Render under somebody else

Yesterday I had to go into a rendering plant. Let me tell you, if anything could make me vegan, it would be a trip to a rendering plant.

For those of you who don't know, rendering is the process through which animal by-products, the stuff which doesn't go into our meats (or at least isn't supposed to), are made into useful products such as greases and bone meals. This means they get all the bones, honed out carcasses, and entrails left over from the butchering process. Can I get a great big eee-yuck from everybody out there?

And that's as close as I will come to a description of the process, because it gets worse. You do not care to see what I saw yesterday. Truly. And rendering plants smell awful, as you might expect. As an added measure of enjoyment, it feels as though grease is just hanging in the air all around you. You feel slimy when you leave. I felt as though I were still smelling rendered whatever all the way home. It was a 200 mile trip by the way. I could not shower quickly enough when I got home, nor get fast enough what I wore directly into the washer. With an extra rinse.

Some political wag somewhere opined that you do not want to see how laws or sausages are made. I would emphatically add that you do not want to see the rendering process either. Like I said, it could almost make me vegan. I had to make myself eat a Big Mac for lunch just to get over it.