Fat washing involved three primary duties. The first, of course, was to wash the fat, and that came from the stomach lining inside the gut. The guys on the gut conveyor would eviscerate the cows, after which the fat puller would heave and ho with it until the great sheets were separated from the stomach and could be hoisted up into a trough suspended above the line. This was all done while the line moved at a steady pace, which I'm sure seemed much too fast for the incredible amount of labor involved.
A faucet was installed above the trough to help flush the fat in my direction until it plopped out onto a wide, flat stainless steel table. It was then my job to use a spray nozzle to clean it of hair and other contaminants. Once satisfactorily cleaned, it was fed into a hopper with an auger at the bottom that drove the fat into a four-inch steam pipe that melted and transported it into waiting tanker trucks about a quarter of a mile on the other side of the plant. All a fascinating business.
The second of my duties involved washing tendons. There was a girl further up the line whose job it was to remove the tendons from the forelegs of the hanging beeves. Every once in a while, before they were full, I'd go to her position to retrieve the stainless steel with the tendons, and give her empty ones as replacements. Then I'd carry the full buckets to a separate room near the fat table that had two high-pressure nozzles pointing downwards. The buckets with the tendons would be hung onto the fixtures so that the water would jet into the product, removing excess blood, hair, etc. Once satisfactorily clean, I would remove them and box the tendons at 40 pounds each. I thought this was an interesting process as it was, but the fascination was taken to a new level upon learning that these tendons were sent all the way to China for consumption! (This was when the world was a larger place, and China seemed a faraway, inaccessible and exotic location.)
Lastly, my third duty turned out to be, in my opinion, the most important of all. Someone on the gut table had the job of removing the pancreas from the viscera of each cow and placing it into a plastic bucket (because it was not consumed as a food, it didn't have to be made of stainless). Every so often this bucket full of pancreases would be heaved my way, sliding on the floor until it reached a place where it could be retrieved. I then carried it into the nearby offal area where they had a very cold freezer, much colder than a home freezer, about 20 degrees below zero. In this freezer there were racks of plastic trays, onto which I would spread the pancreases out so they'd freeze faster. This was before synthetic insulin was widely available, and upon learning that these were used to make life-saving medicine for diabetics the job took on, in my mind, a heightened level of importance.
Of course the second and third duties had to be accomplished while the fat table was filling up, and a bit of time management had to be exercised to get it all done without a mishap. I worked on that until there was actually a bit of free time now and then. In fact, I got so good at it that my coworkers in places such as the head line, skinning lines, gut table and blood pit got used to my presence, peering into what they were doing and asking pesky questions. I was there to learn all that I could, and enjoyed every minute of it. A couple of times I even managed to make it all the way through cold storage and into the side of the plant where they cut the sides into steaks! It's a wonder that they didn't say something, but as long as I kept up with the job I could pretty much do what I wanted and go where I pleased.
The fact that I was actually interested in all this and loved the job earned me the nickname "Mr. IBP". Didn't mind that a bit, until singing at the top of my lungs earned me the scorn of a few of my fellow workers.
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