The Jungle (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free Page A

demands of the variable organic being at the center of the process, is also poignantly explored in The Jungle. In the scene in chapter eleven where the steer breaks loose and has to be shot we see the slippage that occurs between living creature and machine. With the men dodging for cover (this is when Jurgis sprains his ankle), we are also reminded of how far this mechanized killing is from the killing done by the hunter who pits his wits against those of his prey.

... And Now?
    Today the Chicago meatpacking plants are all but deserted. The industry has relocated, mostly to small towns in nonunion states. In the 1980s large multinational corporations came to dominate the industry, as Eric Schlosser reveals in his muckraking bestseller Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. These corporations, catering to the fast food chains and their demand for a uniform product, have overseen fundamental changes in how animals are raised, slaughtered, and processed. In one vivid example, Schlosser recounts the story of how one day in 1979, Fred Turner, the chairman of McDonald‘s, had an idea for a finger food made from chicken meat without bones. (Until then McDonald’s had sold only hamburgers.) Once their supplier’s technicians had come up with the “technology of manufacture” (what we once called a recipe) of small pieces of reconstituted white meat held together by stabilizers, which are then breaded, fried, frozen, and reheated, the chicken suppliers got to work on a new breed of chicken. They dubbed this new bird “Mr. McDonald”; its innovative feature was that it had an unusually large breast. One month after McNuggets were launched, Schlosser informs us, McDonald’s became the second-largest chicken purchaser in the United States, right behind Kentucky Fried Chicken.
    As Schlosser’s book makes eminently clear, consumer anxieties that in Sinclair’s day were focused on the killing and processing of the animal now extend well beyond that to the production (through genetic engineering, feeding, and injecting of hormones, etc.) and preparation of the meat. Schlosser also informs us that, as in Sinclair’s day, the current meatpacking workforce is made up largely of immigrants, many illegal, many illiterate, from Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia. They are a short-term, often migrant workforce (the average worker quits or is fired after three months), and they are performing the most dangerous job in the United States, with a rate of injury and job-related illness three times greater than that of the average factory.
    And again, as in Sinclair’s day, most public concern with regard to the meat industry remains focused on the condition of the meat, now with regard to hormones and other additives. In recent years, the public has expressed a growing concern for the experience of the animal, its quality of life, how much room it is given on a daily basis, and how it is fed. With all this newfound concern, however, someone, as in Sinclair’s day, is being left out—the human worker.

Refusing Sentimentality
    In one of the great critical understatements, Edward Clark Marsh wrote in his review of The Jungle, “It is not a pretty story” (The Bookman, April 1906, pp. 195-197; in Critics on Upton Sinclair, edited by Abraham Blinderman). Marsh went on to recommend that the book be experienced firsthand “if you can stomach [it].” Indeed, The Jungle aims to shock middle-class readers out of their complacent sense that their lives need not be touched (or contaminated) by remote social ills. But Sinclair did not have only his middle-class readership in mind as he wrote the novel—far from it. The Jungle, first published in installments in the journal Appeal to Reason, had a socialist readership and was addressed to a working-class audience. He was highly conscious of this readership. (Sinclair had been introduced to socialism in 1902, and by 1904 was becoming an active socialist.) After spending