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        On the morning of May 25, 2019, a food safety inspector at a Cargill meat processing plant in Dodge City, Kansas, saw a disturbing sight. In the Chimneys plant area, a Hereford bull recovered from being shot in the forehead with a bolt gun. Perhaps he never lost it. In any case, this should not happen. The bull was tied to one of his hind legs with a steel chain and hung upside down. He demonstrated what the US meat industry calls “sensitivity signs.” His breathing was “rhythmic.” His eyes were open and he was moving. He tried to straighten up, which is what animals usually do by arching their back. The only sign he didn’t show was “vocalizing”.
        An inspector working for the USDA ordered herd officials to stop the moving air chains connecting the cattle and “tap” the animals. But when one of them pulled the trigger of a hand bolter, the pistol misfired. Someone brought another gun to finish the job. “The animal was then sufficiently stunned,” inspectors wrote in a note describing the incident, noting that “the time from observation of apparent poor behavior to eventual stunned euthanasia was approximately 2 to 3 minutes.”
        Three days after the incident, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service issued a warning about the plant’s “failure to prevent the inhumane treatment and slaughter of livestock,” citing the plant’s history of compliance. FSIS has ordered the agency to develop an action plan to ensure that similar incidents never occur again. On June 4, the department approved the plan presented by the plant director and said in a letter to him that it would delay the decision on fines. The chain can continue to operate and up to 5,800 cows can be slaughtered per day.
        I first entered the stack at the end of October last year, after working at the plant for over four months. To find him, I came early one day and walked backwards along the chain. It’s surreal to see the slaughter process in reverse, observing step by step what it takes to put a cow back together: inserting its organs back into its body cavity; reattach her head to her neck; pull the skin back into the body; returns blood to the veins.
        When I visited the slaughterhouse, I saw a severed hoof lying in a metal tank in the skinning area, and the red brick floor was littered with bright red blood. At one point, a woman wearing a yellow synthetic rubber apron was cutting the flesh from a decapitated, skinless head. The USDA inspector who worked next to her was doing something similar. I asked him what he wanted to cut. “Lymph nodes,” he said. I later learned that he was conducting routine inspections for disease and contamination.
        During my last trip to the stack, I tried to be unobtrusive. I stood against the back wall and watched as two men, standing on a platform, made vertical cuts in the throat of each cow that passed. As far as I could tell, all the animals were unconscious, although some were kicking involuntarily. I continued to watch until the supervisor came over and asked me what I was doing. I told him I wanted to see what this part of the plant looked like. “You need to leave,” he said. “You can’t come here without a mask.” I apologized and told him I would leave. I can’t stay too long anyway. My shift is about to start.
        Finding a job at Cargill is surprisingly easy. The online application for “general production” is six pages long. The filling process takes no more than 15 minutes. I have never been asked to submit a resume, let alone a letter of recommendation. The most important part of the application is the 14-question form, which includes the following:
       “Do you have experience cutting meat with a knife (this does not include working in a grocery store or deli)?”
       “How many years have you worked in a beef production plant (such as slaughter or processing, rather than in a grocery store or deli)?”
       “How many years have you worked in a manufacturing or factory setting (such as an assembly line or manufacturing job)?”
        4 hours 20 minutes after clicking “Submit” I received an email confirming my telephone interview the next day (May 19, 2020). The interview lasted three minutes. When the lady presenter asked me the name of my latest employer, I told her it was First Church of Christ, scientist, publisher of the Christian Science Monitor. From 2014 to 2018 I worked at the Observer. For the last two of four years I have been the Beijing correspondent for the Observer. I quit my job to study Chinese and become a freelancer.
        The woman then asked several questions about when and why I left. The only question that gave me pause during the interview was the last one.
        At the same time, the woman said that I “have the right to an oral conditional job offer.” She told me about the six positions the factory is hiring for. Everyone was on the second shift, which at that time lasted from 15:45 to 12:30 and until 1 am. Three of them involve harvesting, part of the factory that is often called a slaughterhouse, and three involve processing, preparing meat for distribution to stores and restaurants.
        I quickly decided to get a job in a factory. In the summer, temperatures in the slaughterhouse can reach 100 degrees, and as the woman on the phone explained, “the smell is stronger because of the humidity,” and then there’s the work itself, tasks like skinning and “cleaning the tongue.” After you pull out your tongue, the woman says, “You’ll have to hang it on a hook.” On the other hand, her description of the factory makes it seem less medieval and more like an industrial-sized butcher shop. A small army of workers on an assembly line sawed, butchered and packaged all the meat from the cows. The temperature in the plant’s workshops ranges from 32 to 36 degrees. However, the woman told me that you work too much and “don’t feel the cold when you walk into the house.”
        We are looking for vacancies. The chuck cap puller was immediately eliminated because it required moving and cutting at the same time. The sternum should be removed next for the simple reason that having to remove the so-called pectoral finger between the joints does not seem attractive. All that remains is the final cutting of the cartridge. According to the woman, the job was all about trimming the cartridge parts, “regardless of what specification they were working to.” How difficult is it? I think. I told the woman I’d take it. “Great,” she said, and then told me about my starting salary ($16.20 an hour) and the terms of my job offer.
        A few weeks later, after a background check, drug test, and physical, I received a call with a start date: June 8th, the following Monday. I’ve been living with my mom since mid-March due to the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s about a four-hour drive from Topeka to Dodge City. I decided to leave on Sunday.
        The night before we left, my mom and I went to my sister and brother-in-law’s house for a steak dinner. “This may be the last thing you have,” my sister said when she called and invited us to her place. My brother-in-law grilled two 22-ounce ribeye steaks for himself and me and a 24-ounce tenderloin for my mom and sister. I helped my sister prepare the side dish: mashed potatoes and green beans sautéed in butter and bacon grease. A typical home-cooked meal for a middle-class family in Kansas.
        The steak was as good as anything I’ve tried. It’s hard to describe it without sounding like an Applebee’s commercial: charred crust, juicy, tender meat. I try to eat slowly so I can savor every bite. But soon I became carried away by the conversation and, without thinking, finished my meal. In a state with more than twice the population of cattle, more than 5 billion pounds of beef are produced annually, and many families (including mine and my three sisters when we were young) fill their freezers with beef every year. It’s easy to take beef for granted.
        The Cargill plant is located on the southeastern edge of Dodge City, near a slightly larger meat processing plant owned by National Beef. Both sites are located at opposite ends of two miles of the most dangerous road in southwest Kansas. There are sewage treatment plants and a feedlot nearby. For days last summer I was sickened by the smell of lactic acid, hydrogen sulfide, feces and death. The sweltering heat will only make the situation worse.
        The High Plains of southwestern Kansas are home to four large meat processing plants: two in Dodge City, one in Liberty City (National Beef) and one near Garden City (Tyson Foods). Dodge City became home to two meatpacking plants, an apt coda to the city’s early history. Founded in 1872 by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, Dodge City was originally an outpost of buffalo hunters. After the cattle herds that once roamed the Great Plains were wiped out (not to mention the Native Americans who once lived there), the city turned to the livestock trade.
        Almost overnight, Dodge City became, in the words of a prominent local businessman, “the largest cattle market in the world.” It was an era of lawmen like Wyatt Earp and gunslingers like Doc Holliday, filled with gambling, gunfights and bar fights. To say that Dodge City is proud of its Wild West heritage would be an understatement, and no place celebrates this, some might say mythologized, heritage more than the Boot Hill Museum. The Boot Hill Museum is located at 500 W. Wyatt Earp Avenue, near Gunsmoke Row and the Gunslinger Wax Museum, and is based on a full-scale replica of the once famous Front Street. Visitors can enjoy root beer at the Long Branch Saloon or purchase handmade soaps and homemade fudge at the Rath & Co. General Store. Ford County residents have free admission to the museum, and I took advantage several times this summer when I moved into a one-bedroom apartment near the local VFW.
        However, despite the fictional value of Dodge City’s history, its Wild West era did not last long. In 1885, under increasing pressure from local ranchers, the Kansas Legislature banned the importation of Texas cattle into the state, bringing an abrupt end to the city’s boom cattle drives. For the next seventy years, Dodge City remained a quiet farming community. Then, in 1961, Hyplains Dressed Beef opened the city’s first meat processing plant (now operated by National Beef). In 1980, a Cargill subsidiary opened a plant nearby. Beef production is returning to Dodge City.
        The four meatpacking plants, with a combined workforce of more than 12,800 people, are among the largest employers in southwest Kansas, and all rely on immigrants to help staff their production lines. “Packers live by the motto, ‘Build it and they will come,’” Donald Stull, an anthropologist who has studied the meatpacking industry for more than 30 years, told me. “That’s basically what happened.”
        The boom began in the early 1980s with the arrival of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants from Mexico and Central America, Stull said. In recent years, refugees from Myanmar, Sudan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo have come to work at the plant. Today, nearly a third of Dodge City residents are foreign-born, and three-fifths are Hispanic or Latino. When I arrived at the factory on my first day of work, four banners appeared at the entrance, written in English, Spanish, French and Somali, warning employees to stay home if they had symptoms of COVID-19.
        I spent most of my first two days at the factory in a windowless classroom next to the slaughterhouse with six other new employees. The room has beige cinder block walls and fluorescent lighting. On the wall near the door were two posters, one in English and one in Somali, that read, “Bring the people beef.” The HR representative spent the better part of two days orientation with us, making sure we didn’t lose sight of the mission. “Cargill is a global organization,” she said before launching into a lengthy PowerPoint presentation. “We pretty much feed the world. That’s why when the coronavirus started, we didn’t close. Because you guys were hungry, right?”
        As of early June, Covid-19 had forced the shutdown of at least 30 meatpacking plants in the U.S. and resulted in the deaths of at least 74 workers, according to the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. The Cargill plant reported its first case on April 13. Kansas public health data shows that more than 600 of the plant’s 2,530 employees contracted COVID-19 in 2020. At least four people died.
        In March, the plant began implementing a series of social distancing measures, including those recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The company has increased break times, installed plexiglass partitions on cafe tables and installed thick plastic curtains between workstations on its production lines. During the third week of August, metal partitions appeared in the men’s restrooms, giving workers some space (and privacy) near the stainless steel urinals.
        The plant also hired Examinetics to test employees before each shift. In a white tent at the entrance to the plant, a group of medical personnel wearing N95 masks, white coveralls and gloves checked temperatures and handed out disposable masks. Thermal imaging cameras are installed at the plant for additional temperature checks. Face coverings are required. I always wear a disposable mask, but many other employees choose to wear blue gaiters with the International Union of Food and Commercial Workers logo or black bandanas with the Cargill logo and, for some reason, #Extraordinary printed on them.
        Coronavirus infection is not the only health risk at the plant. Meat packaging is known to be dangerous. According to Human Rights Watch, government statistics show that from 2015 to 2018, a meat or poultry worker would lose body parts or be hospitalized every other day or so. On his first day of orientation, another black new employee from Alabama said he faced a dangerous situation while working as a packer at a nearby National Beef plant. He rolled up his right sleeve, revealing a four-inch scar on the outside of his elbow. “I almost turned into chocolate milk,” he said.
        An HR representative told a similar story about a man whose sleeve got stuck on a conveyor belt. “He lost an arm when he came here,” she said, pointing to half of her left bicep. She thought for a moment and then moved on to the next PowerPoint slide: “This is a good segue into workplace violence.” She began explaining Cargill’s zero-tolerance policy on guns.
        For the next hour and fifteen minutes, we’ll focus on money and how unions can help us make more money. Union officials told us the UFCW local recently negotiated a permanent $2 raise for all hourly employees. He explained that due to the effects of the pandemic, all hourly employees will also receive an additional “target wage” of $6 per hour starting at the end of August. This would result in a starting salary of $24.20. The next day over lunch, a man from Alabama told me how much he wanted to work overtime. “I’m working on my credit now,” he said. “We would work so hard that we wouldn’t even have time to spend all the money.”
        On my third day at the Cargill plant, the number of coronavirus cases in the United States topped 2 million. But the plant has begun to recover from the early spring outbreak. (Production at the plant fell about 50% in early May, according to a text message from Cargill’s state government relations director to the Kansas Secretary of Agriculture, which I later obtained through a public records request.) The burly man in charge of the plant. second shift. He has a thick white beard, is missing his right thumb, and talks happily. “It’s just hitting the wall,” I heard him tell a contractor fixing a broken air conditioner. “Last week we had 4,000 visitors a day. This week we will probably be around 4,500.”
        At the factory, all those cows are processed in a huge room filled with steel chains, hard plastic conveyor belts, industrial-sized vacuum sealers and stacks of cardboard shipping boxes. But first comes the cold room, where the beef hangs on its side for an average of 36 hours after leaving the slaughterhouse. When they are brought to slaughter, the sides are separated into fore and hind quarters and then cut into smaller, marketable pieces of meat. They are vacuum packed and placed in boxes for distribution. During non-pandemic times, an average of 40,000 boxes leave the plant daily, each weighing between 10 and 90 pounds. McDonald’s and Taco Bell, Walmart and Kroger all buy beef from Cargill. The company operates six beef processing plants in the United States; the largest is in Dodge City.
        The most important principle of the meat packaging industry is “the chain never stops.” The company makes every effort to keep its production lines running as quickly as possible. But delays happen. Mechanical problems are the most common cause; Less common are closures initiated by USDA inspectors due to suspected contamination or “inhumane treatment” incidents, as happened at the Cargill plant two years ago. Individual workers help keep the production line running by “pulling numbers,” an industry term for doing their part of the job. The surest way to lose the respect of your co-workers is to constantly fall behind on your score, because that definitely means they’ll have to do more work. The most intense confrontations I have witnessed over the phone occurred when someone seemed to be relaxing. These fights never escalated into anything more than shouting or the occasional elbow bump. If the situation gets out of control, the foreman is called in as a mediator.
        New employees are given a 45-day trial period to prove they can do what Cargill plants call “skilled” work. During this time, each person is supervised by a trainer. My trainer was 30 years old, just a few months younger than me, with smiling eyes and broad shoulders. He is a member of Myanmar’s persecuted Karen ethnic minority. His name Karen was Par Tau, but after becoming a US citizen in 2019, he changed his name to Billion. When I asked him how he chose his new name, he replied, “Maybe one day I’ll be a billionaire.” He laughed, apparently embarrassed to share this part of his American dream.
        Billion was born in 1990 in a small village in eastern Myanmar. Karen rebels are in the midst of a long-running rebellion against the country’s central government. The conflict continued into the new millennium – one of the world’s longest civil wars – and forced tens of thousands of Karen people to flee across the border into Thailand. Billion is one of them. When he was 12 years old, he began living in a refugee camp there. At 18, he moved to the United States, first to Houston and then to Garden City, where he worked at the nearby Tyson factory. In 2011, he took a job with Cargill, where he continues to work today. Like many Karens who came to Garden City before him, Billion attended Grace Bible Church. It was there that he met Tou Kwee, whose English name was Dahlia. They started dating in 2009. In 2016, their first child, Shine, was born. They bought a house and got married two years later.
        Yi is a patient teacher. He showed me how to put on a chainmail tunic, some gloves, and a white cotton dress that looked like it was made for a knight. He later gave me a steel hook with an orange handle and a plastic sheath with three identical knives, each with a black handle and a slightly curved six-inch blade, and took me to an open space about 60 feet in the middle. . – Long conveyor belt. Billion unsheathed the knife and demonstrated how to sharpen it using a weighted sharpener. Then he went to work, cutting away fragments of cartilage and bone and tearing long, thin bundles from the boulder-sized cartridges that passed us on the assembly line.
        Bjorn worked methodically, and I stood behind him and watched. The main thing, he told me, is to cut as little meat as possible. (As one executive succinctly put it: “More meat, more money.”) A billion makes work easy. With one deft movement, a flick of the hook, he flipped the 30-pound piece of meat and pulled the ligaments out of its folds. “Take your time,” he told me after we switched places.
        I cut the next piece of line and was amazed at how easily my knife cut through the frozen meat. Billion advised me to sharpen the knife after each cut. When I was about the tenth block, I accidentally caught the side of the hook with the blade. Billion motioned for me to stop working. “Be careful don’t do this,” he said, and the look on his face told me I had made a big mistake. There is nothing worse than cutting meat with a dull knife. I took the new one out of its sheath and went back to work.
        Looking back on my time in this facility, I consider myself lucky to have only been in the nurse’s office once. An unexpected incident occurred on the 11th day after I went online. While trying to turn over a piece of cartridge, I lost control and slammed the tip of the hook into the palm of my right hand. “It should heal in a few days,” the nurse said as she applied a bandage to the half-inch wound. She told me that she often treats injuries like mine.
        Over the next few weeks, Billon would check on me occasionally during my shifts, tapping me on the shoulder and asking, “How are you doing, Mike, before he left?” Other times he stayed and talked. If he sees that I’m tired, he can take a knife and work with me for a while. At one point I asked him how many people were infected during the COVID-19 outbreak in the spring. “Yes, a lot,” he said. “I received it a few weeks ago.”
        Billion said he most likely contracted the virus from someone he rode in a car with. Billion was forced to quarantine at home for two weeks, trying his best to isolate himself from Shane and Dahlia, who were eight months pregnant at the time. He slept in the basement and rarely went upstairs. But in the second week of quarantine, Dalia developed a fever and a cough. A few days later she started having breathing problems. Ivan took her to the hospital, hospitalized her and connected her to oxygen. Three days later, doctors induced labor. On May 23, she gave birth to a healthy boy. They called him “Smart”.
        Billion told me all this before our 30-minute lunch break, and I came to treasure it all, as well as the 15-minute break before it. I worked in the factory for three weeks, and my hands often throbbed. When I woke up in the morning, my fingers were so stiff and swollen that I could barely bend them. Most often I take two ibuprofen tablets before work. If the pain persists, I will take two more doses during the rest period. I found this to be a relatively benign solution. For many of my colleagues, oxycodone and hydrocodone are the pain medications of choice. (A Cargill spokesman said the company is “not aware of any trends in the illicit use of these two drugs at its facilities.”)
        A typical shift last summer: I pulled into the factory parking lot at 3:20 p.m. According to the Digital Bank sign I passed on the way here, the temperature outside was 98 degrees. My car, a 2008 Kia Spectra with 180,000 miles on it, had major hail damage and the windows were down due to a broken air conditioner. This means that when the wind blows from the southeast, I can sometimes smell the plant before I even see it.
        I was wearing an old cotton T-shirt, Levi’s jeans, wool socks, and Timberland steel-toe boots that I bought at a local shoe store for 15% off with my Cargill ID. Once parked, I put on my hairnet and hard hat and grabbed my lunchbox and fleece jacket from the backseat. On the way to the main entrance to the plant, I passed a barrier. Inside the pens were hundreds of head of cattle awaiting slaughter. Seeing them so alive makes my job harder, but I look at them anyway. Some clashed with neighbors. Others craned their necks as if to see what lay ahead.
        When I entered the medical tent for a health check, the cows disappeared from view. When it was my turn, an armed woman called me. She put the thermometer to my forehead, handed me a mask and asked a series of routine questions. When she told me I was free to go, I put on my mask, left the tent and walked through the turnstiles and security canopy. The kill floor is on the left; the factory is straight ahead, opposite the factory. On the way, I passed dozens of first-shift workers leaving work. They looked tired and sad, grateful that the day was over.
        I stopped briefly in the cafeteria to take two ibuprofen. I put on my jacket and placed my lunch box on the wooden shelf. I then walked down the long corridor leading to the production floor. I put on foam earplugs and walked through the swinging double doors. The floor was filled with the noise of industrial machines. To muffle the noise and avoid boredom, employees can spend $45 on a pair of company-approved 3M noise-canceling earplugs, although the consensus is that they aren’t enough to block out the noise and keep people from listening to music. (Few seemed bothered by the added distraction of listening to music while doing an already dangerous job.) Another option was to buy a pair of unapproved Bluetooth headphones that I could hide under my neck gaiter. I know a few people who do this and they’ve never been caught, but I decided not to take the risk. I stuck to standard earplugs and were given new ones every Monday.
        To get to my work station, I walked up the aisle and then down the stairs leading to the conveyor belt. The conveyor is one of dozens that run in long parallel rows down the center of the production floor. Each row is called a “table”, and each table has a number. I worked at table number two: the cartridge table. There are tables for shanks, brisket, tenderloin, round and more. Tables are one of the most crowded places in a factory. I sat at the second table, less than two feet from the staff on either side of me. The plastic curtains are supposed to help compensate for the lack of social distancing, but most of my colleagues are running the curtains up and around the metal rods they hang from. This made it easier to see what would happen next, and soon I was doing the same. (Cargill denies that most workers open the curtains.)
        At 3:42, I hold my ID up to the clock near my desk. Employees have five minutes to arrive: from 3:40 to 3:45. Any late attendance will result in the loss of half the attendance points (losing 12 points in a 12 month period may result in dismissal). I walked up to the conveyor belt to pick up my gear. I get dressed at my workplace. I sharpened the knife and stretched out my arms. Some of my colleagues punched me as they passed by. I looked across the table and saw two Mexicans standing next to each other, crossing themselves. They do this at the beginning of every shift.
        Soon the collet parts began to come off the conveyor belt, which moved from right to left on my side of the table. There were seven boners in front of me. Their job was to remove bones from meat. This is one of the most difficult jobs in the plant (level eight is the hardest, five levels above chuck finishing and adds $6 an hour to the salary). The work requires both careful precision and brute strength: precision to cut as close to the bone as possible, and brute force to pry the bone free. My job is to cut off all the bones and ligaments that don’t fit into the bone chuck. That’s exactly what I did for the next 9 hours, stopping only for a 15-minute break at 6:20 and a 30-minute dinner break at 9:20. “Not too much!” my supervisor would yell when he caught me cutting off too much meat. “Money money!”