The cover of Harper’s May issue was ominous: “The way of All Flesh: Undercover in an Industrial Slaughterhouse” splashed across an artist’s rendering of hanging beef carcasses.

The author was intimidating: Ted Conover has made a career out of taking unusual jobs temporarily, then writing eye-witness accounts of such topics as illegal immigration and the job of a prison guard — the latter winning him the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.

The result was: A bit of a yawn.

Although Conover makes great efforts to describe the more graphic aspects of meat production in ghoulish ways, the result is a bit anticlimactic. Spoiler alert: the cattle die in the end.

He gets a few things wrong. It doesn’t cost $10,000 a minute to shut down the production line he was working on. Cattle sometimes urinate because they drink water, not necessarily because they are scared.

He also manages to work in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” – but not in reference to anything happening at the plant, rather for its role in the start of federal inspection in meat plants. He works in “pink slime” but doesn’t seem to understand that Cargill doesn’t treat its finely textured beef with ammonium hydroxide. And he has to reach back to the 1970s and 1980s to talk about labor unrest at the plant.

He does suggest that antibiotics use in live cattle causes cattle liver abscesses. Experts say the opposite, but nevertheless, his words may fuel the general antibiotics use debate.

And his decision to not eat hamburger in the future may appear misguided to some, but is an opinion he is entitled to.

He tries hard to make something of ethnic and gender tensions at the plant. He manages to catch a couple of workers telling off color jokes and even exposes a girlie picture or two inside workers’ lockers.

What he doesn’t seem able to find is evidence of animal cruelty or mismanagement on either the Cargill or the government side of the operation.

If there is one take-away for the industry (something most of you already know) it is that the basic distrust of big business and big agriculture is alive and well. He admits he went into this project expecting to be unable to eat meat after what he expected to see.

I asked him this weekend how his views had changed after two months in the Cargill plant. He said, “The plant where I worked was more efficient than I expected, more modern, better lit, and its machinery more ingenious than I would have guessed. Most college-educated Americans carry images from Sinclair's The Jungle in their minds; this wasn't like that at all.”

For the most part, this is the story of a middle-aged man learning a difficult skill and a physically challenging job with the help of friendly and often caring colleagues who take their jobs seriously and still manage to maintain a sense of humor. It’s also the story of an educated New Yorker experiencing small town life and the results of sometimes-grueling blue-collar workdays.

One might question whether it was the best use of taxpayer dollars and FSIS employees’ time to educate an inspector who had no intention of sticking around, but one can hardly blame them for being duped. An FSIS spokeswoman declined to comment on the story.

In the end, Conover is not converted to veganism. In fact, he dines on a delicious ribeye with a fellow inspector, even writing, “It is hard to describe how good that steak was.”

So, as unhappy as industry participants might be with his tactics or his prose, chin up, folks. After 2 months of spying and 18 pages of text, there really wasn’t that much to see.

No news is good news

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