Summary Of The Jungle By Upton Sinclair

Millions of people each day go to the store and purchase meat, produce, and medicine, without worrying if it’s safe, or whether it may be contaminated with things like paint stripper or cocaine. Prior to 1906, there was no organization to monitor whether or not any food or drug contained what it said, let alone if it was safe to be consumed. Even though legislation wouldn’t come for many more years, research into food safety dates all the way back to 1862 when scientist Charles M. Wetherill, who worked for the Department of Agriculture, began testing samples of food for purity. Wetherill’s first project focused on the alcohol content in wine but later led to him and other scientists focusing on problems such as contaminated milk from cows with

One book, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, comprehensively exposed the horrors of meat packing plants. What he wrote was so startling, it caught the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. Sinclair detailed how diseased animal carcasses were mishandled in filthy factories, and the meat was often left lying around for days in vats contaminated with rat feces and poison. When they finally got around to packing the meat, it was treated with a plethora of chemicals, canned, and often mislabeled. After the public saw through Sinclair, how atrocious these slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants were, most started avoiding meat altogether. The public then proceeded to bombard the white house with an overwhelming amount of letters and phone calls, urging the government to put an end to what was happening in the industry, which prompted Roosevelt to read Sinclair’s book. After Roosevelt read the book, he appointed a commission to investigate the Chicago slaughterhouses. When the commission came back to Roosevelt to report their findings, they confirmed everything Sinclair had previously written about. By letter, Roosevelt urged congress to pass laws that would allow inspection from “hoof to can.” Roosevelt’s plea lead to the creation of the Meat Inspection Act, which allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to inspect meat and decide whether or not it was suitable for consumption. While Dr. Wiley and his team were happy to finally see a change, they weren’t satisfied with the amount of change. That further led to the creation of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which was signed into law on June 30th, 1906, at the same time as the Meat Inspection Act. The Pure Food and Drug Act finally called for proper labeling of drugs and food and banned misleading labels, and some dangerous additives. The Bureau of Chemistry was tasked with enforcing the laws of the Pure Food and Drug act, until 1927 when it became the