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Regarding a Mr. Harish Bharti, a Seattle - Washington based Indian - American lawyer filing a class action law suit against the fast food giant McDonald's for misleading its customers by advertising its fries as vegetarian.
For you and many other Indians, Pakinstanis, Sri Lankans, Arabs alike especially those of you who are Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists please hear me out.
There are about 267,000 heads of beef (bulls and cows) slaughtered every week day and about 180,000 heads of beef slaughtered on saturdays. About 915,000 pigs (normally called hogs) slaughtered every day six days a week. The meat from both these animals are processed ti edible meats.
In the case of beef the animal is mechanically killed in a factory that averagely processes about 2100 to 5200 heads of beef a day in this sequence: - The animal is prodded and led with electric probes to a killing station where it is hit on the head with a slug fired from a high pressure compressed air powered metal bolt. The animal is immediately made to dangle from a chain wrapped around one of the its legs. The animal is now suspended in mid air and is sent in a long conveyor called a bleed chain to the processing floor. The animal is still not quite dead. It is jerking and twitching while slowly dying.
The urinary bladder is punctured next with a spike allowing the bladder to drain The urine that is drained to the floor is collected into large tanks and are processed to extract nutrients for the agricultural industry and the water is purified and used in the factory for washing purposes. While the conveyor is moving three of the feet and the tail are cut and dropped into conveyors. The leather skin around the neck is cut next, the skin around the legs, the stomach, and the skin is now wrapped around two slowly revolving drums and are completely without any damage (to the skin) are pulled out of the body and rolled out then sent to special factories that process them into leather jackets, shoes and hand bags that we all use (Indian lawyers, their wives alike).
The head is then cut off and hung from a special conveyor where the brain is pulled out, the tongue is cut off, the horns are sheared, eye balls and whatever else and the meat is pulled out then sent through a head wash cabinet where it is further processed until only the bones are left.
The carcass in the mean time gets opened, the stomach contents, liver and heart is spilled onto a conveyor, the fourth leg is cut off, the carcass is split in the middle and the carcass halfs are sent for preparing supermarket ready meats. The stomach contents in the meantime separated to eaten and digested foodsand eaten but not digested foods. The undigested food is reprocessed to be made into a type of grass biscuits to be fed to living cattle so they can be grown to slaughter age. The digested food of course produces waste and this is taken out separately to produce fertilizer. The guts are washed and used for making sausages.
The pig too undergoes a similar process.
All the bones that are left behind after removing all the meat is washed steamed and ground to a fine powder and goes into making gelatine and gel caps (for medicinal purposes).
In the meatime while all this is going on the blood keeps pouring out of the carcass to the floor. This is routed through the floor of the factory which is lined with food grade stainless steel sheet to large tanks, where it is purified, heated water extracted and blood is made into tiny crystals and shipped to cosmetics manufacturers.
The cold creams, skin ointments and the lipsticks that human beings apply on their face, body and the lips need a base that is compatible with the human body. Yes, you guessed right. All cold creams, body creams, lipsticks used pig and cow blood as the base.
Dear editor, I am sorry that I had to go into the gory and graphic details of slaughtering food purpose animals to show how blood and bones are extracted for cosmetics, gelatine and gel caps. But this is how it is done. I am a sinhala buddhist (Engineer) living right in the heart of the beef producing region in the USA. I am an avid reader of the Lankaweb and I own a company that produces water treatment systems as recommended by the EPA for the US agricultural industry.
Granted there are about 1200 million hindus and about 500 million moslems in this planet. One must be aware of how some of our daily used products are made. This is letter is basically meant as a way of educting some of our very conservative, religious fanatics who take little things like a small amount of beef extract in some fries and try to make a buck out of it.
Sinhala Seneviratne USA
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