HOW TO MAKE BACON

Don't think me macabre for taking pictures of pigs being slaughtered. I just happened to be there. The process was fascinating and I must admit I'm not really big on animal rights. The eyes don't moisten. So anyway, here it is - a photo essay. And if you care about pigs and other four-legged friends of man, skip this one.

These pictures were taken at the Danish Crown factory in Grindsted, Denmark. The plant was shutting down because it was too small and it was no longer viable to run it. The pigs are gassed in a chamber just ahead of this one. Here they enter the assembly line where man and machine go to work to remove the innards. This is how it ends up as bacon and ham at the breakfast table.

A worker makes the first cut.

There are quite a few stages and each worker or machine yanks out a specific part from inside the pig. Theres blood all over the floor and thats not the scary part. Instead, its the knives in the workers hands. I kept thinking, what if one of them went berserk one morning? (Like that morning.) But workers in Denmark are not frustrated. More on that later.

This is pretty much the last stage of the inside-clearing job. As you can see, theres almost nothing there!

Now, the Danes love using their flag. Everyone has a flagpole in their lawn and if its someones birthday the flag goes up. Little flags even go into the birthday cake and all over stores in Denmark you will find all kinds of everyday things with the flags design, like, notebooks, pens, pencils, postcards and of course flags. So it was only appropriate that the last pig that came out of the assembly line went through proudly with the Danish flag in it.

It was an emotional day for the employees at Danish Crown in Grindsted. They had worked side by side for many years and as the last pig rolled out a wave of nostalgia swept over them. But everyone was still smiling. Unemployment is so low in Denmark (about 3%) that only a minority of the nearly 700 workers here had not yet found another job.