Having worked at a rendering plant for a couple of weeks during my (late) teenage years as an industrial temp worker, well, I can tell you what comes out of those places beats just about anything imaginable. Manure pits? Slaughterhouses? Way too fresh, my friends, to get anywhere near the full experience we endured. Think slow-cooked rot--and we were the ones on cleanup duty picking up bones and other ephemera left behind.
A friend and I spent an entire summer working jobs nobody in our (typically) white, middle-class peer group would dare even consider to touch in order to understand for ourselves just how important and respectful these roles were in our daily lives. And boy, let me tell you, it was an amazing and formative experience; I wouldn't trade those experiences for the world. It was "Dirty Jobs" 10 years before the show came out, and in more than a couple of cases, likely illegal given our age versus risk at the time.
Here's a good taste of what one could expect, and it really was amazingly terrible prior to the stench becoming peripheral from exposure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_%28animals%29
A friend and I spent an entire summer working jobs nobody in our (typically) white, middle-class peer group would dare even consider to touch in order to understand for ourselves just how important and respectful these roles were in our daily lives. And boy, let me tell you, it was an amazing and formative experience; I wouldn't trade those experiences for the world. It was "Dirty Jobs" 10 years before the show came out, and in more than a couple of cases, likely illegal given our age versus risk at the time.