Things I have seen #247 – Turkey production
I don’t have anything interesting or inspirational to tell you, but, I feel like telling a story about turkey production. I did a project for a turkey manufacturer in Canada. Did you know that in Canada there is a national board the sets quotas on how many birds can be produced by each company? Sounds like socialism to me, but I digress…
They start with a fertile egg. Actually thousands of eggs. They sell some of these eggs off to other meat producers, but they keep some for the next generation of brooders.
When the eggs hatch they have to figure out which chicks are males and which ones are females. This is called ‘sexing’ and is done by specialists because it is not all that obvious.
Once they sort them out, the majority of the toms, the male birds go off to be turned into food products. They save a couple so they can harvest sperm for the next round of turkeys. Imagine having to tell the kids in school what you dad does on career day. He harvests turkey sperm.
The hens are artificially inseminated in a process called ‘cracking’. One at a time. Thousands of them. Most of the hens are good for a season, but sometimes they can adjust the environment to get multiple seasons out of the brooders.
One of the things they enjoy is taking everyone on a tour of the kill plants. The kill plant is where live birds get turned into food. It is said that once you tour the kill plant you’ll never eat poultry again, but I guess it all depends on your constitution.
The big crates full of live birds come in from the trucks on a conveyor belt. A worker grabs them and hangs them up by their legs in shackles from an overhead conveyor line.
They go through a contraption that gives them an electric shock to the head to knock them out and then a worker cuts the throat to let the blood out. The blood is collected underneath for use in other products.
The birds, still hanging from their feet go through a machine with hundreds of rubber fingers that removes the feathers.
An operator slices them open and removes the guts. The guts get hung on a separate hook on the overhead conveyor. They have to keep the guts with the bird carcass in case there is some evidence of disease. There’s a market for some of the internal bits like the livers and hearts.
Then they remove the heads and the feet, most of which go off to Asia.
The remainder of the bird continues on a conveyor belt into a big room that is very cold and filled with people in clean-room outfits and sharp knives. The butchers pull out a turkey and mount the body on a fixture that looks sort of like a metal traffic cone.
Then with blinding speed the remove the breasts, legs, wings etc. and toss all the bits into different bins that go off to packaging. Whatever doesn’t get used is called ‘offal’ and ends up as fertilizer or other products.
As Upton Sinclair said in “the Jungle” about pig production, “They used everything except the squeal.”
When they package the meat up, especially the whole birds, they inject it with a big shot of saline, (salt water) to increase the weight, because all of the meat is sold by weight.
That’s my turkey processing story. It wasn’t horrible. It was fairly clinical, not unlike 100 other manufacturing operations I’ve seen. The worst part was the smell; it stayed in your clothes. I could see how it might freak some more empathic people out.