Awww yeah. Have I got some stories to tell about this subject. Hmm.. two of the grossest... this is gonna be a tough call. Ok, here goes. I used to work for a poultry plant out here called Maple Leaf Farms/Serenade Foods. You mightta seen their Chicken Nugets, Kiev\'s, Cordon Bleus, Patties, and what not on your local grocery store shelves. If you ever at duck at a chineese resturant.. there\'s a damned good chance it came out of my plant.
Oh.. crap.. jus thought of another one.. ok ya get three stories.
1. On the production floor we have this machine called the WolfKing with grinds up the chopped meat into a paste and cools it with concentrated blasts of Co2 so that it dosen\'t stick to the inside of the Vemag which makes lil meat "tubes" and injects them with cheese and butter. Well, we were running behind one week because they had been trying out this new Xray machine which they couldn\'t get to work. (Bots, Nuts, Shear pins, odd pieces of metal are commonly find they\'re way into the meat) Anyhow, we were busting a$$ on production and didn\'t have enough time to thouruly check out the WolfKing after Sanitation left. Seems they hadn\'t been cleaning it out properly for god knows how long.. and lil bits of fat, skin, meat, and other tissue would work it\'s way up into the gears and would rot. Since Sanitation didn\'t put the machine back together right, there was a small gap between the auger and the side of the tank. All that nasty black rotten chicken gunk which had been rotting for all that time started seeping out into the batch. This stuff was pure death concentrate.. and they let it go because we had orders to fill.
2. This one I dunno for sure if it really happened because I wasn\'t there at the time. We had a girl working over on the Formax, which is basically like a mini-WolfKing.. cept it also mixes Soy into the batch for when we\'re doing Econoline. Well, This girl wasn\'t paying attention and still had her hand on the rim of the tank when she went to shut the hydrolic lid. Crushed her entire hand almost to the point where it had to be amputated. (They saved it tho..) I imagine a good deal of blood went into the mix, but I also heard some bits of flesh and bone snuck it\'s way into it too. Management didn\'t think that it was enough to scrap an entire 800lb batch for.
3. When I was working in the oven room, we\'d always have a real problem with chemical contamination. Well, it was never proven.. but you could see it with your own eyes. The ovens I was using were these old delapadated models with would constantly jerk the rack violently or kick the chains which spun em off. Well, the floors of these ovens were just concrete slabs sittin on bare earth. They weren\'t a part of the room in general. So as the racks are getting slung back and forth, all that grease from inside would spill out and seep down into a mucky recess pool underneith the concrete slabs. Not only that, but Santitation would hose the place down every night before I got in.. so you have.. god.. I dunno how many YEARS of industrial cleaners, duck fat, water, and caustic acids collected up underneith these ovens jus rotting and stewing.. plus whatever was in the ground underneith that found it\'s way up like various bugs, chemicals that seeps into the ground off the roadway, herbicides for the lawn.. ect. Well when you go to push a 600lb rack onto one of those slabs, all that nasty sh*t would well up from benient and bake in there with the duck. It\'d get so bad, that about every five minuites I\'d have to go in there and squeegie down the floor cause that blackish/brownish/greenish ooze would flood out from under the oven an cover the floor. When you\'d open up the ovens, a thick cloud of searing hot steam would pour out smelling like.. ugh.. I dunno what.. but it wasn\'t smellin like duck I can tell ya that. On the ducks themselves you\'d find thick black streaks of this.. whatever it is.. all over them when they were done cooking. And this is barring the few times the company didn\'t REALLY screw up.. like the time they patched the floor with this cheap azz compound that would peel up and stick to the wheels of the racks and bake in there with the ooze and ducks.
Now, after all that.. think about this. Our plant was what our USDA officer called a "USDA Dream". (Course, she was only there for 2 hours a night and never saw even a quarter of the stuff that was going on) I believe her tho. If you only saw the stuff I pulled out of the SYSCO (chicken breast) boxes in one night. Ugh.. Hemostats, gloves, hairnets, chunks of wood, wads of used chewing gum, pens, paper.. it wasn\'t pretty. From what I hear.. that\'s a regular occurance too.
So the next time you feel like complaining about a hair on your food... don\'t blame the resturant. Think of where that food has been and all the nasty stuff that\'s happened to it before it even got to the resturaunt. That lil hair.. is nothing. You have no idea what you\'re puttin in your mouth.
Oh, and BTW: Did I ever tell you guys about the bathrooms in that place? About how the mexicans would poop in the corners or in the sink and wipe with their hands.. then going back to work without even washing them thoroughly? Oh god.. how they ever got away with leaving their bathrooms in that shape I\'ll never know. Here\'s a fun lil game to play at work that the mexicans I\'ve worked with used to love. Take a big juicy crap.. wipe your butt.. and then stick the TP to the wall to see who\'s feces is the most adhesive. Take bets on who\'s poop will fall off first for added excitement.
