Book Report #2

Upton Sinclair
1067 Big Bethel Rd
Hampton, VA 23666
Dear Upton Sinclair:
This passage got my attention because it describes the horrible conditions for workers in the
meatpacking industry. It pretty much gives the audience the visual that it needs to actually take into
account the horrid working conditions for workers and the poor quality of the companys. The image
of all kinds of waste being dumped in with the consumers product is surely revolting. You intended
the book to raise public consciousness about the plight of the working poor, but you relied on a
pseudo-naturalistic technique that emphasized the physically revolting filth and gore of the
stockyards. It caused me to think different about every time I buy meat from a store, especially if it
is not a name brand. It brought me to the realization that, in the early 1900's, eating standards were
not the best. Packing town and the stockyards symbolize the exploitation of workers. Also people
back then would do anything for a job and a chance of getting paid. This passage represents the
meat industrys practice of selling rotten and diseased meat to unsuspecting customers. You use the
cans of rotten and unhealthy meat to represent the essential corruption of capitalism and the
hypocrisy of the American Dream. American capitalism presents an attractive face to immigrants,
but the America that they find is rotten and corrupt. One of the main themes in this passage and in
the whole entire story is the poor immigrant experience. Your attitude toward the passage is
obvious. The victimized working class is right, and the oppressing capitalists are evil. As a result,
your novel caused outrage about the unsanitary quality of the meat that was sold in stores rather
than the oppression of the poor.
Yours sincerely,

The meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble
to lift out a rat even when he saw one there were things that went into the sausage in
comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash
their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the
water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt ends of smoked meat, and the
scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be
dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which
the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and
among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the
barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water and cartload after cartload of it
would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the publics
breakfast.

Sinclair, Upton. 14. The Jungle. Vol. 1. Chicago: Upton Sinclair, 1906. 162-63. Print.
14 March 2016
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