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Babineaux’s Slaughter House & Meat Market C. Hebert's Slaughter House & Meat Market Coleman's Sausage & Specialty Meats Eunice Superette & Slaughterhouse |
RICKY LEBLANC “Earlier in my career you saw a lot of stores making their own boudin. They were little mom-and-pop places and they possibly illegally saved blood when someone killed an animal, and they put it in their red boudin…[Today,] each slaughterhouse that is state inspected can choose to save blood under the inspection, but they have to go by the guidelines of saving it correctly.” – Ricky LeBlanc Ricky LeBlanc stumbled onto meat inspection early in life as a way to support a family while also pursuing his passion, horse training. While he doesn’t come from a long line of meat inspectors, his job covers some familiar ground: growing up, his family raised its own livestock to eat from; they even made their own boudin. As the decades progressed, Louisiana’s meat processing industry changed, and along with it Ricky’s job. When he first began inspecting in 1976, there were several custom meat processing plants in the New Iberia area where he grew up and still lives. Now, there are none. This means that he must drive longer distances between inspections and log more hours. Mom-and-pop boudin producers (his favorite inspection stops) are also fewer and farther between than ever before. The fault, says Ricky, is partly his own: increasingly stricter inspection codes create hardships for small operations, and many of them do not survive. Still, there remain a few old-fashioned, family-run slaughterhouses. Ricky accompanied us on a visit to one of them, C. Hebert’s in Abbeville, where part of his job is to oversee the collection of blood for making blood boudin, or boudin rouge. NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here. Subject: Ricky LeBlanc ----- Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Monday, June 16, 2008, in New Iberia, Louisiana, nd I’m here with Mr. Ricky LeBlanc. If I could get you to say your name correctly and your birth date and tell me what your profession is? Full name is Richard LeBlanc, born March 20, 1953—as a meat inspector, Specialist Three for thirty-three years. And what does that mean? ----- Can you tell me a little bit about how you got into your line of work? Back in [nineteen]’76 I was looking for a job that I could train my horses also. And a friend of mine was a meat inspector and a bus driver. And it got to where it was too hectic for him to bus drive and to be a meat inspector because his plant hours in New Iberia were from 6:00 in the morning until 2:00 in the evening. So I said, “Well, that would be great for me, and I’d have time in the evening to work my horses.” And that’s where it all started. And then as time changed, I had to change my living to the way meat inspection would change, and through the years New Iberia lost all the processing and the slaughterhouses they had; and I had to change to working in Lafayette and area plants within our district, and so I had to actually change my hours of work to meet meat inspection. So when you started out in ’76 were you only working in New Iberia? Were there that many slaughterhouses? We had New Iberia Slaughterhouse in New Iberia; we had Bodin’s Boudin, which chose to change from State inspection to Federal inspection when they moved over to the airbase in New Iberia. The New Iberia Slaughterhouse finally closed down in [Sighs] in—I’m going to say right around 2000 they gave up their inspection. So can a slaughterhouse—you have a choice whether you want a State or a Federal Inspector? First of all, you have different types of inspections. You have where you can have custom slaughter, which is each individual going knowing what animals they have; bringing them to that slaughterhouse; and coming to pick up their process meat—which is called custom slaughter. You have inspection slaughter, where an animal can be bought by the actual establishment, processed—killed and slaughtered, processed—and an individual can buy any type of parts—it can be halves, quarters, parts, and the meat was inspected. And that’s your types of inspection. And what’s the difference between being inspected by a State Inspector and a Federal Inspector? We have all the same guidelines. The State is half funded by the Federal Department, so we have to go by their guidelines, and the only difference you have between a State and Federal is Federal plants’ products can be used across state lines, where State product is processed and can be only sold within the State of Louisiana. ----- Tell me a little bit about how many slaughterhouses there are now in this area compared to when you like started. When I started, we had in—neighboring in this area we had probably three—two—one state-inspected plant that was inspected. We probably had three custom plants in the area where local people would bring their animals to process. And now there’s none in this area. The major ones that are left for inspection is Babineaux’s in Breaux Bridge, Kurt Martin’s in Carencro, Clement Hebert’s in Abbeville, and that’s probably your three larger ones that are left, and you possibly would have a couple of custom slaughterhouses in between here and there. So if you were somebody that raised a couple of hogs a year for your own consumption, you’d have to work at getting somebody to slaughter it for you? Yeah, you would have to bring it to these places, which is changed—another thing that has changed, like I would have some animals to kill here. A lot of these custom places would come in a vehicle, kill the animal, bleed them, load them up in a trailer, go to their place and slaughter them and butcher them. Inspection has changed that. All animals that are to be slaughtered—custom and inspection—are to be slaughtered live at the plants. When did that change? Must have been the last ten years that enforcement, you know, gradually got to where with all the testing that we have to do now of seeing the animal—anti-mortem, if he has any type of symptoms of Mad Cow Disease—any type of symptoms—while you can see in the live stage before the actual slaughtering stage. What does it mean for you to inspect? You have different stages. You have anti-mortem. You’re there to inspect the animal, see its movements forward, walking away, left, and right. You’re supposed to be seeing if it can walk correctly without any type of numbness, anything broken. You’re to check symptoms. If you think they have a fever, you’re to check their fever, and if anything is out of the ordinary, as an Inspector, you’re supposed to put it as a suspect. It will be held for twelve hours. In the meantime, you have a veterinarian on your side that you’re supposed to call, and then he’s supposed to come and make a physical examination of the animal, if it’s considered a suspect. If not, you move onto stage two and—and you go into the slaughtering part. And then you have other parts through the slaughter, as you have to make sure it’s killed in a humane situation. You’re to undress it in a formal matter to where you don’t take any outside dirt, bacteria, anything that’s supposed to be touching the actual meat. The meat is then quartered or—or halved or whatever way they want to put it into a cooling stage and in a manner that no bacteria can be touched, as E-Coli from itself or from any type of human-type hands not being washed or anything like that at all. It’s supposed to be inspected, and you have a final inspection—at-the-rail inspection—before it goes to the cooler and before it’s stamped. Once it’s stamped, it can be processed or sold whatever which way you have it in that manner. ----- So you said earlier that you’re also inspecting to make sure that the animal is killed in a humane way. What does that mean exactly? What would an inhumane way be? Like they used to do years ago, hit them in the head with a hammer. It was kind of a way to slaughter the animals but it was—ended up being inhumane because a lot of people would hit them, and they wouldn’t die…I consider an animal dead is when they bleed them. The stunning gun was a humane way. It was a blank pistol with a rod, hit into the brain that stunned it. When it fell on impact, it immediately bled—lifted and bled. That was the only—besides electric shock, which I didn’t think was all humane—but it was the humane way of killing animals. But some people use not just a stun gun, right, but an actual bullet? The actual .22 bullet or a largest shell-type can be used to kill an animal but you—because of the lead poisoning you don’t know here that lead went to—possibly in the cheek meat or anywhere. We have to sever the head and destroy the head after inspection, throw it away. So a lot of people don’t want to lose the cheek meat and the tongue and all of this good stuff on the head, so they use a stunning gun or the electric shock on the brain. ----- So why did you transition from the kind of inspecting you were doing in the beginning to processing? Really, it’s a step. The more you know, the more you can move up, and that was a move-up stage from slaughter to processing. That’s number one. Number two, losing the plants that we had in Iberia Parish on the slaughter, and I had to move on and to stay with meat inspection and move into Lafayette Parish, move into St. Mary Parish, move into Vermillion Parish—anywhere from Lake Charles to Morgan City to Baton Rouge. ----- So you would go all the way to Lake Charles? Yes. We’ve had two slaughterhouses in that area. We had Stroy’s—they have gone under since my inspections. You’ve had Leroy Istre that changed over to processing, and they’ve gone under in the processing part. You—there was another plant on Highway 13, they went under. That was completely slaughter. Then they opened up processing plants when a couple of these casinos opened up there, one a Cajun-type food and they opened up with a boudin and sausage plant in that area. That’s interesting that the casinos would—how do I want to say it—encourage local culture. Well what—I guess it was the supply and demand part, and people wanted to kind of put the Cajun image in there and then they had red beans and rice in their meal and it took smoked sausage to go into it, and when you’re using 10,000 pounds of smoked sausage, that will open up a plant real quick, you know, and that’s more or less what happened. So I met you first last summer, I guess, when I discovered the Babineauxs’ slaughterhouse and their boudin. You were there inspecting. Can you kind of take me through a typical day from that era of your career? In that case, there it’s a slaughter plant, and you are not to say, “Okay, I’m here for an hour.” You get there; you do an inspection of the plant; you do an inspection of the animals, and you’re asking him what he has to kill that day. You kill until your eight hours are up and, normally, they don’t kill past your eight hours. But if you do have any type of—any processing or any slaughter you—after eight hours, you have a breakdown. You have to stop, completely sanitize and wash everything—all your tools, all your—whatever contact surfaces you have and then start all over again, and that’s a control of any type of bacteria growth—situations like that. There’s no temperature control on the slaughter part, but nowadays, if you go on the slaughter floor, you’ll see them with an air-conditioner in the room, where when I started it was the only cooler you had was in the cooler with the meat, you know, and that was it. ----- I think it was the day that I met you at Babineaux’s—they were also making red boudin, blood boudin. Was that part of your job to inspect that? At Babineaux’s Slaughterhouse it’s inspection slaughter only. Whatever I inspect is to be stamped at the slaughter rail, and it goes into the cooler. I have control of the cooler where there’s inspection animals. He can have another part, which is custom, completely different than the inspection part, but he has to put not-for-sale on that animal. He has to identify that animal, who owns it. When you get into the retail part I have no guidelines that he can go by. So his boudin he makes, his cracklings that he makes, which is sold inside the plant only—his plant—are not inspected besides (by) the Board of Health. When he makes red boudin he is to tell the inspector that he is saving blood to make red boudin. We have guidelines that we have to go by on the process of saving the blood to where it’s not contaminated, to where it’s put in a stainless steel funnel, a stainless steel container and whatever which way he chose to, either by air or by adding salt, to stop it from clabbering. And then he saves it and he can use it in his red boudin. It’s not to resell as a blood type situation. He can use it only in his red boudin. I see. So you were there to inspect the procuring of the blood and the slaughter but not the making of the boudin? Correct. Correct…That when it comes into those doors into that little kitchen or the processing room in his plant, it’s retail. It’s on the Board of Health only. How common is that in this area for you to see people keeping blood to make boudin? There’s only that plant and Clement Herbert’s Slaughterhouse that actually are legal to save—well, that actually saves blood. Each slaughterhouse that is state inspected can choose to save blood under the inspection, but they have to go by the guidelines of saving it correctly. What about earlier in your career—did you see more of that? Earlier in my career you saw a lot of stores making their own boudin. They were little mom-and-pop places and they possibly illegally saved blood when someone killed an animal, and they put it in their red boudin. So you saw a lot more red boudin just being sold in general, like at little—? In the past, yes. Mom-and-pop places, they all had their own way of cooking their own boudin. And then it got to where they could buy boudin. In the ‘70s, in the ‘80s, a person that bought boudin from a place that processed boudin, it was like a three-day rotation. They made sure that if they sold thirty pounds in three days, they only sold them—brought them back thirty pounds. So the next three days they’d come back again; they wouldn’t bring fifty pounds of boudin if they only sold thirty; then they had to pick up twenty pounds—you know. It wasn’t good. And the life of boudin in the coolest stage was possibly three days, and that’s all they would let them keep it; otherwise, it would go bad on them and start getting tacky and start getting—your bacteria growth started. And places didn’t want it, so they’d have to get more and—and now processing plants have changed…They have learned a lot and you know it’s not only our guidelines that enforced them. It was—they were smart enough to say, “Okay, that saved my product from going bad.” Now they checked themselves, “Why is the bacteria growth going up?” They can troubleshoot. A store used to say, “Okay, I’ve got ten pounds of bad product. Come pick it up.” Well, there’s a lot code now that can back it up, and they can say, “I delivered 1,000-pounds that day, but ten pounds just at that store was bad.”…And we have tried to teach the actual places that are ready to eat to protect themselves. No use me going through all kinds of inspection, all kinds of protection, if this lady is going to sell the meat or the boudin and in a hot store and it’s out in the open, or if that boudin is there exposed for more than two hours. I mean bacteria is going to grow, you know. That’s where the gap is now. It used to be the consumer was going to get the product, and you had to do something with it once you got home. If you wasn’t going to cook it that day, you were going to have to freeze it, so you took care of that part. Now it’s in between the store to the consumer, and we have to worry about that part more than anything else, I say. So you’re talking about like…Babineaux’s, I think they only sell their boudin. But a bigger place would sell their boudin to a store who would then sell it—? Right. But that’s kind of what I’m trying to get at is if you notice, there’s no more places like Babineaux’s anymore. There is no new places that’s opening up on that part, and they’re a dying breed. When their plant closes down, I mean that puts the consumer going to the big guy and saying, Wal-Mart, places of—Winn Dixie or—that has to slaughter an animal that’s not even in your state and then brought down to the store. So be careful. I mean it has to be carefully taken care of. Why are those places dying out? Financial concerns? That’s a touchy, touchy situation for me to get on because I blame the guidelines coming in there being so strict. They have to worry about testing E-Coli, Salmonella, Phisteria, where before, these people didn’t have to worry about that. You have to worry about being large enough to keep up with the minimum wages of people that work on the bottom side. The larger plants just ate the smaller up, you know. ----- So over the years, you know, since you’ve been involved, the restrictions have gotten a lot tighter. Have you noticed a change in, speaking of boudin, in the taste of boudin—in the flavor? Yeah. [Laughs] The places that started making boudin, it would be people that used to make boudin in their backyards; they would save the pork chops, they would save the ham, they’d save the shoulder meat—all the trimmings would go in with the boudin, cooked in a big black pot and there’s something about a black pot that makes a good gravy. And then each individual would add their own seasoning, how they wanted it seasoned, and mix it with rice and stuff it and make hog casings. Well in those days the casing was taken from the hog that was killed, cleaned out, and that was the hog casing. Now you buy a hog casing from a plant, and it comes in a fifty-five-gallon plastic drum in a brine solution. That’s a cure, and that’s where a lot of people said, “Well, okay, I can eat boudin, and it’s ready to eat.” No. Boudin is cooked. The rice and the meat, it’s all cooked inside. But the actual casing needs to be heated to make it a ready-to-eat product. And that’s where the Federal Government doesn’t even recognize the word boudin. No. We had one of the first plants that went federal in this area, and when they sent in the actual label to say boudin, the federal people refused it. There is no such name registered as that, so you can name it boudin; but to protect the consumer, in quotations you have to put a pork and rice pudding product. And that kind of ticked off people around in this area that we don’t want it called a rice pudding product. That—that throws the imaginary mind that it’s in a pudding stage and it’s not. It’s—it’s—it’s a product that was made in this area, the way that people slaughtered and—and did in the old days. Is that still the case? Yes, the actual label still has to be that way, yeah. So did you have experience—? You know, I didn’t even ask you where you grew up. Where did you grow up? Here. I was born and raised in New Iberia—in Coteau. ----- So you grew up on a farm where you were killing your own animals?...And your family made boudin once in a while? Oh, yeah. Yeah, we—then custom slaughter places came up, and that was the place to bring them or have him come over and pick them up and kill them and then we—okay, well that advanced us. We didn’t have to kill them and actually go through the part of cleaning them or de-hairing them or things like that because it’s actually a job. What was your family’s boudin like? I’m going to say good. Nowadays boudin is made to meet every consumer anywhere, from a child to an older person, so you will get more less a bland-type boudin; you’ll get a boudin that has a lot of meat in it; it won't be greasy. Where when we made the boudin it was fresh; it was a little bit on the greasy side, which is not good for you, but it was tasty and it was a whole lot—whole lot better when we did it on our own, you know, and not have to make it on a bulk-type situation to please everybody. When y’all made it would you use the liver and other sort of offal products? Everything that we couldn’t put as considered as a roast or a steak or whatever went in, more less: the heart, the liver—the liver you had to watch it because it’s a little bit on the bitter side, so if you only came out with x-amount of trimmings, you only could put a portion of your liver in, you know what I mean. It depends how much trimmings you had on your animal. And in those cases nowadays, the actual hog that is killed and processed is normally from 225 to 275 on foot and that gives you a leaner pork chop, prettier pork chop, a sizeable ham. In the days that we would kill for custom slaughter and family-type situations, the animal might have weighed 400 pounds, so it was a—a larger animal, you know, and they fed it for longer and you had more pork chops, you had more—larger ham. You could make a ham into four pieces instead of just two, you know, because the ham was larger. You had more trimmings because the animal was larger and fatter. ----- Can you—without betraying anything about your profession—can you talk a little bit about the tension between guidelines and people and, you know, some of these people you knew for decades, I guess, and probably formed friendships, and was it, you know, difficult to enforce guidelines sometimes? Well, I’m a friendly type of person, but when you walked into the plant you had to take friendship and throw it away. You had to say, “Okay, when I’m looking at you, and you didn’t wash your hands, what did I have to do to correct when you didn’t wash your hands? I had to make you wash your hands. And did you touch anything to contaminate anything that was in the plant?” And that was my biggest thing because ninety-percent of the time it was a mom-and-pop-type situation, and it was a one-person thing, and that one person would leave the inspection area and come back and, you know, it was hard to enforce the rules that way. But finally we—we have gotten to where we showed the actual plant owner, this is what happens when you do that. It—contamination can be anything. You might not see it with your own eyes, and that was my hardest thing to change from the way we inspected at the beginning to the way we’re inspecting now. The way we inspect now, I don’t have to watch you do—all I have to do is sample it at the end. If it comes up bad at the end, you messed up something down the line, and it’s not me to tell you. Correct what you messed up down the line. You figure it out. And if it’s—if it’s you were making boudin and one burner did not completely cook everything in that product the same way this burner did, and this one stayed raw and you had some contamination in it and mixed it with the good one, well, you screwed up the whole batch. And you can taste that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I could taste—I had one plant that had a black pot and had a stainless steel pot and I could test—take the batch that was in that black pot—different than the one that was in the stainless steel. The black pot had a different taste to the gravy, and I could watch him; he would take the gravy from the black pot and mix it in the meat of the stainless steel because the gravy wouldn’t make in the stainless steel pot the way it would in that black pot. But that was—that was his little thing. You know, I mean you couldn’t stop him. You—it was—it was for the better of the boudin. So I didn’t realize that part of your job—big part of your job was tasting. [Laughs] Wow, you caught me in a trap again. Okay, the—the tasting part wasn’t a requirement. [Laughs] But after you look at it, you touch it, you smell it, and tasted it, it was good. ----- What do you enjoy most about your job? Two things: seeing a person that had pride in what they did and seeing a person that really enjoyed what they did. I took pride in return—that this person came back for this product time and time and time again. You knew it was good. Just like in this place we’re going to go to, I know of people that drove to get meat at this place in the raw stage from New Orleans. They passed by one day and they stopped, and they picked up some meat and they just—next month they came back. The next month they came back. You know, you don’t need to inspection that; that’s some quality product, and that’s how I’m—you know, I was—pride in people, you know, and—and anyway, they didn’t get rich making that product. They took pride in making it. Did you see that kind of pride in the larger plants? No. No, all you see is somebody in the office in front that’s looking at numbers, somebody in the back that’s processing that’s looking at numbers. No quality whatsoever. Hopefully we can find a way to keep the little places going. Yeah, mom-and-pop organizations, you wouldn’t believe—it’s the hardest thing—hardest thing. ----- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here. Home | Introduction | Map | Oral Histories | About & Contact
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