conscientious meat-eater. I have visited quite a few clean, orderly, welfare-conscious abattoirs, but always come away feeling slightly mad. Partly, this is because you have to walk through an abattoir in reverse. To preserve food hygiene, you start at the end of the butchering process, where it is cleanest, and then proceed backwards through the various stages of dismemberment and death.

In a beef abattoir, the tour begins in a giant walkin fridge full of cellophaned packs of steak or mince, labelled and ready for the supermarket shelves. It is very cold and quiet and odourless here. Then you proceed to the butchery zone, where lines of white-clad workers make quick, deft movements with their knives. Next is a room where animal carcasses – skinned, decapitated, sawn in half lengthways and strung up on a slow-moving conveyor belt – are graded on the quality of their meat. After that, you push through a door into a hot, red cacophony of smell and noise. This is where animals get turned into carcasses.

Just outside the room, the live cow walks into a narrow metal box. It gets a squirt of water on its forehead, to conduct electricity, and a metal apparatus descends from above to touch its heart and head. A strong electrical current is passed through this device and, eyes swivelling, the beast drops unconscious. The metal box then tips sideways into the processing room, where a worker ties a chain around the cow’s back feet, hoists it up onto the conveyor belt and slits its throat. Blood gushes noisily through grates in the floor.*

From there, the body is carried by the conveyor belt to one worker after another, each with a different dismembering task. One slits open the belly and removes the guts. One makes circular incisions around the feet and attaches chains to the skin, which is then pulled off in one go, like a jumper. At the side of the room, a man (I have only seen men do this) stands on a moving platform, wearing an enormous circular saw, so heavy that it has to be strapped to his torso. As each carcass reaches him, he rises up and down on his lift, sawing the body in two. The noise is appalling.

I should say that beyond this room, at the point where the animals are herded towards their death, the scene is less awful than you might expect. In this country most abattoirs use carefully devised systems, such as the curved ramps designed by the American animal behaviourist Dr Temple Grandin, that help keep the animals calm. Even so, it is impossible to walk away from an industrial-scale abattoir without feeling somewhat queasy.

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