Life on the fast line
Our meatpacking plants run very, very quickly.
Future Perfect · Vox
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Show Notes
Workers in meatpacking plants already process our pigs and beef and chickens extremely fast, but recently, there’s been a push to make the meatpacking factory line move even faster.
Isaac Arnsdorf, a ProPublica reporter, takes us deep into his reporting on why that would be extremely dangerous for workers’ health. Then Jill Mauer, a federal meat inspector, explains why she’s worried that the changes in inspections necessary to make these faster line speeds possible could endanger us all.
Further listening and reading:
- We based the first half of this episode on reporting in Isaac Arnsdorf’s ProPublica piece on changing line speeds.
- For more on changing line speeds, there are great background pieces from the New York Times’s Julie Creswell and the Washington Post’s Kimberly Kindi.
- Jill’s full NBC interview, which we excerpted in the episode
- The Food Integrity Campaign within the Government Accountability Project pulled together this report with affidavits from federal inspectors in pilot plants.
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Featuring:
Isaac Arnsdorf (@iarnsdorf), reporter, ProPublica
Host:
Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt), senior correspondent, Vox
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