The Food Process In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

In “ The Jungle”, the author Upton Sinclair states that “ I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach”. This means that Sinclair wanted to muckrake the Meat Packing Industry to seek attention for the workers, but instead food became a bigger concern. The characters Jurgis, Ona, and Marija with fellow family members are Lithuanian immigrants who came to PackingTown in hope for a better future, however they came to realize that the whole town is run by capitalist. Although Sinclair intentionally uses metaphors and similes to depict the characters struggle in the horrible living and working conditions in Packingtown, his purpose is undermined and overlooked by his use of realism to depict the food process.
In the “The
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Throughout the book, Jurgis had to constantly switch jobs because of accidents that laid him off work. No jobs was available to Jurgis except the fertilizer mill. The job at the fertilizer is the worse of it can be, Jurgis describes “...the phosphates soaked in through every pore of jurgis’s skin and in five minutes he had a headache, and in fifteen was almost dazed. the blood was pounding in his brain like an engine’s throbbing ……”(108). The fertilizer mill Jurgis is working at is extremely unsafe. Sinclair notes the time and symptoms in order to show toxicity of the workspace many worker had to endure. When Jurgis’s blood is compared as an engine throbbing, it shows that Jurgis is not in a good condition because when an engine is throbbing, it is a sign of not working properly. It is also important to note that Jurgis had to endure this pain because it was the only job left for him to support his family. A lot of sacrifices were made in spite of health concerns. Like many folks in the working class, money to support the family became a greater concern. Yet jobs like this can easily lead to death and sickness that can worsen the family’s struggle. No matter how horrible the job was, workers would still choose to work in order to support the family. After locating Marija, Jurgis learns that she became a prostitute. Sinclair describes the prostitute as “a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances immorality was exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it was under the system of chattel slavery. (89) Sinclair uses simile to show that prostitution is just like slavery, it is inescapable once one starts.Yet, prostitution is stated as a positive work because it provides for the