Meatpacking Industry During The Progressive Era

Have you ever wondered what really goes into your food or medicine? If it wasn’t for muckrakers during the progressive era, you might have never been able to know. Before the Progressive Era, people desired change to the way they lived, yet few people were able to get their news to the masses without a lot hard work and taking risks. Investigative journalism has tremendously helped bring awareness to the food and medicine industries and has helped pass legislations to ensure our safety with the products we consume. The way food and medicine is handled is very different than it was before the progressive era. The regulations on food and medicine today has immensely improved, but it’s not quite where it should be. Few people knew of the horrible

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.

Before Henry Ford adapted the automobile production, they had developed an assembly line. It worked more like a disassembly line because there were 80 separate jobs in one line in the whole process of getting the meat ready. The immigrants did the most dangerous jobs, they worked in cold weather in the winter and the hot dark room in the summer (Willie).”

Upton Sinclair is most known for his criticisms of the meat packaging industry in his book The Jungle. For close to 2 months, Sinclair worked in a Chicago meat package plant in order to expose the hidden truths of the industry. This was one of the first examples of a journalist immersing themselves in the material coved in

As one of the primary federal consumer-protection laws in existence today, The Federal Food and Drug Act of 1906 was a law that had two primary goals for food and drugs: (a) forbid harmful ingredients and additions and (b) demand labeling of ingredients to inform consumers. According to Janssen (1981), it was hoped that the enactment of this law would eliminate adulterations and poisons sometimes found in foods, sometimes in drugs and often in both. The foundation of food and drug protection came from the development of scientific methods of analysis by the Federal Bureau of Chemistry,

It is hard to imagine that there was once a time when meat and meat-like products were butchered and processed in unsanitary conditions, but there was such a time and it was so bad that Congress had to pass the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 to stop these unsanitary conditions. In this paper I will argue why the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was such a good idea.

The first Pure Food and Drug Act was put into action by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. The act was passed to prevent the manufacture, sale, or transportation of misbranded or harmful food, drugs, medicines, and liquors. Due to this act the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) came to be. The FDA is now responsible for the testing of all foods and drugs for human consumption and the label warnings on them as well.

Amidst all of this controversy, journalists began to express their opinions in their articles. They played a major role in spreading new information to the public. Journalists criticized the work of “Beef Trust” businesses, which were a group of five large meatpacking companies. Journalists would also talk about the unsanitary conditions in which the meat was being produced and how these companies would try to avoid inspection. This helped spread awareness to this issue that was continuing to grow as each day passed by.

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

One the key pieces of legislation that was a prime example of the progressive era, was the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. This law came about due to muckraking, and also because of public and political interests. Muckraking, such as Upton Sinclair’s piece, “The Jungle”, helped in the timing of the adoption of this legislature.

     In the early twentieth century, at the height of the progressive movement, “Muckrakers” had uncovered many scandals and wrong doings in America, but none as big the scandals of Americas meatpacking industry. Rights and responsibilities were blatantly ignored by the industry in an attempt to turn out as much profit as possible. The meat packers did not care if poor working conditions led to sickness and death. They also did not care if the spoiled meat they sold was killing people. The following paper will discuss the many ways that rights and responsibilities were not being fulfilled by the meat packing industry.

The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was an attempt to regulate the meatpacking industry and to assure consumers that the meat they were eating was safe. In brief, this act made compulsory the careful inspection of meat before its consummation, established sanitary standards for slaughterhouses and processing plants, and required continuous U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection of meat processing and packaging. Yet, the most important objectives set by the law are the prevention of adulterated or misbranded livestock and products from being commercialized and sold as food, and the making sure that meat and all its products are processed and prepared in the adequate sanitary and hygienic conditions (Reeves 35). Imported meat and its various

In the early 1900's life for America's new Chicago immigrant workers in the meat packing industry was explored by Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle. Originally published in 1904 as a serial piece in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, Sinclair's novel was initially found too graphic and shocking by publishing firms and therefore was not published in its complete form until 1906. In this paper, I will focus on the challenges faced by a newly immigrated worker and on what I feel Sinclair's purpose was for this novel.

The first was the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. This was a designed more to control the promotion and marketing of bad foods rather than bad drugs. It came as a result of the exposure of the appalling unsanitary conditions in the Chicago Stockyard in a book by Upton Sinclair called The Jungle.

People today believe that the government is supposed to eliminate any possible danger from the food they consume, but that is not the case. In the book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of The All-American Meal written by Eric Schlosser, he discusses numerous problems with food production. Some of these issues are discussed in the “Epilogue”, “What’s In Meat”, and “Most Dangerous Job” chapters where Schlosser elaborates on the government’s role and how workers are mistreated. In the article, “U.S. Meatpacking Under Fire: Human Rights Group Calls for Line Speed Reduction, ERGO Standards,” it explains how the working conditions in the meat packaging industry are hazardous and are violations of basic human rights. Although workers are affected by the government’s role in the food industry, consumers are affected as well. The consequences of the lack of governmental oversight, like food contamination and others, are discussed in the film Food Inc. “Escaping the Regulatory Net: Why Regulatory Reform Can Fail Consumers”, an academic journal written by Henry Rothstein, explains how “putting consumers first” is difficult for the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to accomplish because with consumer’s interests that means regulatory reforms are most likely going to fail.