The Food Chain's Weakest Link: Slaughterhouses
食品链最薄弱的环节——屠宰场
The modern American slaughterhouse is a very different place from the one that Upton Sinclair depicted in his early-20th-century novel, "The Jungle."
depict 描绘
jungle 丛林
Many are giant, sleek refrigerated assembly lines, staffed mostly by unionized workers who slice, debone and "gut snatch" hog and beef carcasses, under constant oversight of government inspectors.
giant 巨大
sleek 光滑
assembly 装配
staffed 雇用工作人员
unionized 加入工会
debone 将……去骨
gut snatch 去内脏
hog 猪
carcass （除脏去头备食用的）畜体
oversight 监管
inspector 检查员
The jobs are often grueling and sometimes dangerous, but pork and beef producers boast about having some of the most heavily sanitized work spaces of any industry.
grueling 使人精疲力尽的；艰辛的
boast about ... 吹嘘......
sanitize 消毒
Yet meat plants, honed over decades for maximum efficiency and profit, have become major "hot spots" for the coronavirus pandemic, with some reporting widespread illnesses among their workers.
honed 磨练
maximum efficiency and profit 最大效率和利润
widespread 普遍的，广泛的；分布广的
The health crisis has revealed how these plants are becoming the weakest link in the nation's food supply chain, posing a serious challenge to meat production.
crisis 危机
reveale 透露
After decades of consolidation, there are about 800 federally inspected slaughterhouses in the United States, processing billions of pounds of meat for food stores each year.
consolidation 巩固；合并；团结
federally inspected 联邦监督之下的
But a relatively small number of them account for the vast majority of production.
In the cattle industry, a little more than 50 plants are responsible for as much as 98 percent of slaughtering and processing in the United States, according to Cassandra Fish, a beef analyst.
slaughter 屠宰
analyst 分析师
Shutting down one plant, even for a few weeks, is like closing an airport hub.
airport hub 航空枢纽
It backs up hog and beef production across the country, crushes prices paid to farmers and eventually leads to months of meat shortages.
back up 倒退
meat shortage 肉类短缺
"Slaughterhouses are a critical bottleneck in the system," said Julie Niederhoff, an associate professor of supply chain management at Syracuse University.
critical 决定性的
bottleneck 瓶颈
associate 副教授
"When they go down, we are in trouble."
The ripple effects of the virus are now being felt across the entire meat supply chain, all the way to grocery store freezers.
ripple effects 连锁反应
More than a dozen beef, pork and chicken processing plants have closed or are running at greatly reduced speeds because of the pandemic.
reduced 缩减的
This past week, the number of cattle slaughtered dropped nearly 22 percent from the same period a year ago, while hog slaughter was down 6 percent, according to the Department of Agriculture.
Agriculture 农业；农耕
