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Corn In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

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In 1906, renowned author Upton Sinclair released his book titled The Jungle. The plot of this book is quite simple as it follows the life of Jurgis Rudkus, a recent immigrant to America. Seeking to start a life with his new family, Jurgis heads to the stockyards and, through some difficulty, procures a job working at a slaughterhouse owned by the beef trust, a major superpower, driven by the production of meat. Through Rudkus, Sinclair powerfully shows the awful realities behind the quality of life for these workers and the damaging effects of adulterated products. The Jungle also serves as a reference to contrast the past to the present and see how far society has progressed. Throughout the years, unions have fought for worker’s rights, increased pay, and safe working conditions. After years of struggling …show more content…

Corn has progressed by large amounts in a short period of time. Less than a hundred years ago, one acre could only produce around 20 bushels of corn. Because of incredible advancements, one acre can now easily produce over 200 bushels of corn (foodinc). In simpler terms, that is over 14.000 lbs. of corn (Huffstetler, 2017). Moreover, corn has been found to be an extremely versatile victual. Michael Pollan (2008) even stated: Corn is the great raw material. You get that big fat kernel of starch and you can break that down and reassemble it. You can make high-fructose corn syrup. You can make maltodextrin and diglycerides and xanthan gum and ascorbic acid. All those obscure ingredients on the processed food-- it 's remarkable how many of them can be made from corn. Plus, you can feed it to animals…. The fact that we had so much cheap corn really allowed us to drive down the price of meat…. the average American is eating over 200 lbs of meat per person per year. That wouldn 't be possible had we not fed them this diet of cheap grain.

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