FFN 4

The term slaughterhouse should paint a mental picture of what one is like. Slaughterhouse may be considered very disgusting and nasty places because the purpose of them are to kill and butcher livestock for retail and industrial use. Up until chapters seven and eight of Fast Food Nation, slaughterhouses were unclear as far as how the ran. Initially slaughterhouses were pictured as places where livestock was killed and butchered, yet the slaughterhouses were kept sanitary and the unused organs and excess blood was disposed of properly. Slaughterhouses were not necessarily viewed as a place where the animals were treated like kings before they were slaughtered, but I didn't picture the animals getting thrown around quite so much. However, after reading about slaughterhouses, I now have a true explicit picture about the environment of slaughterhouses.

In today's day and age, beef is a very popular food choice. Thus the need arises to quickly produce and meat for the consumers. To produce meat quickly, slaughter houses are required to increase production by butchering a higher quantity of cattle in a shorter time span.  Now that slaughterhouses need to have a higher output of cattle, "Some plants are killing up to 400 head of cattle an hour," (173). That seems like an unnecessary amount of cattle to be killed in a day, but it is the amount of cattle that will support today's American diet.

Another thing about slaughterhouses that was surprising when the author was "Walking through blood that is ankle deep," (169). If slaughterhouses are killing up to 400 head of cattle per day, there will be a lot of blood and it will be everywhere. I figured that there would be high amounts of blood within the slaughterhouses. However, I assumed that the slaughterhouses would have an efficient way to clean up and dispose of the blood. It is disgusting to think about how messy the slaughterhouses are when they are dealing with the food people eat.