With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another
working in a sausage factory, the family had a first-hand
knowledge of the great majority of Packingtown swindles.
For it was the custom, as they found, whenever meat
was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything
else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage.
With what had been told them by Jonas, who had worked
in the pickle rooms, they could now study the whole
of the spoiled-meat industry on the inside, and read
a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest—that
they use everything of the pig except the squeal.
Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out
of pickle would often be found sour, and how they
would rub it up with soda to take away the smell,
and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also
of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed,
giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole
or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor
they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an
ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time and
increased the capacity of the plant—a machine
consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by
plunging this needle into the meat and working with
his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a
few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there
would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor
so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room
with them. To pump into these the packers had
a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed
the odor—a process known to the workers
as “giving them thirty per cent.”
Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be
found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly
these had been sold as “Number Three Grade,”
but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a
new device, and now they would extract the bone, about
which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the
hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there
was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade—there
was only Number One Grade. The packers were always
originating such schemes—they had what
they called “boneless hams,” which were
all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings;
and “California hams,” which were the
shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all
the meat cut out; and fancy “skinned hams,”
which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were
so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them—that
is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and
labeled “head cheese!”
It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it
came into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up
by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and
mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever
was in a ham could make any difference. There
was never the least attention paid to what was cut
up for sausage; there would come all the way back
from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and
