Upton Sinclair Research Paper
History
3-1-13
What makes what we Eat?
Did you know that for every 100 grams of peanut butter there is allowed a rodent hair. Well in the early nineteen hundreds before the Upton Sinclair exposé The Jungle you might have found more than just a hair. Without his book who would have known how long the meat packing industry would have gotten away with the atrocities they did. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair changed the way America had dinner. Although that was not his intention he tried to hit America in its heart but hit it in the stomach instead. Sinclair went into undercover research and found a lot of grotesque and dangerous things that nowadays is unreal for us to think about. One example being,"some worked at the stamping-machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself, and have a part of his hand chopped off "(Sinclair 140). In our culture today something like this would make major news headlines. Although mistakes are still made but instead of being covered up they are released to the public recalled so that people won't be harmed by the product. Some of the most common reason things are recalled nowadays is salmonella or E.colli both are awful flu bacterium. A simple E.colli was the least of your worries back in the early 1900's. Some people were even eaten, as Sinclair noted, "the other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard"(Sinclair 142). It is hard to believe that something like that could happen but there are many things that can go unnoticed. If Sinclair had not gone undercover to show how bad immigrant workers were
3-1-13
What makes what we Eat?
Did you know that for every 100 grams of peanut butter there is allowed a rodent hair. Well in the early nineteen hundreds before the Upton Sinclair exposé The Jungle you might have found more than just a hair. Without his book who would have known how long the meat packing industry would have gotten away with the atrocities they did. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair changed the way America had dinner. Although that was not his intention he tried to hit America in its heart but hit it in the stomach instead. Sinclair went into undercover research and found a lot of grotesque and dangerous things that nowadays is unreal for us to think about. One example being,"some worked at the stamping-machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself, and have a part of his hand chopped off "(Sinclair 140). In our culture today something like this would make major news headlines. Although mistakes are still made but instead of being covered up they are released to the public recalled so that people won't be harmed by the product. Some of the most common reason things are recalled nowadays is salmonella or E.colli both are awful flu bacterium. A simple E.colli was the least of your worries back in the early 1900's. Some people were even eaten, as Sinclair noted, "the other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard"(Sinclair 142). It is hard to believe that something like that could happen but there are many things that can go unnoticed. If Sinclair had not gone undercover to show how bad immigrant workers were