When food came from The Jungle

Yum!

Perhaps we take for granted where our food comes from. We walk into our nice, clean supermarkets, stroll down the aisles with our shiny carts, pluck colorful, carefully packaged goods from the shelves, and plop them onto a moving belt where we hand over our money and trot along on our merry way home without a second thought.

Where does your food come from? Yes, a supermarket. But where did the supermarket get your food? You don't know? You don't care? In this day and age, we don't need to worry very much about where our food came from - with so many regulations and rules, there's not much cause for concern. 

Back in the day though, in the early 1900s there was cause for concern. Like people nowadays, people back then didn't think much about where their food came from but there were no regulations - and that was scary. People had no idea what they were eating until one man came along and changed everything.

That man, was Upton Sinclair.

THANK GOD FOR THIS GUY

Let me cut to the chase now. The food industry - mainly the meat industry was disgusting. Why? Because money > health. Those in charge of the meat industry were not concerned with the conditions of their factories or what went into their products, only that their products went out and were bought by everyday, naive Americans.

Well, one day a man named Upton Sinclair went to check out one of these factories and decided to write a novel about what he saw.

The novel, The Jungle, revealed to Americans that the nice pretty packages their meat came in was just a facade. Also, that what was in those packages probably contained more than just pork or beef. They probably also contained rats, rat droppings, dirt, bugs, and maybe an actual worker thrown in for good measure.

I'll have the human sandwich, hold the rat poison please.

Needless to say, the public were shocked with what they read. Even the president at the time, Theodore Roosevelt, had trouble believing such things were true, so he sent an investigator to a factory only to find the same unsanitary conditions - meat in piles with rats running over them, meat being picked up off the filthy floor to be thrown in a grinder, and more mouth-watering ways of making food!

In response to these findings, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act which set regulations on the food industry, implemented inspections, and cleaned up factory conditions.

 The Meat Packing Industry was no longer a Jungle and the Food and Drug Act ended up controlling other products in the food industry, such as eventually removing cocaine (yes, cocaine) from Coca Cola. 

I think it is safe to say that Sinclair was a very important man in American history and we should be very grateful that he found and exposed the horrors of meat factories and as he once said "I aimed at the public's heart" (the original intent of the book was to describe the working conditions for immigrants) "and hit its stomach".