The Jungle Analysis Paper

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.

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 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

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

Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, follows the life of Jurgis Rudkus, his Lithuanian family, and friends who all recently immigrated to Chicago in search of a better life. Jurgis, Ona, and the rest of their family find jobs in Packington, the meatpacking industry of Chicago. Quickly they discover the difficulties of surviving in the United States during the early 1900’s through financial troubles, unreliable work, illness, and swindling. Through his novel, Sinclair exploits the dangerous working conditions of the Chicago meatpacking industry, the health violations, and the struggles the workers face to make ends meet. Contrasted with today’s food industry and the fight for Food Justice, authors Raj Patel, Gottlieb, and Joshi address the similarities between Jurgis and meatpacking workers to the agriculture and industry workers of today. All face challenges such as the struggle to survive on low wages, hazards in the workplace, and the mental burdens these jobs impose on workers. Upton Sinclair exploits the corrupt environment of the meatpacking industry but issues such as worker wages, public health, and sanitation remain important issues today.

This book shows the horrific working conditions and unsanitary conditions in Chicago's meatpacking industry. Sinclair's descriptions of conditions and procedures in the meatpacking plant led to subsequent reforms in food safety regulation. From the killing beds to the fertilizer plant, the meatpacking plant is not a place one would like to work at, it is a place of blistering cold and burning heat, a place where a man might accidentally fall and end up in the canned food. Sinclair uses descriptions of food and diseased meat to reveal the disregard capitalist owners have for the safety of American citizens. He also portrays the grotesque physical harm done to workers, who lose fingers, cut themselves and get blood poisoning, have their skin eroded by low pH acid, and lose limbs. Sinclair uses the industrialized brutality of the animals to symbolize the ultimate pain and discomfort the workers are

In an eye opening novel entitled The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, the author tells a story in which exposes the gut wrenching and shocking facts of what actually goes on in these food processing and meat packing factories in an urban Chicago during the early 1900s. Sinclair does a wonderful job at exposing what actually happened behind these factory doors and informs the reader of the unsanitary process in which animals were transformed into meat products. However when reading this novel one must take into consideration that Sinclair’s main concern was not only the disgusting products produced but the employees that produced them as

B. Packing houses products such as, rat dropping & etc, were eventually finding its way in hams, sausages, and cans of meat.

This is when the US started overflowing with new urban cities, where factories were built. New technologies and machines were introduced during this time, which made the US the ideal trading partner. This drastic advancement led to overproduction but most importantly it caused the blood and tears of deprived factory workers.

From the arrival of Jurgis’ family to an America that was not what they expected, to the loss of all hope in their lives, Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” shows many instances where the immigrants and workers of the industries are severely exploited. Sinclair traveled to the stockyards in Chicago in order to observe the conditions the workers lived and worked in. What he found was disturbing, disgusting, and something of major importance to the public. Sinclair then decided to write his story about the abuse of the workers, published the story, and accurately called it “The Jungle”, since the chaos in Packingtown could be compared to an actual jungle. His novel was considered to be a part of a newer type of writing, called yellow journalism, since

In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair discusses the chaos of a meatpacking factory in Chicago through the observations of Jurgis. As a Russian who is begging to familiarizing himself with the North America, Jurgis is unaware of the customs of America. He starts by learning English, finding out that America had worked under democracy and learns more about how men with power execute it. During Jurgis’ trip, he talks about the filth that resided in the area, including “Bubbly Creek” and Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard. While the quote above describes how the workers were physically affected by their work, the bigger picture demonstrates how the process of meat packing is a chaotic— just like a capitalist government.

When Jurgis and Ona first arrive in America they take a tour of the meat packing factories, there they see “[i]n [the] chutes the stream of animals was continuous; it was quite uncanny to watch them, pressing on to their fate, all unsuspicious a very river of death. Our friends were not poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors of human destiny; they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it all”(Sinclair 37). Even though Jurgis and Ona may not be able to see the parallel between them and the cattle, Sinclair foreshadows what their life will be like in Packingtown. The metaphor of the river of death shows how much like the cattle, the immigrants are often abused by the demands of consumerism.The cattle parallels the immigrants who arrive in Packingtown, they often arrive naive to their situation and their soon doom. To further exemplify the parallel between the workers and the cattle, literary critic Lynn Munro explains “[When] Jurgis is working at Packingtown...he is treated with indifference and contempt and, when supply exceeds demand, summarily discharged,’turned out to starve for doing his duty too well.’The brutalization is underscored by Sinclair’s use of […]parallels between the fate of the innocent livestock and the fate of the common working person”(Munro). Even though Jurgis tries to do his work the best he can, the owners of the factories just see him as another number, he is simply a lamb to the slaughter. Consumerism causes the meatpackers to barbarically slaughter thousands of cattle a day, which the workers are paid little for. Likewise, when Jurgis begins to work in the meat packing factory he has first hand experiences and hears rumors that “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

How did America become such a strong industrial country in the nineteenth century? History has credited this emergence to the Industrial Revolution; however, history has not decided if the industrialists or the immigrants are most essential to this growth, or if it is a collaboration of the efforts of both of these groups. Even though immigrants helped build the workforce of the Industrial Revolution, it is the ideals of the Industrialist business owners who transformed American to the forefront of power in the late 19th century for those immigrants.

The book also describes the horrible processes of the meat packing industry. Nothing is “clean” about the business.

The Jungle is a novel published in 1906, written by an American journalist named Upton Sinclair. Throughout the 1900’s, lower class families as well as immigrants were faced with the harsh working conditions of the rapidly growing American industry. Due to the savage working conditions and dangerously low wages, families encountered unstable living conditions throughout this period. Upton Sinclair exposes these treacherous conditions in his novel while also introducing the major health issue of the meat packaging industry in Packingtown, Chicago.