Upton Sinclair's The Jungle: The Food Industry

The influence of Upton Sinclair upon our world cannot thoroughly be measured in just a few short paragraphs or even one study. Sinclair 's work for which he was most famous, The Jungle, written in 1906, was just one of many examples of one person 's ability to change the world they live in. While the topic of The Jungle was bringing to light the horrible working conditions associated with the meat industry, the work accomplished so much more. Of course people were enraged when they found out they were probably eating rat meat along with their favorite meats but they also began to see how much hardship immigrants were going through just to try and make a living in the country at the time. Sinclair didn 't just interview people to get the

As stated before, Upton Sinclair, was ahead of his time with his ability to dig for the truth and show Americans the truth regarding the Chicago meat packing industry. Another large passion of his was politics and the belief in socialism. He advocated against capitalism and ridiculed it within his novel by portraying it as the cause of much downfall for the main character. Sinclair did more for this country with the novel he wrote then many politicians are able to do in a lifetime. He showed through his power of writing the importance of every citizen within America to be woke and involved in every aspect of their lives.

INTRO In the Book, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, we are taught that capitalism is evil and that socialism is the right way. This book is an political fiction that was written in 1906 which was just under 60 years after socialism, the enemy of the capitalism, was created but 11 years before the USSR was created. Due to this no one would know the evils that were to come from socialism. Sinclair uses the book, especially the the first twenty to thirty chapters, to display his thoughts and believes.

They had to get married there because Ona’s dad didn’t approve, so they moved to America with Elzbieta Lukoszaite and her kids. When they started working, they had weak factory jobs. They saw how corrupt America was when they were hired by these guys who took a cut of their salary and butchered infected meat and shipped it to the public. The whole family just gets jerked around. Then

However, readers at the time were not very concerned about the petty immigrants living on the lower rung of society. Rather, they cared about what affected them most: the condition of the meat they were eating-- and had been eating-- for years, that were produced by some of the very factories mentioned in Sinclair’s novel. For the majority of The Jungle’s readers, the fact that poor immigrants were being exploited was not bothersome. Instead, the fact that the food that readers had been eating for years contained the power to kill them seemed shocking, pushing the nation into a worried frenzy. Readers were disgusted by the facts they were reading, catalyzing the creation of administrations like the FDA.

According to the scholar Alfred Hornung, “The Muckrakers grew up in this literary environment and started out as dime novelists and/or historical romancers before they turned to political and social issues as themes for their fictions. ”8 This is exactly what Upton Sinclair did as a writer. He had written other books that had not been even half the success that “The Jungle” became. “The Jungle” was written with such horror and emotion directed towards the meatpacking industry, Sinclair was able to convince the public that it was finally time for a change, and a drastic one at that.

first we see how things were going so well before the Depression hit in the movie James Braddock is making around $9,000 per fight but soon things change drastically a mass amount of people have house foreclosures people have to move into shanty villages called Hoovervilles which were made to mock the president at the time for his lack of care for the people of the country. Next in the movie The Struggle for people to eat and survive, in the movie James Braddock son eat food from the butcher shop so that they have enough to eat. things were hard for Braddock family just as it was for many people during the Depression their electricity got taken out they had to move into a one-bedroom house in at at one time that to send their kids away to live with a

Teddy Roosevelt proved not only to be an economic reformist but also a social reformist as he transitioned from trust-busting into directly benefitting and protecting the lives and wellbeing of consumers. Before any reforms took place, however, Roosevelt noticed that American meet was being shut out of European markets due to it being unsanitary. This problem along with Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, drew the major problems of sanitation and working conditions right to Roosevelt’s eye. Therefore, in an attempt to correct this problem, Roosevelt with help of Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 which said that the preparation of meat would be inspection by the federal government when transferred over state lines. This act not

Snowball had many ideas that oppose against Napoleon’s wish, which links to the ideology of Trotskyism. In the novel, Snowball also believed that in order to sustain the revolution in Animal Farm, they must have more revolutions in other neighbouring farms in England. He did so by sending pigeons to the farms around England, teaching others the tunes of “Beasts of

During the beginning of industrial era, lots of labour were replaced with machine. Besides pollution, these people began to lose their job. Hence, this was the main reason of the Luddites Movement, a movement which the workers strived against the revolution. Luddites Movement somehow left a big mark in European history and considered as an important journey of environmentalism. In the late stage of Industrial Revolution, Henry Salt (1851 – 1939), vegetarian advocate, founder of the anti-hunting Humanitarian League in 1891, who was also an influential teacher of both George Bernard Shaw and Mohandas Gandhi.

Uptown Sinclair’s book The Jungle was originally written to expose the working conditions within the meat packing industry. Sinclair shocked millions as he bore what it was really like behind the scenes. Employees worked with contaminated and rotting meat, which was not a health violation at the time. This eventually led to new food and federal safety laws. Most of the labor force was an immigrant, who moved to the United States with hopes of the “American Dream.”

In chapter 10 in Stuff and Starved they talked about about the the food system is benefiting you as a person by the corporates. The food system has contributed to so many diet- related disease and is even could be decreasing the life span of children in the recent generations. Food has been quite a change the joy people have with food is slowly disappearing. A reoccurring thing that is happens in the book is that even the food industry is bad there are people out their trying to fight against the food system. He discusses how the people get more involved for the food system than the government.

Over the years in America food and how it is consumed has changed, and we seem to actually be eating more unhealthy despite advances in modern science and technology. In Michael Pollan’s book, “In Defense of Food”, Pollan talks about this idea, and how food itself has been replaced by the nutrients in them. Today’s development of food science has done more harm than good, and the food industry has become industrialized. People have to avoid the new “Western diet” and need to go back to the natural way of eating healthy foods. When I arrived at college, I completely changed my diet for good after just a single week in, as I had a realization I needed to eat healthier to transform my relationship with not only food, but with my body and mind.

“Food Inc.” is a documentary which uncovered the truth about food industries in America. Contrary to the images they are showing to the public, animals like cows and chickens are no longer raised on the field but in unsanitary and infectious houses. Cows are forced to eat corns instead of grass, which caused them E. coli, and instead of abandoning this new technology companies just use more chemicals to erase virus out of meat. Farmers and workers are forced to work underpaid and not allowed to talk about the companies’ policies. Slaughterhouses are getting bigger and bigger, thus it is easier for virus and bacteria to pass from one animal to the other through the hand of the workers.

After many years had passed and Sinclair had met his demise, people still fought for the rights of the workers and made Sinclair’s dream a reality. Overall Sinclair’s actions began a new era of exposé journalism. Still this war on health and food sanitation continues to this day, Walsh explains, "Horror stories about the food industry have long been with us--ever since 1906, when Upton Sinclair's landmark novel The Jungle told some ugly truths about how America produces its meat. In the century that followed, things got much better, and in some ways much worse.