ted conover, give us a sense of the scale of the plans.ou mentioned how many head of cattle can come in. who owns these plants, more generally, and where are they in the country? guest: sure, so most of the nation's beef plants are in that part of the midwest where there are cattle. northern nebraska, texas, out there, and the companies are names you're familiar with. cargill is one of them. tyson, you know, they're big corporations mostly, and there's also some smaller players as well, like kosher meat plants in hastings, nebraska, there's one of those. so this happens on various scales, but usually they're giant, multinational corporations that run these plants. the industry shifted from major cities like chicago to smaller american towns in the middle of the last century. i think largely due to the rise of highways and truck transportation, which was able to move cattle in the ways trains had before. you didn't need the rail heads in chicago to get the cattle there. you could use trucks to get them anywhere. so there's towns like skylar

ted conover come to talk about conversations that go on. the usda employees do perceive this divide. one of your colleagues said she was bothered by the fact urban consumers could influence the whole economy by hopping on some politically correct bandwagon in terms of labeling. as they go to the store. >> guest: the pink slime that was a phrase used by usda scientists to describe made from parts of the cow that could almost debatably be called me. things you would not think of as me can be made to look like me. in the sky plus the city is served in school lunches, people in nebraska suffered because jobs disappeared. the demand for so-called pink slime. there are other official names for that product. the dementia drastically in people, my supervising veterinarian lost their jobs and he was angry about that. he said this is one of the cleanest things that come out because it is subjected to a known you and all these other things. in his opinion, baseless hysteria try and gain over reason in regards to what we put in our bodies for food. do

today, hot talk with sharon carpenter, adam conover and ali fedotowsky.e latest juicy "hot topics." now, here's wendy! [ cheers and applause ]

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and as part of our spotlight on magazine series, we will discuss ted conover's discussion on the meat industry. "washington journal" is next. >> good morning and welcome to ""washington journal," as wednesday, the first day of may, 2013. president obama marked the of 100 day of his second term where he fielded questions on topics from syria to guantanamo bay to the health care law. we want to hear what you think of his second term so far. the numbers to call are on your screen.

he had gone through infantry training, conover as a platoon leader in iraq and within the first week that he was there, he had a couple of men in his platoon killed by an ied and he was there. he helped pick up the pieces, literally, of these two men. and he was haunted by the. and he said, every morning i wake up and i think i've got to forget this, i've got to get out of my mind but i do not want to wake up every more and the rest of my life remember this but that's a merely followed by the recognitions that no, everyone for the rest of my life i have to remember this. they were my young men. i cared about them deeply. i had a responsibility to make sure they're not forgotten. if i forget them others will forget them so i've got to remember. that's a burden to carry for a long, long time. and i suspect he won't. >> can i just offer, let me offer what i hope will be a very short story, everyone hopes will be a very short story. for the cadets in the audience here. because i faced the problem there, i didn't go to get no more. what i had to do was a ride anywhere but else had been to

host: ted conover, a job as a usda inspector at the nebraska slaughterhouse.at least one federal program one was able to beat it. the sequester was supposed to be a budget cut you could not beat. three weeks in the agricultural department food inspectors were part of a spending bill the president signed to get out of the sequester. the program got $55 million in new money. the sequester was supposed to take that away. looking more at the question of inspection, he writes the usda is responsible for overseeing the slaughter house operations, employing 7500 inspectors throughout the country. and the food and drug administration is responsible for most other areas. fresh produce. let's talk about the u.s. favors is the fda. here is the budget request for fiscal year 2011. over $22 billion. there is the breakdown for money for federal food safety inspection and inspection at the state level, and also at the international level. how does this differ from the -- the fda. guest: in the simplest terms the usda monitors the killing of animals. the fda monitors seafood,

syria. .hen john walsh of salon.com as part of our spotlight on magazine series, ted, never -- ted conoverwill discuss his article on the u.s. meat industry. we will also accept your phone calls, e-mails, and tweets. >> behind us is this theater. that is the place where our group of friends come together and go in and study decisions that george made on the financial crisis on the surge in and, katrina, afghanistan, to get the information he was given at the time. decide? you going to whether you going to do? it just reinforced the decision and chose people -- shows people. the information he had at the time, what he -- why he chose what he did, and put people in his shoes to see if that is what they would have done if they were president. this is an idea of what it is like to be president and to have those world decisions to make. come withcisions that being the president of united states. nearly every big problem does come to the desk of the president of the united states. >> joy -- joined former first lady or a brush -- laura bush. >> president obama held a news conference on tuesday an