"The Way of All Flesh: Undercover in an Industrial Slaughterhouse"

I've been enjoying the cover story -- "The Way of All Flesh: Undercover in an Industrial Slaughterhouse" by Ted Conover -- from the May issue of Harper's; I've been reading it the last couple night's on the train home. The hyperlink to the article requires a password to access the entire story. -- Conover's piece alone is worth the $20 for an annual subscription. Here is a nice passage from the middle of the story:

Shift’s end, and a fast walk to the USDA men’s locker room. The narrow space quickly filled with exhausted bodies not too tired to crack jokes: about men bending over, about that one Latina trimmer, about the lameness of the Kansas State football team. (The night-shift veterinarian was a K-State diehard transplanted to Husker country.) Locker doors swung open and we had company while undressing: glossies of buxom, naked women. Or, on one door, Hillary Clinton’s head photoshopped onto the body of a strapping female wrestler barely contained by her red-white-and-blue singlet. My locker was near the hamper for dirty uniforms, and I watched and ducked as, bloodied and balled up, the clothing flew in from up to twenty feet away. Each flight marked the revelation of another inspector’s body. It was a cross section of body types you could have found almost anywhere — a few guys physically fit, but most far from it. Why, I wondered, were these so surprising to behold? Why did the images of wide hairy backs or fat white stomachs stick in my brain as I walked through the parking lot to my car and sometimes for hours afterward? 

I think it was because undressed and goofing around, we no longer looked like government employees: GS-5s, GS-7s, and GS-9s. Dressed in hats and uniforms, we were the trained overseers of a specialized industrial process. But naked, we resembled something else: a group of predators (a pack, you might say) presiding over the slaughter of vast herds far too numerous for us to eat ourselves. The genius and horror of humanity was our ability to send the spoils to anonymous others of our kind located states and continents away. In the locker room you could see us as naked apes, as hominids killing cows; industrial slaughter is predation writ large.

I sat at the back of train, not my usual spot, because of the fullness of the car. In the seat in front of me was a young Latino with headphones enjoying music. In the seat to my right was another young Latino fingering his cell phone. All three of us were content. The sun was shining. I was enjoying solid prose and Explosions in the Sky's "What Do You Go Home To?" from All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone (2007):