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U.S. History 1877-Present Videos 173 videos
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U.S. History 1877-Present 4: The Jungle 1255 Views
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Description:
The Jungle was basically the Food, Inc. of the early 1900s, and it got people thinking that they just might need someone inspecting meat to see if it was rotten or diseased before shipping it out all over the country. Seems like common sense to us...
Transcript
- 00:00
Welcome to The Jungle.
- 00:05
Well, The Jungle of socialist muck-
- 00:07
raker Upton Sinclair, at least.
- 00:09
His 1905 novel The Jungle
- 00:11
was all about how meat got
Full Transcript
- 00:13
packaged. And it was so gross
- 00:15
that it forever changed both how
- 00:17
we process meat, and how we
- 00:19
treat meat processing workers.
- 00:21
It also ruined a lot of dinnertimes. Well,
- 00:23
The Jungle portrayed meatpacking as being pretty
- 00:25
much as gross as you can possibly
- 00:27
imagine—which, as it turns
- 00:29
out, was pretty accurate. The plant
- 00:31
was shown as dark, unsafe, and so
- 00:33
dirty that you could probably get salmonella
- 00:35
just by wearing flip-flops in their
- 00:37
parking lot. Conditions in the meatpacking
- 00:39
industry became so bad partially
- 00:41
because of industrialization.
- 00:43
Meat used to be one of those things people
- 00:45
produced themselves or bought from
- 00:47
close by, because meat doesn't stay exactly
- 00:49
fresh after weeks traveling via
- 00:51
Pony Express. Railroads
- 00:53
changed all that, making shipping meat a relative
- 00:55
breeze. Chicago,
- 00:57
land of one thousand railroads,
- 00:59
was the perfect hub from which
- 01:01
to ship meat across the country, so meat
- 01:03
packing started to be centralized
- 01:05
there. Well, factories and assembly lines
- 01:07
pushed all this work into cramped conditions
- 01:09
and then made people do all the
- 01:11
hacking and sawing all day, every day.
- 01:13
Mechanization also introduced massive
- 01:15
meat grinding machines and other horribly
- 01:17
dangerous things that workers could
- 01:19
die or become dismembered in.
- 01:21
Not exactly a common occurrence
- 01:23
on Ye Olde Family farm.
- 01:25
But after The Jungle was published, things
- 01:27
started to change. The federal government
- 01:29
stepped in and passed the Pure Food
- 01:31
and Drug Act and Meat
- 01:33
Inspection Act in 1906.
- 01:35
Thanks to Upton Sinclair, we have now
- 01:37
reduced the amount of salmonella in
- 01:39
the meat supply to a manageable
- 01:41
amount. Still, ordering rare chicken
- 01:43
is a bad idea. Don't do it, people.
- 01:45
Of course, Sinclair wasn't totally happy with
- 01:47
the change he inspired. Sure,
- 01:49
food inspection was a great new thing. But Upton
- 01:51
was a die-hard socialist.
- 01:53
His main purpose with The Jungle
- 01:55
had been to use the unsanitary
- 01:57
conditions to build sympathy for
- 01:59
Eastern European immigrant workers.
- 02:01
He was way less worried about all the
- 02:03
consumers all there shoveling down tainted meat.
- 02:05
When Americans read Sinclair's book
- 02:07
and felt concern over food safety,
- 02:09
but not over worker well being,
- 02:11
Sinclair famously claimed
- 02:13
that he had aimed at America's heart, but only
- 02:15
succeeded at hitting its stomach.
- 02:17
But hey, uh, at least he didn't hit the funny bone.
- 02:19
That thing hurts forever.
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