The Jungle Revisited
You can read all about Upton Sinclair here, if you’re interested, so I won’t dwell on him that much. I couldn’t think of his name again this morning and I couldn’t remember Sinclair Lewis either (I always confuse them, but if I remember one I remember the other). I haven’t read The Jungle, but know its historical place in reforming the meat industry. That’s why I thought of it, but couldn’t think of it, when I read the following article in USAToday. Google is my prosthetic memory, and I eventually found what I was looking for by a search on “progressive meat” (sounds like a Zappa composition!), which took me to a PDF of The Meat Packing Industry In Chicago During The Progressive Era, where The Jungle was referenced. That’s a lot of work for an offhanded citation in a preface…
Food safety chief scolds inspectors
By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
In an extraordinary criticism of federal meat inspectors, their own boss has lambasted them for at times failing to intervene in the face of unsafe and cruel practices at the nation's meat processing plants.
Garry McKee, administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service, gave a blistering speech last month at a conference in Nashville. It is posted on the FSIS Web site.
He alluded to one incident this summer at an Illinois slaughterhouse that appeared in violation of the Humane Slaughter Act, which the USDA enforces. As many as 1,600 hogs died from overheating over the course of several days as they awaited slaughter. Only after several days did the USDA inspector shut down the plant.
"Is it such a stretch of the imagination ... (w)hen animals are dying in large numbers in transporters awaiting slaughter — day after day — that there may be something inhumane about these losses and it is our responsibility to intervene?" McKee asked the 300 food inspection supervisors on Oct. 27.
Doesn’t seem as though we’ve progressed that much since the Progressive Era, does it? Here’s some more evidence of that “thesis,” as lifted from the Upton Sinclair page:
After the USA declared war on the Central Powers in 1917 the Espionage Act was passed and this resulted in several of Sinclair's socialist opponents, being imprisoned for their opposition to the war. Sinclair now took up their case and when Eugene Debs, was imprisoned Sinclair wrote to Woodrow Wilson arguing that it was "futile to try and win democracy abroad, while we are losing it at home."
5:59:36 AM 
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