Meat Packing Packing Industry Essay - 1,033 words

... ch men labored on slippery floors processing the meat. Open vats laid upon the level of the floor, the peculiar trouble of these workers was they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting. Sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Andersons Pure Leaf Lard (Cook 112)! To insure that the meatpacking plants would stay open the owners would do just about anything. Any inspector who tried to interfere with the system did not last long.


Government inspectors were afraid for their life, so they would lie and pass the meat off as okay for public consumption. Owners paid up to two thousand dollars a week hush money from the tubercular steers alone. Also, the same with hogs which died of cholera on the trains, and which you might see them being loaded into box cars and hauled away to a place called Globe, in Indiana, where they made a fancy lard. Meat would also be covered up so that they would pass inspection and be able to be sold in the city. To cover it up the workers would put chemicals in it so that it would cover up the smell or even to turn the meat color to its original color if it had been moldy or old. The Jungle had a wide variety of influences on just about everybody who read the novel.


Sinclair's descriptions of the meat made people stare with horror at the corned beef on their dinner tables and promptly write to their congressmen (Fischer 1). Long before Sinclair's novel, a good many voters had suspected something was wrong in the Packing Industry, because hundreds of soldiers had gotten sick on embalmed beef during the Spanish-American War. Disease had swept the ranks; death rates had soared. It was later reported, with no exaggeration, that more American fighting men had been killed off by the meat packers than by Spanish bullets (Cook 115). The novel appeared for sale on February 16, 1905. Having investigated the Chicago packinghouses, Sinclair hoped to arouse sympathy for the conditions of the workers and promote the cause of socialism, but in the process he also included graphic description of the filth and poisons that was put into canned meats.


Sinclair was disappointed that the public read The Jungle as an appeal for food legislation, he later stated, I aimed at the publics heart and by accident I hit their stomach (2). Readers didnt care about the political philosophy imbedded in his message, what got them was the revolting details about the meat they were eating. After the release of The Jungle, a parody on a familiar childhood rhyme appeared in the press. It read: And now its labeled chicken (Cook 116). The novel was a best seller and led, partly because President Theodore Roosevelt reacted to it by setting in motion a government investigation, to federal meat inspection and the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act. Roosevelt read the book.


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Essay Tags: gale group, packing industry, meat packing, pure food, american heritage

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