Bookmark Project - New Taipei Flower (flowers and blooms) / The Gut Table

My gosh, flowers and blooms.  Where do I start?  As of this writing I've created seventy bookmarks featuring flowers and blooms.  Guess I'll post a couple of the more popular ones...

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[continued from yesterday's post; series started 10/20]

The fourth and last job I did at IBP was during the summer and fall of 1981.  At the end of the gut table, once the parts intended for human consumption were taken out for processing, the leftovers were carried by the conveyor to be dumped into the basement below.  Just before that, however, as the last job on the gut table, I was stationed to do two jobs.

One of those jobs was to use my knife to cut the trachea from the lungs.  Don't know what they did with those things, but it was my job to separate them before the churning conveyor conveyed them over the edge into the basement.

The other part of that job was much more interesting.  The gall bladders came my way either by themselves (if the liver was good enough to use for human consumption and taken off the line to be skinned) or attached to the liver (if it was diseased and/or otherwise deemed not fit for human consumption).  Either way, I would grab it at the proximal end and slice it open, allowing the bile to drain into a 55-gallon plastic barrel.  Naturally I was curious as to why they saved the stuff, and was told that it was sold to the perfume industry!  What?  Sure enough, I stuck my head in the barrel and took a good sniff, discovering that it actually smells pretty good!  They used the gall from cow guts, drained by a college kid on the kill floor of a slaughterhouse, so that people could smell better...