The Small Business Administration has been used for years to secure loans for franchise outlets of the fast-food industry. The individual franchisee is taking out the loan, but the loan is being used to pay Burger King or Subway its franchisee fee. So the irony is that this federal agency which was created to support the independent businessman has really been a nice way for the fast-food chains to expand by using government-backed capital as investment capital.

Also, under various job-training schemes, the fast-food chains have gotten tax credits for hiring low-income workers. The irony here is that they actually want to train their employees as little as possible. I sat in a meeting at a fast-food convention where the top technologists who design the fast-food kitchens got together in a panel discussion. You had the top guy from McDonald's and Burger King and Tricon and KFC, and they were speaking very openly about how they all had the same goal: "zero training" in the kitchen. So, publicly, they're accepting money for training workers and then privately amongst themselves -- and it's on tape; even the brochure for that convention talks about how this panel is going to talk about the goal of zero training -- they're trying to make sure their workers get as little training as possible.

Your book has some pretty unappetizing passages where you describe how most meat is produced in this country. For starters, you write that the USDA has no legal power to recall rancid meat, while federal regulators can recall toys or tires.

Toys, tires, baby swings, you name it.

So how has the meat industry maintained so much power?

If you look at the history of the last century, the meatpacking industry has had enormous influence in Congress and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It's extraordinary that the federal government cannot order the recall of meat. Not only that, the federal government cannot fine these companies for shipping contaminated meat in the same way that it can fine an airline that was deliberately lax in its maintenance of airplanes.

Despite the cheery, happy image that fast-food chains convey, they were close with Gingrich's Contract With America and deregulation and opposing a minimum-wage increase. There's no question that the fast-food and restaurant industry and the meatpacking industry were delighted with Republican control being maintained over the new Congress.

For more than a century, the meatpacking industry has felt that it should not be regulated and that it should have the power to determine what's in the meat it sells. For example, in the United States, the meatpacking industry uses automated meat recovery systems which scrape the last shred of meat off the bone, but which have been found to introduce a fair amount of bone and spinal cord material into ground beef. Now, they're using these machines because they can get incrementally a little more meat, but that's introducing stuff into your ground beef that you don't want to eat. These machines are banned in Europe.

There's stuff in the meat right now that -- you know, you should really be cooking your hamburger meat well. I'm serious.

You write that cleaning a slaughterhouse is the worst job in America. What is so bad about it?

You have to clean up a big building where thousands of big mammals have just been slaughtered and you're under pressure to get it done quickly. It's done while a great deal of the machinery is running, so these conveyor belts all over the place are running and the cleaning equipment is a high-pressure hose with water and a chlorine mix that creates steam when you spray it.

So there's lots of big, dangerous equipment running when the visibility is low; you don't have a lot of time and the stench is horrible. There's blood and gore everywhere and you're likely to spray your co-workers and they're likely to spray you. Also, a lot of these workers ride the conveyor belts as they're spraying, and so they can be many feet above the ground. There are just so many ways to get hurt, you probably can't even list them.

And these people do get hurt. They tend to be the lowest-paid meatpacking workers -- they're the most likely to be illegal immigrants. And in the book I have a list of some of the injuries they've suffered in recent years, and some of them are literally ground up in the machinery. It's horrible. These are the ultimate in disposable workers.

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