Many people do not realize the negative effects that fast food chains and industries can have on the environment. The environment has been negatively affected from the early industries of the 1900s to the fast food chains of today. Some of these negative effects can be seen in our everyday lives and in novels like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. The early effects that meat packing factories had on the environment can be found in The Jungle, a novel set in the early 1900s about the hardships in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. In The Jungle, Sinclair talks about the billowing smoke from the factories and the stench of rotting flesh that pollutes the Packingtown air (Sinclair, 1906). All the factories used the most efficient fuel source of that time, coal. Coal forms soot when burned which pollutes the air and is a strong contributor to global warming (Benzkofer, 2015). Soot can also cause diseases and health problems when breathed in. The Jungle illustrates how easily workers and civilians got sick from unsanitary working conditions, and also from breathing in the heavily polluted or “dirty air” (Sinclair, 1906). On January 29, 1892, Chicago news articles talk about the soot and smoke being so heavy polluted in the Chicago air that the soot and smoke even blocked out the light from the sun (Benzkofer, 2015). Many people who visited Chicago were disgusted by how dirty the city was (Benzkofer, 2015). Some newspaper reports even tell of