A.P. Classport

A Trip to Baldwin Park

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Twas a beautiful Sunday morning when Judi Legler and Devon Arcuri traveled out to Baldwin Park to investigate the reasoning behind this mystery we call urbanization.

Some observations that caught my eye were the closeness of the houses. These poor people barely had yards in effort to make room for other homes in this community. The yards were very well maintained, every one trimmed and mowed to perfection! The people walking by were mostly families. A beautiful lake marks the edge of one side of Baldwin Park. However, right next to the location of the lake, a whole shopping center lays! People live in walking distance to restaurants, pharmacies, and even a martial arts school. Most of the community consisted of townhouses. The driveways were behind the houses! (Shown to the right) This was a surprise but then Devon and I realized that, just like we'll do anything it takes to look beautiful, these houses will do anything. Even put driveways behind their homes in effort to increase the beauty! However, I noticed there was no hospital or clinic in case of emergency. There was only one place to worship, a Baptist church that was having its grand opening the day we arrived. Where did the citizens go to worship before? Where do other religions go? This was unfair to me. It seemed like a place with a variety of people. considering there were all sorts of homes here, from old-southern styled to grand Victorian. I just don't understand why only a Baptist church is present. Besides that, Baldwin Park seemed very nice.

While trying to decipher why this community was here, instead of any other places in Florida, some ideas I came up with were that not only was it close to some of the best schools in Florida (i.e. Glenridge Middle School, Winter Park High) but it was also a short and simple drive to downtown Orlando. This is convenient for those hard workers out there.

Looking at my interview with Ms. Denise D. Rapp, a relater and owner of a large section of Baldwin Park, I can analyze that this is a safer place than the city, it is very family oriented and the jobs are close. It's close to the city, but not in the city, which makes it safe and easy to work and live here. The layout of the community has many city homes and has shops. Baldwin Park is known as "A City within a City".

Baldwin park is located here because of its safe location, easy traveling distance to the city, and great schools. According to the Baldwin Park Neighborhood Guide, the neighborhood is less than 10 minutes from downtown Orlando, Winter Park, museums, theaters, sports events, and medical centers. The Neighborhood Guide also explains that there are over 1700 homes and 1000 apartments built. Over 6000 people live in this beautiful community and there are so many different kinds of businesses right in the neighborhood that people could work at. The guide says that there are over 75 businesses right in the neighborhood!

Comparing this neighborhood to my own, I found that there are no shops anywhere in walking distance to my neighborhood. The houses in my neighborhood are a lot smaller, and a whole lot cheaper. However, the yards are huge here and there is a larger portion of space between the homes. Mostly, in my neighborhood, people keep to themselves, while in Baldwin Park everyone is like a big family. The roads here are wider and garages are in the front of the homes. The houses in my neighborhood were built 1960s style, while in Baldwin Park, the houses are brand new. Personally, I'd much rather live in Baldwin! It's a beautiful and friendly place to live.

So together, on our journey, Devon and I discovered that Baldwin Park is a place for everyone! It's a short distance from "everything you may ever need" (Denise D. Rapp). And it is constantly growing. That's urbanization for you: a never-ending growth of working people together in one community.

A house being built:

Chapter 10: Global Realization

Chapter 10
The author visited Plauen, Germany not only because he found it fascinating, but also because a McDonald's would be the first new building erected in Plauen since the coming of a new Germany. The author describes how he believes the old buildings have "real charm" and how the people are "unpretentious--and yet somehow cursed". Plauen was bombed and destroyed until a McDonalds restaurant came.

It is important to discuss overseas operations to show how many different kinds of people enjoy their food. There are about 17 thousand McDonalds restaurants in more than 120 foreign countires.

In foreign countries, most fast food advertising targets children because they have the "fewest attachments to tradition".(page 231)

A connection between obesity rate in America and the fast food industry involves people eating more meals outside the home. When they do this, they consume more calories, less fiber, and more fat. The prices of the fast food industry are low, and the servings are large. The servings being so large, such as, a 310 calorie 32-ounce Cokes or Super Size Fries (610 calories, 29 grams of fat), 3 times bigger than the original large, you can tell that just with one meal an American can add tons of calories to their diet. The more calories and fat an American consumes, the more weight they gain. The more weight they gain, the larger the number of obesity in America.

Obesity is a problem for American society as a whole because it affects the whole country and the view point of others on the country.

Chapter 1: The American Way

Chapter 1
Carl Karcher first purchased a hot dog cart and sold hot dogs, chili dogs, and tamales for a dime each, and soda for a nickle. He soon purchased another hot dog stand. By the end of 1944, Karcher owned four hot dog carts in LA. A restaurant went on sale, and Carl took a chance! Carl's Drive-In Barbecue soared after World War II. Carl opened Carl's Jr. in 1956. It was a success until new higher-priced dinners were served in Texas.

General Motors wanted to buy trolley systems throughout the USA because they dismantled the tracks and turned them into bus lines. This was inspired by the triumph of the automobile.

The "Speedee Service System" started when the McDonalds fired all their carhops in 1948. After three months, McDonalds reopened with increased speed, lower prices, and a way to raise the volume of sales. There were principles of a factory assembly line applied to a commercial kitchen. It got off to a rocky start, but the "Speedee Service System" eventually gained acceptence and has now impacted so many other restaurants.

Other fast food restaurants that were inspired by McDonald's approach to food service are Dunkin' Donuts in 1948, Insta-Burger-King 1953, Wendy's Old-Fashioned Hamburgers, Domino's, and Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1952.

Chapter 9: What's in the Meat

Chapter 19
Compared with several decades ago, how common are food-related illnesses today? Well, to start about 200 thousand people are sickened by a foodborne disease! Nine hundred are hospitalized and a whopping 14 die. No, 200 thousand people don't die from food related illnesses in a year, nor do they die in a month, but in a single day. In one day: yesterday, today, next Friday; about 200 thousand people die because of what they put in their mouth. Scary? I think so! You never know what goes into your body when you consume something, even if it's deadly.

The centralization of food production influenced the spread of food-related illnesses because several meat is packaged from one central company. This can potentially sicken millions of people. "Today a cluster of illnesses in one small town may stem from bad potato salad at a school barbecue--or it may be the first sign of an outbreak that extends statewide, nationwide, or even overseas" (page 195) That simple statement from the book describes perfectly how worried we should be with our new system of food production. So what if it's quick and easy! It's an every day item that could potentially be lethal. It could potentially kill millions of people.

The U.S. government has no authority to demand a recall of tainted meat. "Today the U.S. government can demand the nationwide recall of defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals, and foam-rubber toy cows. But it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contaminated, potentially lethal ground beef from fast food kitchens and supermarket shelves" (page 196) It's absolutely ridiculous that something as killer as tainted meat cannot be recalled by the government. Murderers go to jail, I think that tainted meat should be recalled, or put in their "jail" (garbage!) too!

The majority of the microbes in meat are spread by fecal material. In fact, over 78% of the ground beef contained the manure.

The first national hamburger chain, White Castle, changed the image of the hamburger by placing their grills in direct view of customers, claimed that fresh ground beef was delivered twice a day, chose a name with connotations of purity, and even sponsored an experiment at the University of Minnesota. White Castle's success helped to popularize hamburgers, and it attracted a broad range of people.

The effects of E. coli O157:H7 on the human body involve the mutated bacterium taking over the digestive system. E. coli O157:H7 effects several people. Some, however, do not become ill. People who do become sick suffer mild diarrhea. Abdominal cramps lead to this watery and bloody diarrhea. Vomiting and a low-grade fever are sometimes effects also. When the Shiga toxins enter the bloodstream, only 4% of reported E. coli O157:H7 cases, hemolytic uremic syndrome takes place. This could possibly lead to kidney failure, anemia, internal bleeding, and the destruction of vital organs, which causes 5% of children infected by it to die.

Some ways people are infected with E. coli O157:H7 are by drinking or swimming in contaminated water, crawling on a contaminated carpet, and person-to-person transmissions among family members, at day cares, and at senior centers. However the most common is from consuming undercooked meat.

Things that are fed to cattle that may facilitate the spread of pathogens range from manure to remains. About 75% of cattle in the USA were fed the remains of dead sheep, cattle, cats, and dogs routinely. This continued until August of 1997. This led to the spread of "mad cow disease" or spongiform encephalopathy. Cows are designed to eat grass, not to consume other animals. Sawdust and old newspapers used as littler are also fed to cattle. Chicken manure is fed to these animals as well, about 3 million pounds in 1994!

The risk of contamination for ground beef compared to whole cuts of beef compares because about one-quarter of the nation's ground beef (made from worn-out dairy cattle) is made from animals most likely to be diseased. Ground beef is a huge admixture of animals and has crucially spread E. coli O157:H7. When eating a single fast food hamburger, you could be consuming meat from dozens or even hundreds of different cattle.

The author is concerned about the use of older dairy cattle to make ground beef because they are worn-out and more likely to have disease. Dairy cattle are slaughtered at the age of four, when they could live for forty years.

The meatpacking industry generally responded to health concerns about the nation's beef in a chill way. They act like it's not big deal when someone reported a problem, and denied it existed. The motives of its critics fought and fought, trying to avoid any outbreaks of food poisoning.

The Streamlined Inspection System is a program designed to reduce the presence of federal inspectors in the nation's slaughterhouses. The Reagan administration believed it would help the USDA shrink its budget. Basically, this system gave the meatpacking industry the authority to inspect its own meat. Streamlined Inspection System for Cattle concluded, in 1992, that the beef produced under the program was no dirtier than beef produced at slaughterhouses fully staffed by federal inspectors. However, federal inspectors in Greenly, Colorado stated that the meat produced under this system had "never been filthier." The poorly trained company inspectors would let meat with fecal material, hair, insects, metal shavings, urine, and vomit be shipped. The Streamlined Inspection System for Cattle was discontinued in 1993.

The Jack In The Box restaurant chain responded to the outbreak of salmonella by trying to shift the blame somewhere else. Children would be hospitalized after eating Jack in the Box hamburgers. The restaurant chain struggled to recover from the bad publicity due to the outbreak. Every Jack in the Box manager attended a food safety course, and now buys all of its ground beef from two companies.

The meat selected for consumption in public schools is the lowest priced meat, most likely to be contaminated with pathogens. It's also the most likely to contain pieces of spinal cord, bone, and gristle left behind. Cattle that were already dead before arriving at the plant were processed routinely. Also, the Cattle King facilities were infested with rats and cockroaches. Right near our home in Winter Park, E. coli O157:H7 was found in Bauer Meat's processing plant being served to children. In Finely, Washington, Eleven children had eaten undercooked beef tacos at their school, and one other was infected from other students.

What you learn about the things you eat can really open your eyes. I never buy my lunch, but after reading about what they put in the cafeteria for children, I worry about my three younger siblings. I love meat! But after reading this chapter and analyzing the facts stated in it, I'm going to think twice next time a juicy hamburger is put in front of me.

Chapter 8: The Most Dangerous Job

Chapter 8
When reading this chapter, I couldn't put the book down! It was emotional, frightening, surprising! "The Most Dangerous Job" was about the distress that people working in the slaughterhouse had to go through to earn a living. About the pain and harsh environment they underwent.

The injury rate in meat packing is about three times higher than the rate in the typical American factory. Fourty thousand people suffer an injury or illness that brings them to the hospital each year.

There are tons of injuries that occur in the meatpacking plants. In this chapter, I read about amputations and trauma and diseases! Lacertations are the most common, however. This is where workers accidently stab themselves or another worker. "Trigger finger" is a disease in the finger, where it becomes frozen in curled position.

By speeding up the line in meatpacking plants, not only are over 400 cattle an hour slaughtered, but more and more workers are injuring themselves seriously. Fantastic job? I think not! The intense speed of the disassembly line is the blame for the insanely high injury rate. In order to keep up with the speedy-meat, workers neglect to sharpen their knives again. This forces them to add stress to their bodies when chopping the meat. "As the pace increases, so does the risk of accidental cuts and stabbings" (page 173-174) Even a former Monfort nurse says that she could always tell the line speed, due to the number of patients she had!

Workers don't complain about the safety conditions, however, because only 1/3 of IBP's workers belong to a union; they could be fired without warning at any time.

Supervisors' have a very important job. They must meet production goals, keep the number of recorded injuries low, and keep the meat flowing down the line without interruption. They have one other job, however. This job is to...report injuries. In order to seem like the best supervisor they can hire, injuries must be low. People do not find out what goes on in the slaughterhouse because the number of injuries that the supervisors report is a lie.

The author describes the most dangerous job as the late-night cleaning crews. He described how the work was "so hard and so horrendous that words seem inadequate to describe it." (page 177) The author discusses the water-chlorine mix (heated to about 180 degrees) high pressure hose that forms a thick fog, dropping visibility to as little as five feet. They have to clean the bloody muck and leftover scraps of meat. The whole plant heats up, "It's hot and it's foggy. and you can't see anything" a former sanitation worker described. (page 177) Headaches occur, amputations occur, and...death occurs. Carlos Vincente was dramatically pulled into the cogs of a conveyer belt. This man was torn apart. People, such as Lorenzo Marin, Sr. slipped and hit their heads and passed away. Coworkers trying to save a fellow employee inside a thirty-foot tank died, along with the other employee. Its a tragety what happens to these hard workers, it really is.

Allowing plants to maintain injury logs caused several injuries not to be logged. Even though more and more people were getting injured, OSHA inspections decreased. The IBP beef plant in Dakota City, Nebraska kept two injury logs. One for OSHA visitors, and the log with every injury recorded.

At first OSHA had random inspections, making sure each and every slaughterhouse is clean. However, after individual injury logs were obtained, only certain slaughterhouses could be inspected.

Some problems with Colorado's workers' compensation law--from a worker's point of view, of course--involve the restrictions on workers' comp payments. The benefits were reduced, and some injured patients wouldn't get the right treatement just because the pain isn't visible. Kenny Dobbins, for example, was told he only had a pulled muscle, but ended up having to get back surgery. Eventually, Dobbins went through so much trauma he was half-dead by the age of fourty-six.

So basically, this chapter was screaming "YOU WILL GET AN EDUCATION, JUDI! YOU WILL GET A GOOD JOB, AND NOT HAVE TO WORK IN A SLAUGHTERHOUSE!" the whole time. :)

Chapter 7 Cogs in the Great Machine

Chapter 7
IBP made several changes to the meat packing industry. IBP, or the Iowa Beef Packers, opened its first slaughter house in 1960. With this new slaughter house came a great deal of new ideas for the meat packing industry. Rather than being a three story building, the new plant was one story with a disassembly line. A worker would just do a simple task over and over throughout the whole day. (Sounds pretty borning, huh?) The success of IBP'S new system depended upon the cheap workforce. When stating "We've tried to take skill out of every step" (Pg 154), you can conclude that IBP has a fast fod mentality. The new slaughterhouses were in rural areas, and they depended on highways instead of rail roads to ship meat. The IBP shipped smaller cuts of beef, rather than whole sides. Wages were low for the new production techniques.

Newer meat packing plants were located in rural areas because it was closer to the feedlots. Also, with the new highway system, the meat packing plants wouldn't have to worry about shipping. Rural areas were "far away from the urban strongholds of the nation's labor unions" (page 154)

The links between IBP and organized crime were through Currier J. Holman who was convicted with IBP for bribing union leaders along with meat wholesalers in 1974. The links extended far beyond the payments that honest business men made. Holman fired four top IBP executives because they didn't want to deal with organized crime figures. So, he made Moe Steinman, and his son-in-law vice president. Steinman had earlier been arrested because he bribed meat inspectors. This man sould tainted meat to the U.S. Army. After reading this, I wondered what could have happened to the meat I eat every day! I can't believe that someone would disrespect the Army like that!

The relationship between labor unions and modern meat packing plants is that labor unions were in the Western United States, forcing the meatpacking plants to either "go west or go out of business" (page 155) . Paying wages could also be sometimes 50 percent or lower that what union workers earned in Chicago.

Wages in meat packing plants today are barely above poverty rates. At less than 10 dollars an hour, the meat packing job is paid minimum wage. Before, people were waiting in line to become a meat packer. Wages are more than 50 percent lower than before.

Meat packing plants have discovered a new kind of person to employ...illegal immigrants. Because they are willing to work for cheap, thousands of migrants worked at the plants. IBP recruits not only recruit migrants, but also refugees, asylum-seekers, and homeless people. IBP even has commercials running in Mexico offering jobs in the USA. GFI America Inc. needed workers, so it sent recruiters to the border with a rented bus. There, the recruiters hired 39 people who they offered housing and pay. The new industrial migrant is a migrant who works a meat packing plant, and constantly moves to knew towns looking for something better.

The meat packing firm in small communities has a HUGE impact. When I first started reading about the meat packing firm relocating to a small community, I thought it would just be a little smelly. However, there are several other issues with the plant in a small community such as Lexington, Nebraska. Besides the horrible stench of "burning hair and blood, that greasy smell, and the odor of rotten eggs" (page 165), Lexington has turned from a cute, family-friendly community, into one of those scary cities that you don't feel safe in, no matter where you are. To start, only one year after the slaughterhouse opened, Lexington had the highest crime rate in all of Nebraska...in only a year! Prior to the slaughterhouse, Lexington looked like something Norman Rockwell would paint! (According to the author, page 165) But now, over a decade later, the crime rates have doubled, there is some major drug dealing going on in this city, and gangs are everywhere! There are drive-by shootings in Lexington. The majority of the white inhabitants moved away, while Latino inhabitants increased over 50% percent. Welcome to "Mexington"!

Chapter 6 On the Range

Chapter 6
Some problems currently facing cattle ranchers are the economic problems such as rising land prices, stagnant beef prices, oversupplies of cattle, increased shipments of live cattle from Canada and Mexico, development pressures, inheritance taxes, health scares about beef. Also, more than about half a million ranchers have quit in the last twenty years. "Trusts" set the prices offered for cattle. Prices spent on beef has fallen from 63 cents to 46.

The impact the consolidation of the meat packing industry has had on cattle ranchers are that they "flood the market with their ownn captive supplies, driving prices back down." The meat packing industry pretty much sets the prices for the cattle ranchers.

The impact of the Chicken McNugget is that it raised the poultry industry from "virtually powerless, trapped by debt and by onerous contracts" and chicken over all from "sold whole" and "carved at a dinner table to an easy-to-eat everyday finger food. "The impact of McNuggets was so huge that it changed the industry," the president of ConAgra Poultry said.

The nutrition facts of the McNuggets are thought to be healthier than hamburgers. And I won't lie, I thought the same thing. After reading, however, I learned that their fatty acid profile resembles beef more than poultry. They contain double as much fat per ounce as the hamburger, and are made from "small pieces of reconstituted chicken, composed mainly of white meat, that were held together by stablizers, breaded, friend, frozen, then reheated.

Way to go, Mr. Turner! You turned chicken from a healthy, sit-down-with-the-family food, into a fast-food revolution constructed in a lab.

During the 1980s farm crisis, people paid attention to the ever-so-high suicide rate among ranchers and farmers. In the United States, the suicide rate for these ranchers and farmers is a whopping three times higher than the national average. Hank was one of those poor agriculture workers. He was buried at his ranch.