I’ve been wanting to post something about Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle for a while now, but I’m finding it a bit difficult, the book is so heart wrenching at times, and the passages that I would like to quote are precisely the one’s that make me turn away from the page when I read them the same way people do when they see something horrible in a movie or on T.V. The difference is, when you look back at the screen, the offending image is gone, but the words on the page remain, waiting for you to return so they can shock you with their blunt brutality.
The Jungle has been on my list of books to read since I got interested in food, factory farming, and the treatment of animals a couple of years ago. D gave me his copy of The Jungle when I saw him in New York a few weeks ago, so I started reading it on the bus ride home. D has this wonderful policy of giving away all of his books after he reads them, except cook books that is. I have benefited from this practice on more than one occasion, and while I would like to say that I pass them on to others when I am finished, the truth is that I horde them on my bookshelves and keep them stacked on the floor of my bedroom in small towers that teeter and threaten collapse when I pass them on my way from my desk to the dresser or closet.
The following is part of the description of the wedding party with which Sinclair begins The Jungle:
Now the fat policeman wakens definitely, and feels of his club to see that it is ready for business. He has to be prompt – for these two-o’clock-in-the-morning fights, if they once get out of hand, are like a forest fire, and may mean the whole reserves at the station. The thing to do is to crack every fighting head that you see, before there are so many fighting heads that you cannot crack any of them. There is but scant account kept of cracked heads in back of the yards, for men who have to crack the heads of animals all day seem to get into the habit, and to practice on their friends, and even on their families, between times. This makes it a cause for congratulation that by modern methods a very few men can do the painfully necessary work of head-cracking for the whole of the cultured world.
Although the emphasis is slightly different, this passage reminded me of Joel Salatin’s statement in Food Inc:
A culture that just uses a pig as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structure, to be manipulated by whatever creative design the human can foist on that critter, will probably view individuals within its community, and other cultures in the community of nations, with the same type of disdain and disrespect and controlling type mentalities.
The real difference between these two quotes is that Sinclair seems to indicate that the brutality of slaughter house practices in the early 20th century only affected the individuals who directly took part in it. Salatin, on the other hand, makes an argument that extends these negative effects to the entire culture of which it is a part. I do not mean that this point was lost on Sinclair, not at all, that last sentence is far too tongue in cheek for anyone to think that he exonerates the rest of the country from the horrors of packing town: the cultured world indeed. The real victims of The Jungle are the poor immigrant workers, and while they treat animals with brutality, it is not a brutality of their choosing, rather it is one that is foisted upon them by their bosses and their bosses’ bosses, one which horrifies them as much as it does us, when and if they ever have a moment to consider it, moments that are not easy to come by amidst the struggle to survive. The real brutality of the book is that which is inflicted upon the people working in packing town, it is the brutality of poverty and need, the brutality of being constantly taken advantage of and robbed of whatever pittance one might have, of whatever hope one may have harbored, the brutality of not having even a moment’s respite from suffering.
The Jungle had a huge impact on the meat packing industry in the U.S., and it is one of the reasons we have certain laws regulating the quality of food and the conditions of workers in this country. Although we have taken great strides forward since Sinclair’s time, the way we produce our food remains exploitative in many ways and on many levels; we have still to leave the jungle.
