Upton Sinclair

Nicolette Ricciuti

Conditions of Food Industry Establishments

Food industries would sell “spoiled, rotten, and unsanitary meats” (Abigail Philip) to consumers.

The industry inspectors were paid to “turn a blind eye” (Philip) to unsanitary and below standard conditions.

People who consumed these products often became sick, and some even died from them!

Workers were made to move too fast, always on the point of exhaustion, which led to an unsafe environment, where it was easy to slip and become injured (like losing a finger to machinery).

Upton Sinclair

Author during the 20th century He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 One of his most famous works was

The Jungle which he wrote in 1906 Was meant to expose to terrible

work conditions of workers of the 1900's

The Jungle In the final weeks before publishing Sinclair

worked undercover in meatpacking plants for his expose.

Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expound on the terrible working conditions of his time.

He was, in essence, a muckraker. (Someone who exposes the bad things in society.) In society, many muckrakers were journalists.

Underlying themes in The Jungle Sinclair exposed things like wage slavery (not

paying workers enough money for the amount of time they worked), which kept people in poverty (unable to pay the cost of basic needs).

Sinclair exposed the atrocities of the meat-packing industry and it's corruption.

Quotes from The Jungle “Any day, however, one might see sharp-honed and

shaggy haired creatures running with sheep- and yet what a job you would have, to get the public to believe that a good part of what it buys for lamb and mutton is really goats flesh!” (90)”

How products were never really what they said they were

More Quotes from The Jungle “Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be

found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the plant--a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them.”

Talking about pumping meat with whatever chemicals they chose, and the unsanitary conditions of the factories.

Publishing The Jungle - Roosevelt

Roosevelt suspicious of Sinclair's socialist attitude (being against capitalism and considering it unfair)

To tried to disprove Sinclair by telling the meat-packing industries when inspectors were supposed to be coming to make surprise visits

Afterward, concerned about western stock growers, Roosevelt refused to publish the inspector's reports

Stood up for People

After the public was finally exposed to The Jungle, and other works of it's kind pressured the government, along with the decline in consumer confidence...

This led to the passing of The Meat Inspection Act – all slaughtered animals

were inspected before consumption Pure Food & Drug Act of 1906 - “forbade the

manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated food products and poisonous medicines”

Food and Drug Administration – government regulation of food, tobacco, and dietary products