metro
Empire from page 49
CHIROPRACTIC CARE
20-539-0100
Wishing our family, friends and the community
A Happy & Healthy NEW YEAR!
May the coming year be filled with
health and happiness for all our family and friends.
L'Shanah Tovah!
taishing My
Students, Friends,
and Family
May the coming year be filled with
health and happiness for all our family and friends.
L'Shanah Tovah!
J11675.-
50
September 22 s 2011
.7. 216114,
At Empire's hatchery, the temperature,
humidity and duration of incubation are
strictly calibrated to ensure maximum
yield. Eggs are turned every hour on
the hour to keep the chicks inside from
sticking to the eggshells. Once the eggs
hatch — 82 percent will — the chicks are
inoculated against avian sicknesses such
as Marek's disease and coccidian before
being trucked to farms spread out over
five Pennsylvania counties, all within 90
miles of the Mifflintown plant.
Area farmers raise the chickens, but
Empire dictates and remotely monitors
how the chickens are housed and provides
all the feed. It takes approximately 1.8
pounds of feed — mostly corn, but also
some soy meal and other ingredients —
to grow a pound of chicken. The birds'
diet is strictly vegetarian and kosher for
Passover all year-round.
When the chickens are 38 to 48 days
old, they are loaded onto crates and
trucked to the plant for slaughter.
Kosher-Literate Workers
The workforce at Empire's plant is full of
incongruities. More than a third of the
farmers who raise the kosher chickens are
Mennonites. CEO Rosenbaum is a Reform
Jew who does not keep kosher. Rabbi Israel
Weiss, the head mashgiach, or kosher
inspector, writes Hebrew science fiction
novels in his spare time under a pen
name. The staff is filled with Methodists,
Presbyterians and Episcopalians whose
familiarity with kashrut — and the
Yiddish terminology that surrounds it —
exceeds that of some religious Jews.
"For the first year-and-a-half it was a
total learning experience',' said Neenah
Glenn Lauver, a Mifflintown native who
works as Empire's director of product
marketing. "Even still, I'm learning things
about the culture we serve"
A phalanx of rabbis works at the plant,
living on-site in dormitories during the
week and spending weekends at home
with their families in New York, Baltimore,
Philadelphia or Lakewood, N.J. The plant
has its own mikvah, or ritual bath, where
the shochets immerse before beginning
their workday, and a shul with multiple
morning minyans and evening classes.
The father of Leiby Kletzky, the 8-year-
old Chasidic boy from Borough Park,
Brooklyn, who was abducted and mur-
dered last month, used to work at the plant
as a mashgiach.
In deference to the shochets and mash-
giachs, the assembly line does not run on
Fridays so they can get home for Shabbat.
In deference to the assembly floor work-
ers, the plant also closes on the first day of
buck hunting season.
A typical day starts in the kill room at 4
a.m., but it involves frequent breaks for the
shochets so they can stay fresh; no shochet
works more than five hours in a given day.
"Shechitah is a very complex job;
you have to be rested',' said Rabbi Aron
Taub, a shochet from Baltimore who has
worked at the plant since 1989. "It's not
like doing any other physical job. You
have to have a lot of concentration:'
Approximately every five minutes, a
light goes on signaling the shochets to
stop their work and check their knives
for nicks. If a shochet finds an imperfec-
tion, all the chickens from the last few
minutes are discarded. That goes not just
for his work, but also for all the hundreds
of chickens killed by the shochets during
that period because the birds are mixed
in together. The reason is kashrut: If a
single shochet's work could be singled
out, he theoretically could come under
pressure to compromise his standards to
achieve a better pass rate. That's a con-
flict of interest. In the contest between
efficiency and kashrut, kashrut always
wins.
As the chickens move along the assem-
bly line, a mashgiach inspects every yolk
sack and tray of intestines for treif char-
acteristics. When a mashgiach finds a
slaughtered chicken that has a suspicious
bulge on its yolk sack, he pulls it off the
line for further scrutiny. Another rabbi
making rounds takes a closer look, some-
times slicing open tumor-like lumps to
look for telltale signs of treif Birds that
are disqualified are sold to companies
that make dog food.
There are USDA inspectors on-site, too,
but the rabbis remove about five times as
much poultry from the assembly line as
the government inspectors.
On the assembly line, the birds are
soaked for 30 minutes in tap water before
they are salted for an hour and then
triple rinsed. A machine pulls open the
necks to drain the blood. Another cuts
open the wingtips so water can get in.
As the chickens move along, a steel rod
dislodges the windpipe and eviscerates
the bird. A machine with rapidly spin-
ning, finger-like protrusions removes
the feathers. Plucking a kosher chicken
is more difficult for kosher producers
because the warm water used by produc-
ers of treif chicken to remove feathers
cannot be used in the kosher process.
Eventually, the finished products are
wrapped whole, cut up or processed into
foods like turkey pastrami, all-breast
chicken nuggets or Empire's seasoned
chicken in a bag, which cooks in a micro-
wave in 20 minutes.
With a limited shelf life, the chickens
are rushed onto refrigerated trucks to
delivery points across the country on the
same day they are killed. Some long-haul
trucks have tandem drivers so they can
drive nonstop all the way to California. A
chicken slaughtered in Pennsylvania on
a Tuesday can make it to a supermarket
shelf in Los Angeles by Thursday.
Just in time for chicken Bob to end up
on your Shabbat table. l__)