hree 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 big 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 labeled "head cheese!"

It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the
department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute
flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was
in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention
paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back
from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and
white--it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the
hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat
that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the
workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs.
There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from
leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about
on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man
could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of
the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would
put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread,
and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and
no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did
the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw
one--there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with
which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men
to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a
practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the
sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of
corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that
would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the
system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs
that it only paid to do once in a long time, and amo