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
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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
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.
Lmao the meme with the dude saying “eww rats in the food” and “capitalism is evil” flying over their head
Actually the real moral of The Jungle was “ew theyre putting the greasy kilbasa-groping fingers of polish immigrants in my food”
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.
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.
