The Jungle - Exposing the Meatpacking Industry

1. In your opinion, which specific details in this excerpt most convincingly highlight problems in the meatpacking industry in the early 1900s? Why? Use specific passages and quote. Analyze at least five details. 

A.    The loose regulation of the meatpacking industry is highlighted in this document. When Sinclair mentions the government inspector inspecting the meat he says that, “while he was talking with you you could hardly be so ungrateful as to notice that a dozen carcasses were passing him untouched.” This implies the loose regulation of the industry, as the inspector doesn’t care enough to stop talking and inspect the dozen pigs that have passed him.

B.    When a pig was old and their skin became droopy the meatpackers would cut it off and have it “cooked and chopped fine and labeled ‘head cheese!’”. This is an example of the meatpacking industry maximizing profits by selling unsanitary products, just one of many.

C.    When talking about the making of sausage, Sinclair notices that “they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage,” they being the workers whose hands got dirty from making the sausage. There were no other areas near their place of work where they could wash their hands, no other source of water. This shows an example of the problem of unsanitary working conditions.

D.    A ham’s gone bad in the pickling process? Not a problem for the meatpackers! They’ll just sell it at free lunch counters, or as Number Three Grade meat! Or use the “ingenious invention which will “extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron.” This, for the meatpackers, was enough to turn this Number Three Grade, spoiled meat, into Number One Grade fresh.

E.    The sausage-making process was incredibly unsanitary at the turn of the century. They would put whatever meat they had in the sausage, including “moldy white sausage” rejected from Europe, meat that had been “ tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs”. They would also use the meat of rats that had been crawling all over the meat, as well as the rat-dung covered meat.

2. What is the overall tone of the story?

The overall tone of the story is revealing and accusative. The author was clearly out to make all the problems of the meatpacking industry public. He wanted it to be known that the industry was incredibly unsafe and that they were deceiving millions of Americans into eating spoiled meat by packaging it differently. I believe he also wanted to point out the weakness of the regulation, through the lax government inspector described at Durham’s.

3. Based on your reading of this excerpt, why do you think Sinclair titled his novel The Jungle?

Sinclair probably titled this novel The Jungle for a few reasons. For one, the jungle is known as a very dirty place, and while you’re there you probably don’t want to eat anything you find lying around, and the meatpacking industry was essentially forcing the public to eat whatever was in their factory. This title could also reference the “forest of freezing hogs” that Sinclair calls the chilling room as, implying that the meatpacking industry is as loose and wild as the jungle.