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Upton Sinclair And The Meat-Packing Industry

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“The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie” (Upton Sinclair).The revolutionary figure that will be addressed in this essay is the one and only Upton Sinclair. Through most of his life, starting from the age of 14, Sinclair was invested in voicing his opinions through fiction. He did this by taking a real-life issue and integrating it into the plot of his literature while a point of view in that literature is given to a fictional character representing something or someone related to the real-life issue. Although Upton Sinclair didn’t intend to, he improved the meat-packing industry’s cleanliness and ethics by revealing unethical practices and being …show more content…

The meat-packing industries carelessness towards their workers are physically endangering them daily. “Men who used knives on the sped-up assembly lines frequently lost fingers. Men who hauled 100-pound hunks of meat crippled their backs” (Constitutional Rights Foundation). The repetitive endangerment of these businesses’ workers highlight the industry’s unnatural greed and lack of empathy. The damages that are inflicted on their workers can be critical, life-changing or even lethal. The book provided more distressing news of terrible practices in this industry taught to the workers so that more meat can be distributed for profit. “He wrote that workers would process dead, injured, and diseased animals after regular hours when no meat inspectors were around” (Constitutional Rights Foundation). The industry provides more meat for their customers purely for profit. This causes the industry to be influenced to sell its meat, no matter the condition it is in. The disgusting context of the conditions America’s meat was put through was brought to light, thanks to “The Jungle” and the customers of these businesses were …show more content…

Upton Sinclair’s literature influenced people into getting help from the government. “The book's horrific description of conditions in the meatpacking industry led to a public outcry, and helped promote the passage of the Meat Inspection Act (1906) and the Food and Drugs Act (the Wiley Act) (1906)” (Badertscher). The outcry that occurred partially because of The Jungle influenced people to get the problem solved by the government. America’s rallying against the meat-packing industry had a gargantuan role in creating the Pure Food and Drug Act. A group that was knowledgeable of the effects certain chemicals have on food was appointed to regulating the standards of the meat-packing industry. “The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Division of Chemistry was charged with enforcing the Food and Drugs Act, which prohibited interstate commerce in foods, drinks, and drugs that were mislabeled or adulterated” (Badertscher). A chemistry affiliated group was put in charge of monitoring of the produced meat. The meatpacking industry was regulated and supervised constantly to ensure that any and all produce is acceptable for consumption. The meat-packing industry took a massive blow from the popularization of “The Jungle” and its revealing

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Innocent Belief Famously known for his novel, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair changed American life in the early 1900s without a doubt through his literature. However, many don’t realize that Sinclair reformed American life in more than one instance, through more than one book. At times, he even reached beyond his realm of literature to discuss other needed adjustments. Besides the serendipitous changes he created for the meat packaging industry, Sinclair’s other actions throughout his life are, subjectively, important to American history, according to Anthony Arthur. In his biography, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Arthur reveals his bias towards Sinclair, while supplying a relevant nature to his writing across an in-depth review of Sinclair’s

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When I first read Chapter Ten of “After the Fact”, by James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, I was shocked at the methods meat factories use in preparing their products. I was especially shocked seeing as now; we have so many food regulations that most people don’t think twice about the food that is going in their bodies. I am now thinking, do these things still appear in our lives today? It was nice to know that Theodore Roosevelt took action in an attempt to fix these major problems. He became aware of the poor conditions of the meat industry through the book “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair.

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The unsanitary factories were also home to rats, rat poisons, germs, dust, and dirt. The workers put contaminated meat into the meat choppers. Moldy and otherwise inedible meat was doused in chemicals and ground into sausages. When the public found out about these scandals, many were repulsed and demanded immediate government action. The government responded with the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

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Sinclair sheds light on how unsanitary the meat processing industry was, using words to paint a mental picture in the minds of the reader leaving them with a bad taste in their mouths. This story eventually led to the creation of the Pure Food and Drug Act after people went crazy reading what was described in the book. Although no specific facts were provided other than the contents in the book itself, it held true accounts of what the industry was like. Sinclair would speak of the rat poison being left close to the meat, or the use of the rotting meat to be sold. With this story people began to see the gruesome conditions by which their food was being handled.

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“- And while we are on the topic of horrible and unethical practices of the rich man taking advantage of the poor, lets discuss the conditions of the working man in the meat industry.” He continued to discuss the gruesome, shocking, and awful treatments that the men had to deal with on a daily, reading an excerpt from his article, “Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by

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Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle is a novel, which affected the food industry in 1900’s but also in America today. People have learned over the years the truths about the food industry, revealed through Sinclair’s detailed evidence. Sinclair meant to aim at the public’s heart but instead he shot straight at their stomachs. One would easily be convinced to never again buy or eat meat again. Fortunately, people have seen changes from 1906 and have been currently trying to repair the Food Industry.

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In Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Sinclair illuminates the horrors of the meat packing industry during the early 1900’s. This caused a push for change in the food industry. In 1906 the Food and Drugs Act was signed. For drugs there had to be a label that stated what was in the drug. It prevented the interstate transport of unlawful food and drugs.

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The Jungle was released to expose meatpacking industries’ ways of treating workers and meat. With this release, changes occurred. President Roosevelt urged Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. This act required the Department of Agriculture to inspect every hog and steer whose carcass state lines. In other words, it required companies to pay to get their facilities and practices checked by an inspector to assure everything was being done correctly.

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The 1906 book, The Jungle, caused an uproar that completely shifted focus to these issues of these workers and the safety of their conditions. This work should be considered a milestone in itself because of how wide-reaching and accessible it was. It also sparked the need for the government to get involved, which happened almost immediately after Sinclair’s book was published. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 paved the way for health inspections of both facilities and meat, even though the bar was set extremely low and inspectors were often still disgusted. Both this act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1907 resulted in much higher quality ingredients in the United States.

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Revealing the harsh treatment of meatpacking workers and showing the reality of the disgusting conditions found in butchery shops to the public, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle became an enduring classic by American readers throughout the early twentieth century the prompted the later creation of the Federal Drug Administration. In the early 1900s, America was explosively transitioning from an agricultural society to a thriving manufacturing-based nation. As production demand in factories grew throughout the country, the work force needed to run those factories also expanded. A new type of demanding and dangerous work became prevalent throughout the nation, as immigrants coming into the “Land of Opportunity” found themselves desperate

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“The Jungle” was horrifying to many Americans, because they had not been aware of what was going on. After the book was published, many laws were put in place and many changes were made to the working conditions of these factories. In 1906, after the release of “The Jungle”, the Food and Drug Act was passed. The Food and Drug Act created many laws that ensured the food we were consuming was safe to eat. If Upton Sinclair hadn’t fought for what he thought was right, our food may have still been made under unhealthy conditions.

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Intro: When people eat food they do not think about what is in it, or how it is made. The only thing people care about is what the food tastes like and how much they get. During the 1900’s the meat packing industry had not regulations of any kind. All that mattered to the industry was that they made as much money as possible with as little expenditure as possible. During this times people were often made sick and died either from working conditions or poor food quality.

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In the early twentieth century, Upton Sinclair, who is the author of “The Jungle”, exposed the unsanitary of the working conditions in the meat industry during the progressive era. The mass-production method was tended to replace skilled workers

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Sparked by the Progressive Movement, the Federal Government passed legislation to protect the health and well-being of American citizens. Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle which described the meat industry as disease-ridden and corrupt caught the attention of President Roosevelt. An investigation revealed that bribery, unsanitary conditions and contaminated food were commonplace. Individual states had enacted laws regulating food purity and safety by 1900, however,

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The meat packing industry disregards animal’s emotions and their rights all together by the malicious treatment of animals. The way animals are being treated is highly unfair. Being slaughtered for their body parts and suffering just to be used for protein or an asset to humans is unbearable. An animal’s life is at equal values to a human and deserve the same rights as

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