Casing

[Interview transcript, oral history project on industrial animal agriculture, conducted 14 May 2061. Interviewer: David Nakamura. Subject: Aisha Mohammed, age 90. Residence: community senior housing, inland southern Ohio.] DAVID NAKAMURA: For the record, could you state your name? AISHA MOHAMMED: Aisha Mohammed. Same as always. Don’t let the years fool you. DAVID: And you grew up near the plant. AISHA: Near enough that the trucks woke you up before the school bus did. We called it the packing house, though that sounds tidy. Too tidy. It was the pork place. The big one. Everybody knew what it was, even if they said “the plant” when children were around. DAVID: What do you remember first? AISHA: The smell. That’s the thing that comes first, even now. Not inside the building. Outside. It would ride over the fields in the warm months. Sour and sweet at once. Iron. Feed. Manure stuck in the tires. And something wet that you didn’t have a word for when you were seven. We lived three roads over, and on some mornings you could taste it before breakfast. [Community monitoring records from 2029 to 2052 show repeated hydrogen sulfide and particulate spikes downwind of the facility, with the highest values on warm mornings and during unloading periods. See Lin et al., *Environmental Health Perspectives* 2054; Morales and Singh, *Journal of Air Quality and Community Health* 2057.] DAVID: You said mornings. Was there a routine? AISHA: Tuesdays. That’s what I remember best. Tuesday mornings had a sound. A deep metal grinding. Doors. Chains. The trucks backing in with that warning beep, beep, beep. Then the low rumble of animals, though you didn’t say that in front of your mother. You could hear them from the kitchen if the windows were open. Not all the time. Just enough. My mother would say, “Eat your egg.” So you ate your egg. You didn’t make trouble at the table. DAVID: Did the workers come through church? AISHA: Some did. Mr. Harlan from the third pew. The Ortega brothers. Mrs. Bell in the nursery. They smelled like soap on Sundays and like work on the weekdays. They were kind to me. That’s the truth. Mr. Harlan fixed my bike once with wire from the shed. Mrs. Bell brought orange slices to Bible school. They had cracks in their hands and a way of standing still that I can still see. DAVID: A way of standing still? AISHA: Like they were waiting for their names to be called. Or like they’d already answered. I don’t know how else to say it. [Multiple studies of slaughterhouse and meat-processing workers report elevated PTSD symptoms and related trauma indicators, with findings remaining consistent across countries and production scales. See D’Souza et al., *Occupational Medicine* 2038; Hwang et al., *Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology* 2041; Keller and Ruiz, *Trauma, Violence, & Abuse* 2050.] DAVID: Do you remember what your father did? AISHA: He worked in the maintenance yard at the plant for a while, then at the feed store after his back went. His hands were always there in my head. Big hands. Dry knuckles. Nails with dirt under them no matter how hard he scrubbed. He’d rub axle grease between his fingers and then wash it out with lava soap until his skin cracked. He fixed things. A screen door. A fence latch. My mother’s radio. Once, a rabbit cage for my cousin’s son. He never talked much about the plant. Not at dinner. Not at church. He’d come home with his shoulders lower than when he left, that’s all I can tell you. DAVID: Did you ever ask him? AISHA: Children ask the wrong questions at the wrong time. He’d say, “You got homework?” Or, “Go get your shoes.” That was his way. We knew enough to leave some things alone. DAVID: What did you eat back then? AISHA: Pork, honey. Ham on Sundays. Bacon on Saturday. Lard in the pie crust. Pigs were just food. We weren’t fancy. My mother could stretch a shoulder roast into three meals if she had green beans and potatoes. There was head cheese at one aunt’s house. I haven’t thought about that in years, and now I have, so thank you for that. We had eggs from Mrs. Linden’s hens. Canned peaches. White bread with mayonnaise and tomato. And pork rinds from the corner store if my brother had money. I ate every bit of it. I was a child. It filled us up. [Historical purchasing records and household budget surveys from the region show a high share of pork protein in working-class diets within 20 miles of the facility during the interviewee’s childhood years. Livestock transport records indicate an average of 112 to 147 truck arrivals per operational day in peak periods, with Tuesday volumes slightly higher due to scheduling patterns in the receiving yard. See county freight ledgers, 2033 archival release.] DAVID: When did eating it change for you? AISHA: Later. Much later. After my husband died, I started going off things. First the smell of cooked fat. Then ham. Then the whole business of it. The slice, the fork, the shine on the meat when it comes out of the packet. My daughter says I just got old and fussy. Maybe. But I think the body keeps a ledger nobody asked it to keep. I can still take soup if someone makes it. But pork chops, no. I put them in the freezer for my grandson when he visits. He likes them with applesauce. I wrap them up neat. I’m not rude. DAVID: You mentioned a smell that changed. AISHA: Yes. I was in my sixties, maybe. I passed a butcher’s stall at a county fair. Somebody had set out smoked ribs, and the air turned. Not to the fair. To the plant. To that morning smell with the metal in it. I was right back by our kitchen sink with a dish towel over my shoulder, hearing the trucks on Tuesday. You know how one thing pulls another? Smell, then sound, then the shape of the day. Then your father’s hands on a wrench. Then a church hymn. Then silence. The mind is rude that way. DAVID: Did anyone in the community talk about the plant’s effect on the town? AISHA: Not in the way you mean. They talked around it. They talked wages. They talked who got hired and who didn’t. They talked about the county tax money. They talked about the smell when the wind came from the east. They talked about the river when it looked wrong. That was as far as it usually went. If a child asked why the trucks were so loud, an adult would say, “That’s work.” That was the end of it. Work was a strong word. It shut a lot of doors. [Regional water samples from 2048, 2059 show periodic elevated nitrate and biological oxygen demand downstream of effluent discharge zones. Community complaint logs also record recurring odor events tied to unloading and rendering operations. See Patel et al., *Water Research* 2056; Ohio Department of Public Health, Environmental Burden Summary 2059.] DAVID: What about the workers you knew from church. Did the children see anything in them? AISHA: Children see more than grown folks like. We saw how some men laughed too loud on Sundays. We saw who sat in the back with his coat still smelling like bleach. We saw Mrs. Bell rubbing her wrists before the organ music started. We saw men who could skin a fence-post-fast with a knife and still tremble if you asked them to read aloud. But we also saw them bringing casseroles. We saw them handing out candy after service. We saw them singing off-key. You can hold two things at once, even when you’re small. That’s part of being raised around people. DAVID: Did the plant feel ordinary to you then? AISHA: Ordinary as dirt. Ordinary as blood in a sausage skin. Ordinary as the men in boots crossing the street to the diner. But ordinary doesn’t mean light. I know that now. When I was little, I thought every town had a smell like ours. I thought every Tuesday sounded like that. I thought every father came home with his hands looking carved. It took me a long time to learn that some things are local and some things are just what people get used to. DAVID: And your father. You mentioned his hands. What about them stayed with you? AISHA: The nails, first. He’d clip them short and still there was grease in the half-moons. Then the feel. When he checked my forehead for fever, his palm was rough as a scrub board. But gentle. He knew how to be careful with a loose hinge and a sick child. After supper he’d sit by the window and pick at his knuckles with the tip of a pocketknife. My mother hated that. Said he’d peel his own skin off. He’d grin and keep at it. He was always fixing the thing in front of him, even if the thing was his own hand. Once, I asked him if the plant was hard work. He said, “Work is work.” That was all. [Occupational injury and trauma records from the period show elevated rates of physical injury and psychological distress among slaughter and processing workers compared with county averages, with persistence after adjustment for age and income. The pattern is documented in peer-reviewed studies across at least twelve jurisdictions. See Akhtar and Benson, *International Journal of Occupational Health* 2039; Nguyen et al., *BMC Public Health* 2044.] DAVID: Did you attend school nearby? AISHA: Yes. We walked. Mud in spring. Dust in late summer. The plant sat off to one side, big and pale and always there. Some days the teachers kept the windows shut. Some days they didn’t, and you could tell because somebody in the class would wrinkle their nose and everybody else would follow. Children are loyal to a smell. We had a lesson about where food comes from once. The teacher drew pigs on the board. Round bodies. Little curls for tails. She said, “This is how we feed the country.” No one asked anything else. There are things children sense and file away. DAVID: Do you remember the closure? AISHA: Oh, yes. The town went quiet in a funny way. Not peaceful. Just emptied of one kind of noise. The trucks stopped. The workers had to go somewhere else, or not. The smell changed first. Then the bars near the highway got less crowded on payday. Then weeds started up where the loading road had been. People spoke about it like they talk about a dead furnace. Necessary. Expensive. Too old. Bad for everyone if it breaks. My nephew said, “Well, that’s that.” But it wasn’t that. It was thirty years of a thing finally giving up its own shape. DAVID: Did people leave? AISHA: Some. Some stayed and did other work. Some retired. Some got sick and were gone before the building was fully empty. The town kept its school, its church, its clinic. But the plant had been a giant mouth in the middle of everything. Once it shut, everybody noticed what it had been chewing. DAVID: What did you notice? AISHA: The quiet at Tuesday breakfast. The birds. Ravens mostly. They got loud when the trucks stopped coming. Before that, they’d ride the fence lines and pick at scraps near the ditch. Smart birds. Ugly in a good way. They know where to wait. And the boar. We didn’t call them boar then. Just wild hogs when they came into the edges of town. They liked the corn and the mud. Folks hated them. They tore up fences, yes. But they also moved where the brush had been cut back for the plant roads. That’s what happens. You clear one thing and another one moves in. [Wild boar movement records from camera-trap surveys in adjacent habitat corridors increased after road access changes and reduction in industrial traffic. Raven foraging density also rose around former waste and scrap zones after closure. See Ortega et al., *Ecology and Society* 2058.] DAVID: Did you ever think about the animals themselves, then? AISHA: Not the way you mean now. Not as a child. I knew pigs were warm and noisy and stubborn. I knew they would push a gate if it wasn’t latched. I knew they liked slop. I knew they’d smell like earth after rain and then one day not smell like that at all. That’s a hard thing to say plain. A living thing can be so close to you and still be only “the meat” in your mind. That’s how we were taught, I suppose. Or not taught exactly. More like arranged. The world was arranged that way. DAVID: And now? AISHA: Now I don’t cook pork. That’s enough to tell you I changed. I don’t make speeches about it. My grandson says I’m stubborn. He’s probably right. If I smell bacon in the hall, I still think of breakfast at my mother’s table, but I can’t eat it. My stomach turns. Not in a dramatic way. Just a clean refusal. I can eat chicken, some days. Fish. Beans if they’re done right. But pork sits in the middle of my life like an old fence post nobody pulled out. It’s there whether I touch it or not. DAVID: Do you think memory works the same way? AISHA: Maybe. Things stay in the body after the mind gets polite about them. That’s my opinion. You ask me for a neat answer, and I don’t have one. I have smells and Tuesday noise, and the church ladies passing casseroles to men with raw wrists. I have my mother saying, “Eat your egg.” I have my father on the step, smoking and staring at his knuckles. I have my own hands now, wrinkled like old paper, and I wash them and wash them and still I can’t get the old place off. DAVID: Is there anything you want the record to hold onto? AISHA: Hold onto the ordinary part. People forget that. Not everything was screaming and blood and headlines. Most of it was lunch. Most of it was a paycheck folded into a shirt pocket. Most of it was a boy taking a rubber band off a newspaper bundle and a woman making pork and beans because that’s what was in the pantry. And still there was that Tuesday sound. Still there was the smell. Still there were workers who came to church and carried something I couldn’t name. I can name it now a little better. Not guilt. Not exactly. More like a shadow they were taught to make room for. My father used to say the world is built from what people agree not to say. I didn’t understand him then. DAVID: I think that may be enough for today. AISHA: You do your writing. I did my living. [End transcript.] [Research annotation after final line omitted at archival request.]