The Meat Industry In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

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Where does your steak come from? What about that chicken nugget? Do you know what happened to that porkchop? These are all questions that people often try not to think about. Most people know which animal each meat comes from, but we never want to think about what happened to the animal to result in this delicious hamburger. The treatment of our livestock is a topic that usually makes us cringe and turn away in disgust.
There were no laws or guidelines on the treatment of livestock. Meat packing agencies were individually owned, and they had the right to do whatever they wanted in order to increase profit. Nobody cared where their meat came from. This happened until 1906, when Upton Sinclair wrote a book called “The Jungle.” This book exposed meat industries on the dangerous, unsanitary, and immoral practices they were using. This included using rotten, moldy meat in their products, slicing up animals while alive, workers being underaged, and even a story about a employee falling into the meat grinder while performing dangerous tasks, and the process continuing anyway. When citizens we're exposed to this book, they decided that they did not support the meat industry, and president Roosevelt …show more content…
Farmers can be forced to pay to update their farms to make their holding areas, and practices more comfortable for the animals, and instead of killing the animals for free, they have to buy the tools required to kill them humanely. They are also required to have a veterinarian on the premises that watches production, and is supposed to report anything they think is inhumane. Aside from the cost, companies have to constantly deal with accusations, and assumptions from society, and large organizations like PETA. Large meat industries face being taken to court on often also. All of these conflicts takes, what seems to them like a simple process, and makes it a large, complicated, expensive
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