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__)