The Jungle vs. The Grapes

A few weeks ago we had our pigs “processed”. Micah picked an independent, family-owned and operated place in Chickasha and took Harp with him to drop off the pigs. (Traumatic for Harp: “Hug pigs! No bacon!”) A week later, Micah asked me to go pick the meat up. As I pulled up to the plant, a smell assaulted my nostrils that can only be described as liquid death. I opened the car door and passed out. When I regained consciousness down in the gravel of the parking lot, I swore that I would become vegan. But I still needed to carry out my farm-wifely duties, so I entered Garcia Processing Plant, blank check in hand, fighting back nausea.

Here’s what I saw: a clean cinder-block building, sheet-rocked walls not covered in paint, several workers who spoke a hybrid Spanglish, a huge American flag stretched across the wall, and a glimpse of a very clean and frigid killing room filled with gloved people of many races who were wrapping cuts of meat into pristine white paper packages. While they boxed my order and washed their hands, I began to look around more closely. One wall featured many grade-school hand-drawn pictures. The artist had clearly been indoctrinated already, evidenced by the “Just Say No to Smoking” propaganda (sample caption: “Stop Smoking or Go to Jail!”). But what caught my heart were two penciled pictures, taped up side by side. A little girl cries in the first picture, which reads, “Before Garcia Processing Plant Came Into Our Lives.” An identical girl grins in the next picture, which reads, “After Garcia Processing Plant Came Into Our Lives”.

By the time the white woman with no teeth, the black man in falling-apart clothes, and Hispanic gentleman who spoke no English came out with my “puerco”, I was a little teary. I walked in believing myself to be in a Sinclair Lewis novel, I walked out inside The Grapes of Wrath.

As writers (or crazy people) will, I began speculating about this nameless eight year-old artist and how bad things had to be for her family that she would draw pictures about her gratitude for a meat processing plant. I think it’s likely that this Plant gave her father and/or mother jobs, when possibly they had had no jobs before…possibly because of their education level, lack of English language skills, or race.

I called Micah on the way home, my car weighed down with a serious load of puerco, and said, “I don’t know that I ever want to eat meat again, but if you do, the Garcia Processing Plant is the only place we should use from now on. Por favor.”