Questions: Five Plant Foods

Upton sinclair's novel, The Jungle depicts the family members jobs in different areas of the meatpacking business which reveals the industry's atrocious sanitary conditions. Sinclair effectively uses the rhetorical device of ethos to expose social problems and inspire change. Sinclair states in his novel, Paragraph 1, lines 1-3,"With one member trimming beef in the cannery, and another working in a sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great majority of Packingtown swindles.” The ethos was accomplished by telling the reader that the reader that the family had extensive knowledge of the meat-packing trade. Upton goes on to state in chapter 14, “...old sausage that had been rejected… it would be dosed with borax and glycerine,

The article “the inuit paradox” starts off with an Inupiat woman describing the most common foods that she consumed growing up in an Inuit community in which foraging is necessary for survival. She describes that the traditional Inuit diet focused primarily on meat that was foraged from the environment.

Every year, Li’s family struggled to survive with the limited amount of food that was accessible. Poverty surrounded them. They couldn’t get away from it. Li remarked, “There was never enough food to feed the people, let alone the pigs.” They may have owned pigs and chickens but they could never provide them with enough food to fatten them up to eat or for them to produce eggs. Eggs were a rarity. Meats in their diets were uncommon. They mainly “ate a lot of dried yams. They were the easiest things to grow.” They lived off yams. They relied on yams as their food source. Everything they could “grow and earn from the land depended on the weather and luck.” Every family received basic foods that the government controlled. They were “allocated a very small quantity of meat, seafood and eggs, along with oil, soy sauce, sugar, salt, wheat, and cornflour, rice and also coal each month.” The Li family tried their best to preserve as

Readers were not concerned with the treatment of workers, as portrayed by The Jungle, because they really didn't care for the working class, or more specifically, immigrants. However, readers were shocked when they discovered exactly how their meat was processed and prepared. Sinclair used just as much, if not more, gruesome detail in describing the products the American public was consuming, as he did when describing the workplace, living conditions, politics, society and Chicago's scenery. In a futile attempt to build up the readers' sympathy toward the wage-slaves, Sinclair also details the process in which foods not related to the meat-packing industry are prepared. For example, he writes, "their pale blue milk...was watered, and doctored with formaldehyde."

The average Cherokee diet consisted of corn, beans, squash, berries, deer, and fish. Most of their food came from farming, but they still hunted and gathered for some meals. The Cherokee people used everything from what they killed. Skin from deer was used to make clothing. Moccasins were made from rabbit fur. Rattles were made from hollow turtle shells tied to sticks.

During the 1845 till as late as the 1920s pioneer living conditions for women was harsh and rough. Their biggest task was helping to feed the family. In addition to preparing meals and cleaning up after them, they planted large gardens. Vegetables like potatoes, carrots and turnips were stored in root cellars. Cabbage was made into sauerkraut and stored in large crocks. Some vegetables like cucumbers were pickled in vinegar. Apples and sometimes pumpkins and squash were cut into small slices and dried. In the winter they could be soaked in water and cooked. When canning jars became available, they preserved corn, green beans and tomatoes. Farm women also raised large flocks of chickens. The hens supplied eggs which were an important part of

5) What do you think Gilbert meant when he said he “turned vegetarian because I realized that the meat I was eating represented so much of the

In the book “The jungle” by Upton Sinclair, Jr. is about the harsh conditions immigrants live thou. One chapter in particular talks about food and the uncleanliness of it. The meat packing district is where meat goes to be canned or packaged. There would be meat stored in great piles in

Other foods such as, wild grapes, jack rabbits, wood rats, yucca fruit, wild potatoes, juniper, berries and mountain sheep were eaten all the time.

“The meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy, which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water—and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped

2. What satiric comment does the narrator make concerning “mother-woman”? Cite specific words that reveal the satiric nature of these comments.

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

Religion and tradition are two ways that families come together. However in Norman Maclean’s novella, A River Runs Through It, the Maclean family’s devotion to their Presbyterian religion and their tradition of fly-fishing is what undeniably brought the family together. Under the father’s strict Presbyterian values, his sons, Norman and Paul used fly-fishing as the link that brought them closer together and helped them bond with their father on a different level. The family’s hobby of fly-fishing was started just for fun. It was a sport that was taken up every Sunday after church to take their minds off of the worries in life. After a while, going fly-fishing every Sunday turned into a tradition and soon a

within their lifestyles. They slowly learned to eat foods such as nuts, grains, roots, and

The potato is one of history’s most important vegetables, although initially reluctant Europeans quickly became dependent on the plant. Most of the educated class saw the potato’s potential and raised it in their gardens before the more superstitious lower classes. The lower classes feared the myths of “night shades and plagues” and the encouragement from God was the only sign to begin growing potatoes (Zuckerman 49). Some farmers believed this crop to be an aphrodisiac, others saw it as the cause of fever and leprosy. In meat-loving England, urban workers and considered potatoes to have an extreme distaste. The critic, Denis Diderot wrote in his Encyclopédie in 1765 his stance on the potato. He stated that “it wasn’t a pleasant food, though abundant, and adequately nourished those who didn’t care about anything except sustenance” (Zuckerman 73). The Europeans had strong opinions about the potato and it would have to take a lot of convincing to change their minds. The European government knew the potato could develop and effect the economy in a positive way, they only needed to find a way to encourage the lower classes to grow the vegetable.