The Impact of the Jungle

The New York Times has a great opinion piece up at the impact of The Jungle and its specific impact on the food industry of today:

When “The Jungle” was published, the public reaction was instantaneous. Outraged readers deluged President Theodore Roosevelt with letters. Roosevelt was ambivalent, but he invited Sinclair to the White House for lunch, and promised to send his labor commissioner and assistant Treasury secretary to Chicago to investigate....

Sinclair suspected Roosevelt’s team would do a whitewash. But its report strongly reinforced the allegations of “The Jungle.” It included an array of Sinclarian images, like workers using privies without soap or toilet paper and returning “directly from these places to plunge their unwashed hands into the meat.” Popular outrage continued to grow, and the momentum for reform became unstoppable.

Most people never forget the first time they read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. I myself remember quite well picking up the Classics' Illustrated version at the comic book store ^*. I was never quite appalled by the description of the food industry, having always had a private policy that to actually thinking about what I ate would lead to madness, but there's certain aspects of the book that still haunt me: a strange, sensuous description of a sax player; a little boy who gets drunk on a bucket of beer and is eaten by rats; the death of Ona and Jurgis' little boy drowning in a puddle on the street.

100 Years Later, the Food Industry Is Still ‘The Jungle’ [New York Times]

^* — I'm being facetious, but it was a hell of an adapatation. Published by First Comics in the early 90's, if you care to eBay it up.