The Jungle in The Classics

Feb 12, 2021 Amy rated it liked it

Shelves: classic, literary-fiction, bookclub, vegan, social-justice, read-in-2021

I read this for my vegan book club. It's an important and essential read, a difficult read. A result of Upton Sinclair's undercover work in the Chicago meatpacking industry, The Jungle was first published in 1906. Sadly not a lot has changed since then. Animals are still abused and mistreated and it's a dangerous and low paid job for workers. Mostly immigrants worked the meatpacking plants then, as they do now. Back then 8-10 million animals were slaughtered for food daily. Today the number is 7 I read this for my vegan book club. It's an important and essential read, a difficult read. A result of Upton Sinclair's undercover work in the Chicago meatpacking industry, The Jungle was first published in 1906. Sadly not a lot has changed since then. Animals are still abused and mistreated and it's a dangerous and low paid job for workers. Mostly immigrants worked the meatpacking plants then, as they do now. Back then 8-10 million animals were slaughtered for food daily. Today the number is 7.7 billion. “It was all so very business-like that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making reduced to mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the pigs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly and they were so very human in their protests-- and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury as the thing was done here-- swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretense at apology, without the homage of a tear. Now and then a visitor wept to be sure; but this slaughtering-machine ran on, visitors or not visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and memory.” In reading this book, you develop empathy for the plight of the immigrants and workers. There's a section about housing and "swindling poor people" which sounds quite like the housing crisis of 2008. The main character Jurgis, a Lithuanian immigrant, goes through a lot: injury on the job, loss of work, prison, his wife gets sexually assaulted by her boss, death of his wife and child, being homeless and the cycle of poverty. Sinclair writes: “A very few days of practical experience in this land of high wages had been sufficient to make clear to them the cruel fact that it was also a land of high prices, and that in it the poor man was just exactly as poor as in any other corner of the earth; and so there vanished in a night all the wonderful dreams of wealth that had been haunting Jurgis.”

“Red cattle, black, white and yellow cattle; old cattle and young cattle; great bellowing bulls and little calves not an hour born, meek-eyed milch cows, and fierce, long-horned Texas steers.”

“How could they find out that their tea and coffee, their sugar and flour, had all been doctored; that their canned peas had been colored with copper-salts, and their fruit jams with aniline dyes?And even if they had known it, what good would it have done them, since there was no place within miles of them where any other sort was to be had?”
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Jul 24, 2010 Jscorse rated it it was amazing

A must read- unfortunately, the tale is as true (or truer) today than it was 100 years ago. The industrial meat industry is a toxic inhumane cesspool that is wreaking havoc on planet Earth.

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