How To Write A Summary Of Guns Germs And Steel Chapter Summary

Being confronted with the reality of a desensitised society advances one’s self to a heightened awareness of that reality. ‘The Meatworks’ exhibits this idea through the disregard for non-human life as seen when directly exploiting pigs to earn a living. The enjambment Gray employs within “But I settled for one of the lowest paid jobs, making mince, the furthest end from those bellowing, sloppy yards. Outside the pigs fear”. Along with first person and high modality expresses how both physically and mentally uncomfortable the persona is with being more involved with the slaughter, revealing his standpoint as a humanist, empathising with the pigs. Gray delves further into this empathy, directly describing the result of desensitisation in “arm-thick corkscrews, grinding around inside it, meat or not… using a

The other physical separation in the beef plant was between the inspectors and the workers. There is understandable animosity between the two groups. As they start the inspectors are on a lower wage than the workers. This is presumably because the nature of the inspector’s job is a lot less dangerous, and less physically demanding than that of the ‘beefers’. The only interaction between inspectors and workers is of a negative nature, as the inspector will be telling the worker that the work is not of a high enough standard, this slows the progress of the workers and causes resentment towards the inspectors. Due to this negative interaction, inspectors are kept separate from workers eating “in a separate lunchroom” according to Thompson.

Schlosser describes the environment of the meat packing plants serving fast food companies in a startling straightforward narrative of his visit through a meat packing plant. He describes a brutal, and sometimes unsanitary environment. The rights of animals are a very broad and complex subject, but Schlosser touches on this as he describes the slaughterhouse floor. He describes animals in various states of disembowelment. Sometimes the animals were dead or stunned; sometimes they were thrashing about wildly in the last throws of death. The slaughter room floor was described as being covered with blood and feces. Employees worked at a furious pace to meet the day's quota. What bothered me most was the fact that this meat is not only prepared for fast food companies but also contracted out to serve our children's schools.

In the book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser talks about the working conditions of fast food meat slaughterhouses. In the chapter “The Most Dangerous Job,” one of the workers, who despised his job, gave Schlosser an opportunity to walk through a slaughterhouse. As the author was progressed backwards through the slaughterhouse, he noticed how all the workers were sitting very close to each other with steel protective vests and knives. The workers were mainly young Latina women, who worked swiftly, accurately, while trying not to fall behind. Eric Schlosser explains how working in the slaughterhouses is the most dangerous profession – these poor working conditions and horrible treatment of employees in the plants are beyond

Factory Farming is an increasing industry in the United States. These large farms, which evidently appear to be more like slaughterhouses than the typical farms a person can imagine are located throughout the United States. These factory farms contain animals ranging from chickens, sheep, goats, cows, turkeys, and pigs, they also contain dairy products. The conditions for the animals and the employees of these factory farms are inhumane and vile. Life behind the walls of the factory farm is both unsanitary for the animals and the employees. Employees are forced to endure long hours and poor treatment. Animals in these conditions withstand living in cages and are forced to live in uninhabitable ways.

Factories did not have to meet any safety guidelines, causing the United States to have the worst working conditions out of any other country. Also the factories were definitely not the cleanest places to work. Since there was no one inspecting the meat at the time, low skilled laborers were forced to package meat that was spoiled or contaminated. This did not go well with human consumption.

Another problem mentioned by Sinclair is the dangerous working conditions in the slaughterhouses, The work in the slaughterhouses had to be done at a fast rate. In the beginning of the book, Jurgis often “marveled at their [the men on the killing beds] speed and power as if they had been wonderful machines” (Sinclair 47). The pressure to do the work fast led to many accidents. “Of the butchers and floorsmen…and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who has the use of his thumb” (Sinclair, 82).

There were no toilets, so human and rat excrement wound up in the meat, along with the rats themselves. These unsanitary details moved readers far more than the injustices inflicted on the workers. Other examples include the rechurning of rancid butter, the cutting of ice from polluted water and the doctoring of milk with formaldehyde. The average consumer was shocked to know that the “pure beef” was in fact contaminated and unfit for human consumption. Imagine

It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of mean and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go in the hoppers together.”# There was nothing the packers would not do to make a profit, if meat went bad they would pickle it or make sausage out of it, “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 moldy and white-it would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption.”# The Packers took no responsibilities for the sickness that these meats caused. It was not uncommon for people to die from sickness they had gotten from eating bad meat, this is also an issue in “The Jungle” when a young family member suddenly dies one morning, “it was the smoked sausage he had eaten that morning-which may have been made out of some of the tubercular pork that was condemned unfit for export.”# Disease was also a factor for the workers, as quoted from the book “Meat and Men “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.”# It was also not uncommon for people to fall into the vats and become lard. “The public revolted at the

set of terrifying and inhumanity acts take place on immigrants in the meat packing industry where many of them even lost their lives. They encounter extremes in freeze weather, heat exhaustion, overwhelming, and infectious disease. Upon Sinclair’s novel, where he depicts the scenery in the meat industries, "They don't waste anything. They use everything about the hog except the squeal." Yet most of them are grateful for getting a job because otherwise they would be in debt, starve and die. The author purpose of this book is to raise public awareness, soon after, The Food and Drug Act immediately takes a step on investigating animals slaughtering and working environment. Soon afterward, workers no longer work closed to the diseased animals and

Discoveries can be confronting and provocative, and can often lead to renewed understandings of our society. In Robert Gray's poem “The Meatworks", Gray offers disturbing insight into the horrifying reality of the meat industry, following the persona’s process of self-discovery as they realise society's high value on consumerism has paved the way for the destruction of nature. Gray opens with gruesome details of the conditions of the persona’s workplace; the abattoir. By doing so, he immediately confronts the reader in the

Although this shined a light on the issues, I wanted to aim “at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." I had attempted point out how badly the animals were treated by workers, rather than the sanitation of the workplace. To reveal the harsh reality Chicago’s famous industry, Jurgis becomes the “shoveler of guts” and through his time there, he witnessed the horrendous state at which men were in labor – their fingers cut off due to working with knives in speed up assembly lines, workers with skin diseases in the pickling room, working in areas with no light or ventilation, and men carrying 100 pound meat and breaking their backs. The company scammed the laborers by making the assembly line faster to get more work out of the men for the same pay. Furthermore, sanitation of the workplace was an immense issue. Many men had tuberculosis and coughed blood, onto the floor, and with no area to urinate, many did it in a corner and did not wash their hands after doing so. With all that being said, the meat was dumped into the same floor where all of this occurred, usually also accumulating dead rats and their

When reading the title of Jared Diamond’s, “Guns, Germs, and Steels,” the readers must initially think how do these three connect? After starting the first few chapters they will realize that Diamond is referring to the proximate and ultimate factors in that lead to the advancement of society. When Diamond talks about proximate and ultimate factors, he is explaining the cause of European dominance in the world. The proximate factors are the one that directly led to the European dominance and the ultimate factors are the ones that let to proximate factors. I believe that this book is referring to the Homo sapiens revolutionizing through the years, through the Neolithic Revolution through agriculture and industrialization.

     The working conditions for these immigrants at the meat packing plants were appalling and displayed how badly in need of a change they were. Workers in the factory that did unskilled labor would be paid only somewhere between a mere fifteen to twenty-five cents an hour. They would have to work from early in the morning until it was dark at night, with only a half hour break for lunch. They had no choice but to accept whatever position

Yes, if there is a lot of resources around it can support a large group of people instead of a small group of gatherers