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
It's a great book with some very evocative imagery and a good main story about an immigrant family being ground down by capital.
One great part is the head of the Lithuanian imigrant family at the start is a bear of a man, tall and muscly; he easily gets work and condescends to all the other workers who complain they can't get jobs, thinking they just don't want it enough. Over the course of the book he is ground down physically until he resembles all the other wretches, vainly trying to get noticed at the factory gates, before being forced into more and more dangerous work. He is blinded by the promise of America and only opens his eyes much too late to save his dependents.
Jesus christ, when the family learns about getting swindled on the house, capital just starts throwing haymakers at them. The whole rats in the meat thing never bothered me as much as how fucking bleak there lives were after being so hopeful and excited for the future.
Yeah, and its made worse by the false hope, where they can see the path they need to tred to get to financial independence but it requires them never making a mistake or having an accident for 25 years.
When the first thing goes wrong the bottom just falls out of their lives.
It’s a great book
no. i liked reading when i was 15 and the jungle was terrible.
Lmao the meme with the dude saying "eww rats in the food" and "capitalism is evil" flying over their head
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.
Actually the real moral of The Jungle was "ew theyre putting the greasy kilbasa-groping fingers of polish immigrants in my food"
I figured the FDA still had a max allotment for non-citizen digits per 10k units delivered
I believe he once quipped “I aimed for the nation’s heart, but I hit it in the stomach.”
Nah but Sinclair's bit about it being "difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" is one of my favorite quotes to trot out when I explain to somebody how class interests and ideology work
I have to say the impact of The Jungle was huge. Now instead of having European immigrants getting mangled in unsafe meat packing facilities we have Latin American immigrants getting mangled in meat packing facilities with the constant threat of ICE over their head if they go to the FDA or OSHA. Progress!
Yeah, I put off reading it for a long time because "my social studies book said it was about food safety, and food safety is reasonably solid now. And it's sooo long, why bother". But I finally got around to it a few years back and wish I had read it much sooner, at least before I was solidly socialist to speed that process up a bit.
But now I rage just a bit harder whenever someone suggests that we need less regulation, or that immigrants shouldn't be given any legal protection, or that capitalism is not an inherently destructive, dehumanizing force. That is to say, highly recommended
Having read it prior to becoming a communist, highly recommend
Sometimes I get so many invasive thoughts about this book that I have to take an Ativan just to force myself to eat food.
"I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
Read it as a class book in high school and the analysis was just as :LIB: as you said. This thing was on the AP test and the most they would say about it is that it changed food safety laws. Apparently when the book was first published that’s what people freaked out about, not the insane labor conditions. It reminds me of that German movie where Hitler travels to the future and kills a dog and THAT’s what makes him unpopular, not, you know, being Hitler.
It reminds me of that German movie where Hitler travels to the future and kills a dog and THAT’s what makes him unpopular, not, you know, being Hitler.
For those not in the know the film is Er ist wieder da / Look who's back and I can't recommend it highly enough
It's been on my bookshelf for a year, haven't cracked it because I thought maybe it doesn't matter anymore? If y'all say so I'll put it on my list.
It’s a quick enjoyable read at the very least, definitely suggest it. Some of the imagery of the slaughterhouse still comes back to me at times.
strong disagree. the book is a slog and a half. i used to like reading and then we were assigned the jungle and all quiet on the western front and a decade+ later I still hate books.
I don't think bad books can ruin the activity of reading. Because you can put them down and grab good books.
I think you just can't be bothered to read anymore because your attention span got nuked by TV and the internet.
I was reminded of it with all the baby formula production discussion
It is just as relevant today as it was 115 years ago and is basically theory
