Mira Landwehr: Essay “The Blood Factory”: Porridge is my vegetable

I know you love your dog. But please imagine this scenario. A man you don’t know, who is holding a “knife with a blade about 20 cm long” in his hand, takes your Bello away from you and does the following to him in front of your eyes: “Starting just below his left ear, he pulls the blade deep into the flesh to the other ear and cuts (…) through both carotid arteries. A jet of blood immediately pours onto the ground (…) The man then separates the head from the torso (…) The body-warm blood steams and flows from the headless body through a drain opening in the ground into a special tank.” The front and back paws of your pet The man then “cuts it off with a heavy cleaver and throws it into a wheelbarrow with others.” Because the paws are still needed: to produce animal feed or glue. Then, after he has “hung the dead barker by its hind legs (…) on two hooks” (so that it would be easier to remove its fur later), the man turns to the next passer-by who is walking his dog, and does the same thing with his dog.

Don’t worry: your pet has previously been anesthetized using a (hopefully) correctly used captive bolt gun. (“A ten centimeter long steel bolt penetrates the brain and destroys the affected areas with great force.”) So it’s not that bad. No reason to get so upset. Just imagine if your sweet dog was conscious when his head was cut off. That would certainly have been much less pleasant. Now, of course, you won’t be particularly impressed by what’s going on. After all, the stranger has just slaughtered your familiar pet without your consent in order to send it – a nice German word – to the “animal carcass processing industry”, where knowledgeable staff carefully check which body parts or body fluids from your dog’s corpse can be used for what exactly.

Stop! Stop! Before any further confusion arises: Of course, none of this happens to your beloved Bello and his friends, but only to cattle and other so-called farm animals. On average, “8,189 cattle are slaughtered every day” in this country, but no dogs and cats. So we can rest assured.

In her essay “The Blood Factory,” which has just been published, the Hamburg journalist Mira Landwehr describes in detail the route that slaughter animals take in Europe and the process of animal carcass utilization. It’s not just steaks, sausages and other meat products that are produced in this way… hmm… This also produces numerous so-called by-products, the whereabouts of which most people who buy their beef steak wrapped in cling film in the supermarket probably prefer not to know.

How and for what purposes are all the fats, bones, skins, hooves and claws processed? After all, we live under capitalism, which is why the constantly accumulating carcasses cannot be exploited. Hence the apt term mentioned above, but which still leaves some questions unanswered: animal carcass processing industry. What happens to the “eyes, noses, tails, testicles, udders and other (…) parts of the animals that are difficult to sell”? Didn’t we always want to know this in detail? Don’t we want to be informed about the details of everyday practices in our modern society? By reading the informative 34-page booklet, you will learn a number of interesting new words that start with an “F” and that you have not previously had in your active vocabulary: “fine crusher”, “fat melting kettle”, “meat pulp”.

Landwehr, who has repeatedly dealt critically with the so-called animal rights movement in the past, wrote down her research results with the necessary sobriety, but fortunately did not forgo clarity. For example, when she refers to the “total blood volume” of the animals slaughtered in Germany every year, she doesn’t just mention a number (380 million liters), but instead stimulates the reader’s imagination: “So almost 7,000 bathtubs full of blood – every day .” What happens to this quickly perishable blood that is picked up from the slaughterhouses every day by large tank trucks? You may not want to know too much, but in any case: the plasma obtained from it “is a protein with market potential for human consumption,” such as the company Alfa Laval AB, “a listed manufacturer of products for material separation, heat transfer and fluid pumping « (Wikipedia), proudly announces on its website.

The reader also learns a lot: about the history of the slaughterhouses; about how many resources are used to produce a kilo of beef; about state subsidies and the conditions under which so-called farm animals are bred and kept under capitalism (“in the cramped … stables, diseases … and cannibalism are widespread”), as well as about the relaxation of feeding regulations (“pigs are now allowed on the menu again ground poultry and vice versa”).

Furthermore, we learn that the profession of butcher, for which poorly paid migrant workers are often hired, requires a “high level of ’emotional neutrality'”, which should actually surprise no one, and that what happens in slaughterhouses, especially that “between the anesthesia of the… living and the dismemberment of the dead animal”, has so far only rarely been documented in visual form (“the bleeding, the dying animal is taboo”) – after all, the carcass processing industry is interested in people continuing to buy their sausage and not one that is too big Develop an interest in how exactly this is made.

The Berlin artist Jill Senft contributed the appropriate illustrations to the brochure, which form a successful contrast to the deplorable reality of what is reported here: When reading, you look at pastel-colored drawings that are equally inspired by Pop Art and the comic tradition, in which representational things was so artfully reduced to simple geometric shapes and in which just as much will to abstraction and alienation was incorporated that all the things shown are still easily recognizable: meat and sausage products, factories, trucks, laboratory equipment, cute pets. When you look at the pictures, you immediately think of the work of the painter and graphic artist Hans Ticha, one of the few pop art artists in the GDR. You could also be dealing with a modern children’s book here. If you didn’t know better.

Mira Landwehr: »The blood factory. Why rose fertilizer contains animal blood and so do cigarette filters.« With drawings by Jill Senft. Maro-Verlag, 36 pages, br., 16 €.