Beef: Social Issues- The Jungle
As New Dreamers are aware, and as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization states so well, “Ultimately, environmental issues are social issues: environmental costs created by some groups and nations are carried by others, or by the planet as a whole. The health of the environment and the availability of resources affect the welfare of future generations, and overuse of resources and excess environmental pollution by current generations are to their detriment.”*
The previous section about the impact of the beef industry on the environment, in particular the industry’s impact on climate change, fresh water availability and land use. The following section addresses the impact of the beef industry on human health and social justice. This section will specifically address the way in which the beef industry in the United States directly affects a specific community: employees of slaughterhouses.
The Jungle
In 1906, Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, a muckraking exposé of the meatpacking industry at that time. Sinclair discusses in great detail the disparity between the “have-nots,” the workers living with an absence of social protections to protect them and their families from their dangerous work environments, and the “haves,” the corrupt captains of the beef industry. Perhaps the most noted passage of The Jungle is the following:
“There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off . . . and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,--sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!”
Sinclair hoped to improve the social condition of the workers. Americans, however, were less shocked by the working conditions than they by the possibility that they were consuming “human lard.” As Sinclair later wrote, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” The Food and Drug Administration was established soon after the novel’s publication regulate and supervise food inspections and safety.
Learn about how meatpacking is still the most dangerous job in the U.S.