In the early 1900s, food safety was an incredibly unfamiliar and overlooked part of America’s food industry. Written by muckraker Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, was a controversial novel that depicted the harsh living and working conditions of immigrants working in the food industry. After the release of The Jungle, thousands of meat-eating Americans were horrified at what had been happening in factories. Disgusting yet accurate details presented in The Jungle were the basis for the creation of laws to stop food production from becoming so unsanitary. The Jungle follows a young Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis Rudkis and his teenage wife Ona.
The United States had a time of growth in agriculture and the importance of agriculture in the 1930’s. Work Cited A Cultural History of the United States Through the Decades The 1930’s Petra Press. San Diego, California Lucont Books Inc. 199, pp 40-41. “Dust Bowl” Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition, Mar. 2017, p. 1.
In 1904, Sinclair spent seven weeks in disguise in Chicago’s meat packing district to research his novel, The Jungle. Sinclair continued the tradition and wrote King Coal and The Coal War about Colorado coal fields. Sinclair’s literature continues to influence us today. The Jungle is a muckraking novel exposing the challenging hardships immigrants in industrialized cities like the meat packing district faced in the early 20th century. Sinclair aims to show the reader the harsh injustices immigrants faced upon emigration into the United States.
In summary, Sinclair’s the Jungle tackles problems about the capitalist system and uses instances of literary elements to connect two concepts, like animals in the Slaughterhouse and immigrants in the US, but these are not Sinclair’s primary concern. Upton Sinclair wrote the Jungle with a desire for money. This claim is proven by the overwhelming instances of impossible levels of misfortune, excessively gory imagery, and disturbing descriptions of the food you eat and how it’s truly prepared. The main character’s dad dies, then his wife, then his son, from drowning in mud, then his other family member gets eaten by rats. To have that many horrible things happen to one family is impossible.
The Jungle is a story that revolves around the protagonist Jurgis Rudkus and his family, the Lithuanian immigrant who came to America to lead a better life and worked at meatpacking plants of early 20th century Chicago. The story showcases the hardship that they underwent due to the harsh and bad working condition, poverty, starvation and being cheated by unjust people agents, eventually losing all their money. The Jungle provides us ways to look at the unfettered capitalism that prevailed in the early 20th century. This book also exposes the corruption, inequality, unjustness, sickness and slavery that existed in the society. Jurgis started off firmly believing on his American dream of having a better life where he would work hard and earn lots of money.
A bushel is a unit of measure for volumes of dry commodities such as shelled corn kernels. 1 Bushel of corn is equal to 8 gallons. With the exception of Antarctica, corn is produced on every continent in the world. There are over 3,500 different uses for corn products. As well as being eaten by the cob, corn is also processed and used as a major component in many food items like cereals, peanut butter, potato chips, soups, marshmallows, ice cream, baby food, cooking oil, margarine, mayonnaise, salad dressing, and chewing gum.
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair is renowned source of political fiction that pioneered the movement of food safety in the United States. The Jungle was first published in a socialist newspaper in 1905 and then later adapted into a novel in 1906 after popular demand. Sinclair initially wrote the exposé as a way to change the unfortunate circumstances of immigrant laborers, whose working conditions that were believed to be unacceptable for any laborer in the industry. Sinclair leaves short references of his political opinions in the novel in various locations throughout the text “As if political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable!” (Sinclair 31). Written as an indirect attack at the labor industry, the real driving force behind the popularity of the novel was that many readers could not fathom the truth behind the meat industry.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair follows the main character Jurgis Rudkus who is an immigrant from Lithuania. Jurgis immigrated to the United States and made his way to Chicago in order to follow the path of a legendary hometown name, Jokubas, who supposedly made a lot of money in the states. Upon reaching the United States and arriving in Chicago they realized it would be much harder to establish an income in a city they weren’t familiar with. Their luck changed when they happened upon the infamous Jokubas and found out he ran a local delicatessen in the stockyards in Chicago. Jokubas helped them find a place to sleep for the night in a boarding house while they used those first days to look for work in order to move to a nicer place of living.
Ashwin Kumar Ms. Bergith Weber AP English Language/4 March 17, 2018 Independent Reading Lodestar Title: The title of this book is The Jungle. Author: The author of this book is Upton Sinclair. Original Date of Publication: Upton Sinclair published this book originally in 1906, but numerous editions have been published even in the 21st century that censor some its graphic content and violence. The time period was the progressive era in the early twentieth century. Genre: This book is in the genre of political and historical fiction, as it portrays the horrors of the meat-packing industry with a few fictional characters.
Unhealthy food is advertised almost everywhere .You can also buy it anywhere. Obesity is becoming quite common in the United States. The United States Department of Agriculture reported that the average American ate 20 percent more calories in the year 2000 than in the year 1983. Part of the reason was the boom for the need of high fructose corn syrup. This high fructose corn syrup can be found in almost everything we eat such as cookies, soft drinks, bread, sauces, and many other common ingredients that we use today.