“Jonas has 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 colour and any flavour which 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 working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle m a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be found ham spoiled, some of them with an odour 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 odour—a process known to the workers as ‘giving them thirty per cent.’ Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as ‘Number Three Grade,’ but later on, some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Number Two, and Number Three Grade—there was only Number One Grade! The packers were always originating such schemes. They had what they called ‘boneless hams,’ which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and ‘California Hams,’ which were the shoulders, with great knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy ‘skinned hams,’ which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them—that is, until they had been cooked, and chopped fine and labelled ‘head cheese’!”
This question of _diseased meat_ is, therefore, one which deserves our close attention, largely because it has been treated so ineffectually in the past, in other books dealing with this subject. The defect has been due to the fact that, until recently, no definite _facts_ have been available; and, although everyone knew in a general way that much of the meat said to be “inspected” and found free from disease was, as a matter of fact, unfit for human food, there were no data to which the vegetarian could point, and say: “Here are facts and figures incontrovertible! What have you to say in defence now?”