Ninety-nine per cent of us eat meat, yet few of us know how it gets to our plates. And what about the bits we'd rather not consume? Shane Hegarty visits a plant where the cattle arrive alive and leave as plastic-wrapped chunks.
When you enter the abattoir, you do so at the end of the line. To get to the beginning you have to dodge cattle in various stages of dismemberment, trying to dash along the narrow white room without being splashed by blood. You walk against the flow of carcasses, as if you are watching the halves of meat being reunited, the insides going back inside, the head reattaching to the neck, the hide reattaching to the body, the gaping neck wound closing up. The cattle go from hanging upside down to lying unconscious on their sides. Until you reach the start. And at the beginning of the line, behind a wall, is a live cow, wandering blithely into a box. It is the only time when the abattoir gives the impression of being an assembly line instead of a disassembly line.
Every meat-eater should see, at least once, how the dinner dies. The Irish consume an average of 15kg (33lbs) of beef each a year - and tuck into far more chicken and pork. Ninety-nine per cent of us eat meat, according to Teagasc (94 per cent, if you prefer the estimate of the Vegetarian Society of Ireland). Yet most of us have only a vague idea of how it goes from field to shop. We see cattle grazing. We see them behind butchers' glass. If we're prepared to eat them, surely we should be prepared to look at least one of them in the eye during the bit in between, that transition from cattle to beef.
In this abattoir - a plant in Cahir, Co Tipperary, owned by AIBP, or Anglo Irish Beef Processors - cattle arrive as whole, breathing animals and leave as plastic-wrapped chunks. Everything happens here. Killing, boning, packing, rendering much of what's left. It is typical of the modern meat-processing plants that have taken over from the independent abattoirs once scattered through the country, supplying local butchers. Owned by Larry Goodman, a man whose name is as synonymous with "beef" as it once was with "tribunal", AIBP supplies several major supermarkets, including Superquinn, Asda and Sainsbury's, and has contracts with McDonald's and Burger King.
Its logo is the last thing one in five Irish cattle sees. If you like a burger now and again, there's a good chance you've eaten one that came from this or another AIBP plant. It's as good a place as any to come if you want to test your carnivorousness. Which I do. Have a burger before you go in, friends joked when I told them. You'll not want one for a while afterwards.
So here's how your dinner dies. Once it wanders to the top of the queue - also, in another sense, the end of the line - the animal is about 45 minutes from being slabs of meat hanging in a cold store. It is herded into a box and stunned unconscious with a bolt gun. You can't see this from the abattoir floor, though. Instead, the first sight is of the box tipping over, to slide the animal onto the floor. A hand is waved over its eyes, to make sure there is no reaction, and its breathing is checked for signs of distress. Then the animal's limp body is hauled into the air, so that it hangs by a hind leg. With one knife the hide is sliced vertically, at the neck. To avoid contamination, a second knife is then thrust through the fat, to open a massive wound. There's a worker whose job it is to do this for eight hours a day - about 350 cattle a shift. If cattle ever turn on man, this guy will have answering to do.
For a moment, nothing much happens. It is an incongruous sight, this large animal, hanging upside down, its tongue lolling and eyes blank, a large hole letting the air in. Then the blood comes. First a trickle. Next a surge. It gushes from the carcass, pours through a grate in the floor. The animal twitches as its nerves fire final shots before the body shuts down, and as it jolts it is the one moment when you really want to be reassured that it felt nothing, that it was unconscious. Sympathy overwhelms machismo.
Worse things - from a certain perspective, anyway - used to happen here. A ritual box is available when the cattle must be slaughtered according to religious requirements, such as the kosher or halal traditions, for which the animal is conscious as the blade punctures its trachea. The animal might take 30 seconds to die, and even veterans of the killing floor will tell you that they didn't like that. The ritual box in Cahir has not been used in a decade.
Up on the gantry, the hide is pulled from the animal in one piece, two men snipping away at the fat as the flesh resists, until the hide is peeled reluctantly over the skull. Watching it happen, it's impossible not to think of a child having a polo neck pulled over its head.
Farther along, the head comes off, because it can be sent only for rendering. Next the insides come out. Then the carcass is sliced in half, weighed, graded and tagged before heading to cold storage. Gradually, it has become just another slab of meat, no longer an animal but something familiar from the butcher's window.
Several people had warned me about the smell of the abattoir. It will be awful, they said. It will contaminate your clothes, your hair, your skin. You'll be showering for hours. But there is no smell. Or, at least, nothing other than the familiar cold, fleshy odour of a butcher's shop. Cattle eat grass, of course. It does not become particularly foul in the stomach. Pigs, on the other hand, eat anything and everything. A pork abattoir, apparently, is a stinky place indeed.
In Cahir, the offal goes off on a different conveyor belt, taking with it the bits that the Irish won't eat but others will. Aortas go to China, skirt meat and tongues to France, tails to Spain, tripe to Europe. The rest is considered the "fifth quarter" - the hoofs and head, the parts useful only for tallow or considered specified-risk material, meaning they are not allowed into the human or animal food chain, from skull, brain and eyes to tonsils and spinal cord. This is turned into meat-and-bone meal and incinerated.
After it is chilled, the meat goes to the boning room, where most of it is cut with the aid of machines. The Superquinn meat is boned by hand, by workers who are nifty with their knives; it reminds you that, from slaughtering to boning, this is tough work, often requiring great concentration. It is a little too tough for the Irish, as it happens. Half the employees in this plant are foreign, mostly eastern European or Egyptian. "It's hard work," the plant's manager, Finbarr McDonnell, tells me. "They need to be on the ball. They're using a sharp implement; they're on a moving line. It's not easy. It's a cold environment. It's not an Intel."
By the time you buy the meat in your supermarket, the animal may have been dead almost a month, depending on the maturation required.
There was a time when the catch-all phrase was "peel it and eat it", when abattoirs were the norm in most towns and workers left at the end of the day in the same bloodied clothes they arrived in. That, you suspect, was the best of it. It's a business still struggling against public perception. Beef, according to the Bord Bia slogan, is deliciously convenient. But the public doesn't buy that as much as it used to. Chicken is cheaper, quicker to cook.
The reduction in beef consumption is being matched by the increase in that of poultry. Yet, even if chicken has had its own bad press recently, beef had the big stuff. It's the meat of BSE, foot-and-mouth, angel dust, the war against McDonald's and, in Ireland at least, the daddy of all tribunals.
So the notions of traceability and responsibility have been force-fed to the industry, and during my tour they are explained to me in exhaustive detail - more dizzying than any of the blood. Later in the day I will be brought to an almost picture-perfect farm in the Golden Vale, the kind AIBP brings its foreign clients to, to dazzle them with the sight of happy cattle grazing on rich, lush green fields. And on that farm is a logbook. It details medicines, feeds, veterinary visits and the comings and goings of the cattle in recent years.
The care now required is obvious. The identity of the animal is paramount in a business that has faced "mad-cow" and foot-and-mouth disease. In the abattoir, the carcasses move forward in a line, unable to overtake each other. The animal's ear tag - essentially, its passport - is taken and pinned to its flesh, and in the case of any health scare it must be traceable back to the batch of meat it came from. If it is bound for Superquinn, the animal will be traceable thanks to a DNA scrape taken as the last act, before it went to be chilled.
Officials from the Department of Agriculture and Food are present in the abattoir. In fact, a man from the department is one of the first to meet the animals when they arrive, crossreferencing their ear tags with computer records.
On the wall in the office at the lairage - the holding area where the animals arrive - is a picture guide to the five hygiene categories, going from clean animal to filthy, by which cattle are judged acceptable. A dirty hide, for example, might contaminate the meat during slaughter. As we move from packing room to boning area to abattoir, we are guided through narrow decontamination areas, where boots are cleaned, white coats replaced and hands washed. There are separate changingrooms for the abattoir, boning and packing workers.
None of which, of course, is happy news for the animals. In the lairage, one of the newly arrived cattle is getting frisky and tries to mount another. You wouldn't blame it. If you knew what awaited you on the other side of that wall, you'd probably do the same.
For us, though, it's time for lunch: tofu and lentils. Of course not. We have steak and chips, and I'm a little surprised to find that it tastes just the same as it used to.
VEGETARIANS, PLEASE DON'T LOOK NOW
• Pigs and sheep are generally killed in much the same way as cattle. A bolt gun knocks them out before their throats are slit and they are bled to death. This is known as exsanguination.
• It is illegal to slaughter one animal in front of another.
• The skin stays on the pig as it enters the food chain, so after death its hair is scalded with hot water and scraped off.
• Chickens are often stunned by running them through electrified baths.
• According to the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, because they are dealt with on an animal-by-animal basis, cattle and sheep are considered to have lower risks of cross-contamination than pigs and poultry, for which the process is often communal.