Chapter XIV

With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and
another working in a sausage factory, the family had a
first-hand knowledge of the great majority of Packing~
town swindles. For it was the custom, as they found,
whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used
for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up
into sausage. With what had been told them by Jonas,
who had worked in the pickle-rooms, they could now
study the whole of the spoiled-meat industry on the
inside, and read a new and grim meaning into that old
Packingtown jest, -- that they use everything of the pig
except the squeal.

Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out
of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would
rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to
be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles
of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of
meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and
any flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of
hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they
saved time and increased the capacity of the plant -- a
machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a
pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and work~
ing with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a
few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be
hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad
that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them.
To pump into these the packers had a second and much
stronger pickle which destroyed the odor -- a process
known to the workers as "giving them thirty per cent."
Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be

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v?