…about the Chicago meatpacking industry? Quite apart from the apalling accusations (i.e. that rotten meat was being sold to consumers), the mistreatment of the workers was bad enough. The late Milton Friedman claimed the book was mostly propaganda-he couldn’t see why the meat industry would willingly poison its customers.
So, was lewis accurately reporting tjhings, or was this mostly socialist propaganda?
It’s hard for me to belive that meat companies would get away with this sort of thing for long-people would stop buying the products.
Sinclair Lewis would have lied if he had even claimed to have written The Jungle at all.
That was Upton Sinclair.
Apparently there are many folks who feel it’s not in great shape even today:
And the tobacco industry?
It is possible to market an unsafe product without destroying your customer base – just so long as it is not so unsafe as to kill every consumer immediately. And it is often highly profitable – more so than producing a safer product at higher production costs.
Look, if you’re a working-class American of that period, and you like sausage, and you have a choice between an industrially produced sausage that might have rat feces in it and a sausage made by a trusted local butcher that costs a lot more . . . well, do the math. And remember, the latter might not even be an option where you live.
We have “organic” foods available as an option in supermarkets nowadays, but only a minority of the customers buy them.
You are right! :o
I often get them confused too. (Based on what I read in It Can’t Happen Here, BTW, Lewis had very little respect for Sinclair, who plays a minor and not admirable role in the story as a political dupe of the Corpos – and who is the only real person I can recall being used as a character in the book.)
He would have been in a position to form an opinion.
Lewis lived for some time at Sinclair’s socialist commune, where he worked as a janitor. Perhaps what he saw firsthand he didn’t like much.
FDR, Fr. Coughlin, Huey Long, Landon, I think. They may not have had as big a role as Sinclair, but the book built on the U.S. society of 1935, employing several real persons.
Sinclair wrote The Jungle to highlight the latter, but made the mistake of including five or six pages about the former. His readers fixated on those five or six pages, since middle and upper-class readers could relate to being poisoned more easily than they could relate to immigrant labor problems.
That’s exactly right. At the time, cheap factory-produced meat for urban laborers was a new and wonderful thing. In earlier times, lower- and middle-class urbanites didn’t have nearly as much meat in their diets. If the meat contained rat dung, well, that’s what immune systems were for, and it was better than eating bread and corn meal all the time.
Jack in the Box sold contaminated meat and killed a few customers. Fast food burgers are alive and well. Jack in the Box is still in business.In my area a mexican restaurant killed several customers. They changed their name and business goes on. Short term risks to get profits are worth the risk.
Food inspection should be increased. The FDA has been gutted.
Probably because organic foods are no healthier than conventional foods.
What happened at Jack in the Box wasn’t even close to what was described in The Jungle. The Jack in the Box incident was accidental undercooking of hamburgers. They did not set out to undercook them on purpose as part of a diabolical plot to poison consumers as you seem to think.
Cite, please.
As to the OP, I have read in places that there was no evidence to support Sinclair’s contention about food contamination. Does anyone know of any place that discusses the meat packing industry at the turn of the century that could either prove or disprove Sinclair’s portrait?
You do realize the one has no bearing on the other, don’t you. Nearly all actual food inspection is performed by the Department of Agriculture and by state and local authorities.
The FDA is much more of a policy body.
My grandparents and great grandparents worked in the meat packing houses of St. Paul. My father was young, but has heard the stories. When I read The Jungle he thought it was pretty true to the stories his grandfather had told him. It was HARSH work with few quality controls. But its been years since I read The Jungle.
I believe the meat industry’s unsanitary practices were not widely known to the general public – until Sinclair published The Jungle. And then and only then came consumer reaction and government action. So the argument that “he must have been a liar because what he described was too horrible to be tolerated” really doesn’t fly.
It is really not that hard for industries to keep dirty secrets when there are no muckraking journalists nor government inspectors around.
See “Food manufacture in modern China.”
All of which pokes gaping holes in conservative/libertarian theory. Companies don’t lose any business over subtle infractions, only major errors. People just don’t care enough.
I hope he was misquoted. That has to be one of the silliest logical extrapolations I have read–certainly the stupidest attributed to Friedman.
I’d like to see some solid evidence that Sinclair made up his claims about unsafe meatpacking industry practices.
At about the same time there were vast quantities of patent medicines sold to the public, most of them ineffective, others addictive and some toxic. Would the patent medicine industry set out to “poison” its customers?
All it apparently took was a reckless intent to make money without caring too much about marginal practices, without any fear of government intervention.
It’s my (somewhat dim) recollection that the Pure Food and Drug Act (of 1904?) was passed not just because of Sinclair’s revelations but due to indications of shady and unsafe doings in a number of industries.
And by the way, it wasn’t just rat feces and garbage that supposedly ended up in food products made in Chicago. There was the unsettling idea that the occasional unwary worker tumbling into a vat wound up on the market as Pure Leaf Lard. :eek:
I also recall a passage from The Jungle (quoted in the standard high-school American history text, The American Pageant) that they tried to control the rats by setting out poisoned bread for them – and when they found dead rats in the morning, the rats and the bread went into the sausage hoppers.
I hope the OP is right to extent that Sinclair made up that bit, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true.
I’d rather have human flesh in my sausage than rat poison.
(Well, actually, I’d rather have human flesh in my sausage, period, but that discussion belongs in CS or IMHO. )
Ah…Not all of us like our beef cooked completely into oblivion and some of us have even been known to eat it raw on occasion. (Try “gored gored” [better picture here] in an Ethiopian restaurant sometime…Very yummy!!!) I think the underlying problem was that the meat was contaminated. Cooking it into oblivion might have destroyed the contamination but its hardly the only solution to the problem…and not one that all of us are keen on.
And, having not read The Jungle, I can’t say for sure, but I imagine the problem there wasn’t a diabolical plot to poison consumers either. It was simply that the pressure to produce the product rapidly at the lowest possible price overwhelmed the pressure to make sure the product is healthy and uncontaminated.