Upton Sinclair wrote an expose on how manipulated American factory workers were and how socialism was the answer. And everyone’s takeaway was just, “ew they’re putting rats in our food”. Which, yeah that sucks, but is kinda missing the bigger picture.
Anyway, whenever I see issues with the FDA being underfunded I think about some of the imagery in that book and cringe
yeah Sinclair said afterwards "I was aiming at the audience's heart but missed and hit their stomach"
But tbh reading it I am not sure how you could come away thinking food safety was the main point of the book unless you were willfully ignoring the rest of The Jungle where the poor immigrant family gets scammed and exploited. Or maybe nice middle class people read that and think it's just the will of the free market for the poor to be brutalized but eww I don't want gross sausage.
I’m sure the books message was buried by the spin machine
NYT headline: The Jungle shines a spotlight on food safety in the livestock industry
https://www.nytimes.com/1906/03/03/archives/jurgis-rudkus-and-the-jungle-a-dispassionate-examination-of-upton.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1906/05/18/archives/the-boycott-on-the-jungle-upton-sinclairs-book-in-trouble-in-the.html
Can only read headlines since I don't want to pay the New York Lies subscription.
I think all the time about the part about housing where the houses were built cheaply and made their tenants sick, so they’d get nearly done with a rent-to-own scheme and be evicted due to their inability to work from that illness. Reminds me of when I lived in a trailer park. Those landlords were the most predatory I’ve ever had
Every step of the process of accumulating the small amount of money I have deeply radicalized me.
Every single aspect of life became exponentially easier the further I got away from being homeless. When I hit the "people routinely offer you things that are understood without discussion to be free" I lost my shit and started to see visions of guillotines.
Because nobody actually reads theory anymore