industry in Packingtown Chicago, and crafted a novel around a fictional Lithuanian immigrant family. The Jungle, published in 1906, was hugely popular and influenced the public, Congress, and even the president of the United States. Sinclair reveals horrifying and grotesque practices inside meatpacking plants. From steers running loose on the kill floor, to severed limbs, he chronicles injuries, amputations, and even death in vats of lard. The Jungle paints a picture of the meatpacking industry in Chicago that readers won't soon forget. After reading this book, you won't ever look at Spam the same way again.
Meatpacking Industry
Chicago Meat Packing Industry
Fast Food Nation is a nonfiction novel published in 2001 that addresses different ways fast food has changed our food culture, our working culture, and our country. Like Upton Sinclair, Eric Schlosser researched an industry and revealed distressing working conditions.
McDonald
McDonalds
Upton Sinclair writes about the meatpacking industry, but Schlosser's focus is the fast food industry, using McDonald's as the primary example. He discusses the exploitation of fast food employees through a reliance on cheap, quickly trained, expendable workers. He brings readers inside factories that supply our fast food restaurants, revealing some distressing working conditions and illegal activity to maximize profit.
In the 1960s, slaughterhouses began to open up close to the feedlots in the rural western U.S. This helped employers avoid the influence of labor unions based on the East coast, and reduce the cost of supermarket beef by removing the need for skilled butchers in stores. In 'Fast Food Nation,' readers visit one such modern slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colorado. Slaughterhouse workers today are still injured at higher rates than any other industry, and discouraged from reporting injuries for fear of losing their jobs. Scholosser's description of cattle chained, lifted upside down, and their throats cut, soaking the workers with blood, was enough to make hamburgers unappealing for a long time. Cost cutting practices at slaughterhouses endangered the workers, and endangered the public, resulting in sickness and death from E.coli, and the frightening threat of Mad Cow disease in the early 2000s.
