A Return to the "Jungle?"

In 1906, Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle", a book about the meat packing industry in Chicago at the turn of the century. According to the book, there were some 163 government inspectors that oversaw what went on in the packinghouses. What the general public didn't know at the time was that all of these state appointed inspectors were appointed by the packing industry itself. After Sinclair described the horrible working conditions in the plants where people's hands and fingers were cut off and diseases such as tuberculosis ran rampant among the workers, as well as the unsafe practices of processing the meat, the public outcry was so great that the federal meat inspection program was implemented. Listen to what Sinclair said about the conditions in the slaughterhouses back then: ..."

"....There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was mouldy and white-it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it......"