Tyson Foods is one of the largest multinational corporations in the food industry controlling 27% of total meat and poultry supply in USA. How can they manage to produce such massive quantity? Is the tempting farm image printed on the meat packages really shows the truth?
Well, for the farmers that raise animals, the cost of operating one farmhouse range form $280,000 to $300,000, not including the cost of upgrading facilities each year. It leaves them with no choice but to keep signing contracts with Tyson because of the large amount of debt from bank loans. In order to minimize the cost and maximize the efficacy, chickens are feed with antibiotics to shorten the growth length from 3 month to 49 days. Hundreds of chickens squeezed in one cell and live in the dark till slaughter.They even never get a chance to learnt how to walk.
In the factory where all the animals are slaughtered and packed worked thousands of undocumented workers. Most of them are illegal immigrants. The company brought them in, but in fact, there’s an agreement with the immigration office: they can take 15 workers away per day, but no massive raids. The hardworking workers are being taken away while the company doesn’t get affected at all.
Also, germs like salmonella and E.coli are delivered to people’s dinner table along with packaged beef from mass production assemble lines. With such large amount of production, affected beef won’t be able to be detected and goes out freely into the market, which had caused deaths along the years. For years within the Bush ministration, the chief of US FDA was the former chief lobbyist to the beef industry of Washington.
Who and what has empowered companies like Tyson to do things like this with out being punished? Do we blame the famers and the factory workers, or do we blame the corp. that cares about nothing but profits?