38. Eat More Chikin?

Bright and early, actually, I think it was still dark, on Friday morning, we boarded university vans and headed to Tydstoorn Poultry Abattoir. That means that before everyone in Stellenbosch had eaten breakfast, we were taking a tour of a chicken slaughterhouse. We walked through the whole process, seeing the chickens delivered in crates on trucks, get doused in a cleansing solution, have their throats sliced while hanging from their feet, having their feet chopped off, their feathers plucked, their insides inspected for disease and their intestines pulled out, their hearts and livers separated for freezing, and then their meat parts getting cut up and packaged, labeled and/or frozen for delivery to your grocery store shelf. Yum Yum! It was like living Food, Inc.

Maybe I'm a horrible person, but I didn't think it was that bad. Honestly I was expecting worse. I think if we had visited the chicken farms, where they are raised, I might have had a worse opinion and reaction to the whole thing. Dr Snyman (our public health professor) told us all to eat our chicken sandwiches on Thursday night because we'd be vegetarian after this field trip. Au contraire, lots of us (obviously not the vegetarians) ate chicken for lunch that day. Chance (one of my classmates) turned to me when we were in the final stage - the packing and labeling phase - and said it was making him hungry. It wasn't nearly as bad as we were all anticipating.

We had to dress up in boots and lab coats and hair nets and ear plugs because of food safety reasons obviously. They also messed up the shoe size conversion table they had sent us the previous evening for US --> SA shoe sizes, so we were all wearing US men's size boots that were flopping around making us look like quite the spectacle. For 7am on a Friday, it was quite comical.

The worst part of the process for me was seeing the crated chickens arrive and seeing them alive, although it was less than a minute from when they left the crates to when they were dead. The whole process, from live chicken being hung by its feet on the moving track to being placed in a foam tray and sealed in a labeled, priced package ready to be shipped to a Checkers or Pick'n'Pay is approximately 16 minutes! Sixteen. They process an insane amount of chickens every day. 130/minute. 120,000/day. Yes, that's how many chickens this plant processes a day. And no, it wasn't the biggest place in the world. It didn't even seem to be that huge. We walked around the whole thing in probably about 20 minutes. The chickens that were waiting in crates outside the back of the facility when we observed that phase were probably the same ones we saw as packaged raw chicken breasts and thighs and wings and hearts and livers when we got to that phase of the plant.

Oh wait, I think the real worst part of the process was the smell. I could not bring myself to breathe in through my nose the smell was so horrendous. I literally cannot fathom working there for the smell alone.

Ok, so why was this a field trip for my program? Well it was actually all about occupational health. We were there not to see the chickens, but to see the worker conditions. And that was actually probably the worst part of the trip. It's sad that chickens die, but honestly, it's the circle of life and they go on to serve the higher purpose of providing hearty nutrition for growing kids' bodies. The chickens we saw supposedly came from a free range farm, so that's great as long as that's true and they were allowed to be raised in humane conditions. But the workers - there were extremely sharp blades all over the packaging arena for cutting bone and flesh. Designed for chickens, but also capable of cutting human skin and flesh and bone. The floors were wet and slippery. There were so many repetitive motions performed at high speeds to keep that number at 130 birds/min - ergonomic nightmares. Work Related Upper Limb Disorders (WRULDs) are one of the highest costs in the world. [Before you go thinking "developing world problems," the US spends about $20 billion on WRULDs annually.] There are obviously microbiological risks when working in a poultry processing center, the workers don't use gloves because they trap in the moisture and cause even worse problems apparently. But working with poultry isn't exactly the safest, so the workers had warts all over their hands. And of course they don't get paid great. They have regular occupationally-induced asthma checks because of all the dust and bone particles and feather particles floating around in the air, but even moreso from all the chlorine and ammonia used to bleach things. Also, the people that work in the freezer are working at sub zero temperatures. We stepped in there, and my nose hairs were instantly frozen. It was so cold. It was unreal.   On our way out, we drove past some of the farms and also the township which supplies most of the work (permanent and temp) for the slaughterhouse. Seeing that was very sobering.

After lunch, we went and sat in a lecture presentation to prepare us for the afternoon portion of our field trip - the Environmental Health side of things. So we drove over to Kayamandi to look at the water, washing, and public toilet facilities. It was disgusting. It was in an area of town that I've been in often, and I've seen but never looked at (if you know the difference...) these bathrooms. I didn't know they were bathrooms until I got close, then the smell alerted me to that. I looked inside the door and you couldn't really even see toilets or a sink because they were buried in feet - literally feet - of litter. It was disgusting. Only one of the toilets at the end was visible and usable in the sense that you could see it. I would personally rather go to the bathroom outside though because the bathrooms were so incredibly disgusting. It was horrendous. And shocking. I stood there for about ten minutes trying to comprehend how someone would use that toilet. Why there was so much trash there.

Then we walked over to the river and stared at it just looking at the rubbish in there. It was appalling. Clean water is not a reality in South Africa. For those of us who work in Kayamandi, it was shocking and disturbing. Something we haven't personally confronted because we use the toilets at the NGOs.

River in Kayamandi...their water source. Cool and refreshing? I think not. 

 Then we drove over to a wealthier area of the town where we looked at their lovely little river, the First river running by. The E. coli counts there are safe enough to drink...just the occasional dog or home sewage leak, but nothing serious.

From there, we walked to the area where the two water sources collide - the one for Kayamandi, and the one for posh Stellenbosch. And voila, inequity visualized. Right in front of me, I could see with my eyes the distinct color difference between the water from the two communities. I could smell the difference. It was sickening. And there they mix. Within a few years time, all of Stellenbosch's water will be contaminated. It's not sustainable. Stellenbosch -  the posh and the poor - have to take responsibility for their water if they want to be able to drink and use clean water in a few years.

Look at the difference in the two water sources as they meet.

Clear vs cloudy doesn't even begin to describe this.