Where Do TV Dinners Come From and Other Stories?

Life experiences are the basis for lots of things - songs, plays, teaching, stories and more. Over the past few weeks I've been drawn back to memories of some of my own experiences that helped shaped me. Things that taught me and helped make me who I am today. One of those memories was shaken from a file in my brain by a short article last week about workers in a poultry factory not being allowed to take bathroom breaks and solving their problem by wearing adult diapers. Yes folks, May of 2016 was the date of the article.

The wires in my brain lit up and began searching my memory bank - poultry, factories, injustice - and soon I slipped back into the mid 60's. Something was familiar. Once there I remembered and saw myself and five or six close friends who had migrated from St. Joseph's House of Hospitality in New York City to the small town of Tivoli, up the Hudson River and home to the Catholic Worker's Farm community. Some details are a bit grey but basically we were a group of young people going off in our own direction but at the same time needing to be in close proximity to the core of our beliefs, the Catholic Worker. We discovered an abandoned property, perhaps even purchased or rented it with the hopes and dreams of starting our own community of workers and scholars. Of course we needed revenue for our adventure so a number of us found work, picking fruit with migrants and performing other odd jobs in the area. The fruit harvesting didn't go that well as I remember it, at least not for me.

We, along with everyone else, were paid at piece rate for containers of fruit brought back to the orchard owner's scale where another employee would, somewhat gleefully, go through our baskets culling out what he considered to be unacceptable fruit. This process had a direct impact on the amount you were paid for that 'piece' and many times we drifted back to the trees to refill our baskets for a recount. It was hard work and I didn't do particularly well at it, fruit bouncing off of my head more often then landing in the basket. We worked in blazing sun, strong winds and rain. Weather didn't really matter to either the farmer or the migrant group leader.

At some point along the way, we became aware of a frozen food factory that was hiring line workers and other production employees for an hourly rate. This seemed like a much better alternative to picking fruit and having someone control your pay by choosing what was and what wasn't acceptable. It turned out that the factory was subcontracting for a large national food company to produce a newly popular item, frozen TV dinners, chicken dinners to be precise. One section of the factory consisted of a poultry room where chickens were plucked, literally ripped apart, cooked and processed for delivery to the production line.

The other section consisted of a conveyor belt production line where frozen vegetables, mashed potatoes with tabs of butter, and chicken were placed in the three compartments of aluminum trays. Another line wrapped and packaged the trays for freezing in cartons on pallets. Middle aged women sat on stools at stations along the conveyor belt controlling the flow of potatoes, placing butter, and arranging chicken slices or pieces.

My friend Isidore, always up for an adventure, choose to work in the chicken processing center. He wore thick, oversized rubber gloves and spent his days ripping chicken carcasses apart, all day, every day for 8 plus hours. The room and the people would be hosed down numerous times per day and bones cutting through gloves and skin were a common occurrence. Isidore loved it and hated it at the same time but that tended to be his philosophy with most of what he encountered in life.

I worked on the production line. The foreman saw me as a young man who should be able to do the work at the head of the line. That work consisted of taking aluminum trays in stacks and placing them in two tower type holders that fed into the conveyor belt. But there was more. Next to the belt was another pallet of 40 to 50lb boxes of frozen vegetables for a particular run, peas, corn or succotash. Each of these boxes were smashed on the floor to loosen the vegetables, opened and finally lifted and dumped into a bin at shoulder height that would drop the appropriate amount of peas, etc. into the tray compartment as trays were being fed by the belt. Trays and vegetables obviously had to keep up with each other. Trays had to be placed correctly so that they wouldn't jam and more importantly that the right compartment lined up with the automated vegetable shoot. The orchards were looking better every minute.

I was killing myself keeping up with what I considered to be about three jobs in this 'automated' factory while I looked at others sitting on stools placing a pat of butter on a pile of potatoes. About 30 minutes into my agony, as I was smashing a box on the floor to fill the near empty bin, I heard the machinery screech. I had stacked the trays a bit off center and they were all flying over and under the belt getting caught in various machine parts. As the foreman ran across the floor to hit the switch to shut down the belt, puffing and swearing, I looked at the line and saw a number of the women giving me a thumbs up. It turns out that was the only way people got a break - equipment breakdown or maintenance. The previous line feeder had been fired for too many of these self inflicted breakdowns and all were glad to see that their breaks would continue due to my inability to keep trays straight and bins filled. I smile at the thought. Forced overtime was also a constant issue at this factory. At what was supposed to be the end of the day, the foreman would announce that four more pallets had to be competed before anyone could leave. Smile gone.

There are more stories about this particular expierience and the saga of the commune along the Hudson but I'll leave it there for now while we all ponder how far we've come in poultry and food processing plants.