Collection 5: "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair (excerpt)

Turgis heard of these things little by little, in the gossip of those who were obliged to perpetrate them.

Turgis heard of these things little by little, in the gossip of those who were obliged to perpetrate them.

It was stuff such as this that made the “embalmed beef” that had killed several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards; only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned, it was old stuff that had been lying for years in the cellars.

They were regular alchemists at Durham’s; they advertised a mushroom-catsup, and the men who made it did not know what a mushroom looked like.

Perhaps they had a secret process for making chickens chemically—who knows? said Jurgis’s friend; the things that went into the mixture were tripe, and the fat of pork, and beef suet, and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends of veal, when they had any.

They put these up in several grades, and sold them at several prices; but the
contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper.

All this ingenious mixture was ground up and flavored with spices to make it taste like something.

...but it was hard to think of anything new in a place where so many sharp wits had been at work for so long; where men welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding, were because it made them fatten more quickly; and where they bought up all the old rancid butter left over in the grocery stores of a continent, and “oxidized” it by a forced-air process, to take away the odor, rechurned it with skim milk, and sold it in bricks in the cities!

Up to a year or two ago it had been the custom to kill horses in the
yards—ostensibly for fertilizer; but after long agitation the newspapers had been able to make the public realize that the horses were being canned.

There was another interesting set of statistics that a person might have gathered in Packingtown—those of the various afflictions of the workers.

And the wandering visitor might be sceptical about all the swindles, but he could not be sceptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence of them about on his own person—generally he had only to hold out his hand.

There were those who worked in the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years.