Summary Of The Jungle By Upton Sinclair

570 Words3 Pages

Meat was the first food that triggered food-related federal laws. In the early 1900s there was a steep rise in the price of food, especially meat. Many people blamed the National Packing Co., which was created by the three major meat packing companies. Their monopoly allowed them the ability to control prices on the market with little competition. At this time, Adolph Smith wrote a series that detailed the unsanitary conditions in the Chicago meat packing plants in the medical journal The Lancet. Adolph Smith met with Upton Sinclair and further complained about the meat industry’s unsanitary conditions. Upton Sinclair had a deeper concern about the immigrant laborers of the meat packing industry. In 1906 he wrote The Jungle, a fictional account of the poor treatment of immigrant …show more content…

The Jungle had very strong imagery and was designed to get the public’s sympathy towards these workers. Instead the people became disgusted at the sanitation of the meat packing industry and appalled about how their food was processed. Upton Sinclair said: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Sinclair identified that the meat packing industry created a significant amount of true risk. The poor sanitation conditions increased the probability that people would get sick. It also affected everybody who ate meat, since the meat packing industry was monopolized. The perceived risk was very high after the release of The Jungle, since the outrage was so high. The biggest outrage factor was the fact that it was memorable. The extremely descriptive language that Sinclair uses in the book creates strong and powerful images in the minds of people that become very memorable. For example he wrote: “They use everything about the hog but the squeal.” This created a horrifying picture in the minds of people and made many of them sick to their