Mason Jennings
US History
2/24/2015
Industrial Food Safety Essay
Have you ever bought a
can of food and just trusted what the label said? Of course you have, everyone who has ever
been to the grocery store or to a restaurant has trusted what the packager of
that article of food you are about to consume has said about that particular
item of food. But unfortunately, it has
not always been that way. There was a
point in time in the United States that the people consuming the meat coming
out of meatpacking plants, especially in a long strip of meatpacking plants in Chicago
famously called “Packingtown”, had no idea what they are actually
consuming. This is a scary thought, and
what is even scarier is that it was only a little over a hundred years ago!
The shocking truth behind the curtains of the meatpacking
facilities in Chicago in the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s was truly
horrific. The main proponent of the
truth being revealed to the public was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, published
in 1906. Originally, the book was
supposed to display the horrible working conditions of the workers who were
working in the meatpacking facilities, but the book uncovered so much
more. A quote from the book can put it
into a nastier image than I could ever think, so in the book, Mr. Sinclair wrote
“They advertised ‘potted chicken,’…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.”
(“tripe” is the meat from the stomach of animals, and “beef suet” is raw
beef or fat)
As promised, the visual from Upton Sinclair’s book, being
gross and repulsive, was the last thing the meatpacking bosses wanted the
public to hear about. This book revealed
the unsanitary conditions and meats in the meatpacking process. Not to mention the attention brought to the
sewers outside of Packingtown. The
sewers and ditches, most commonly referred to as “Bubbly Creek” or “The Bubbly
River”, outside of the meatpacking institutes were the most popular places for
dumping the leftover meat that they did not want to put into their meat. The Creek was said to be ‘crusted sewage
build up’ from the blood, grease, and animal remains from the butcher
shops. And after reading parts of “The
Jungle”, it makes you wonder how bad something had to be to be thrown out when
they were putting absolutely disgusting things into their meat and sending them
off to be eaten by hundreds of families.
And these families were not the only ones to feel the nasty wrath of the meat-packers, but so did the soldiers fighting for the United States in the Spanish-American War.
The scandal most commonly referred to as the ‘United
States Army Beef Scandal’ brought even more attention to the fact that the meat
being sent around was only appropriate for the vultures. 337 tons (that’s 674,000 pounds) of
refrigerated beef and 198,508 pounds of canned beef were sent to Cuba and
Puerto Rico to fee our soldiers. As soon
as the soldiers began eating this sewage, they knew something was up. Major General Nelson A. Miles testified about
the beef and appointed the Dodge Commission on December 21st 1898 to
help him fight his case. He accused the
Commissary Department with accusations that chemically tainted meat was
deliberately being sent to the troops.
After much controversy and skepticism, the testimony came to an end with
the meat being said to be “pure, sound, and wholesome”. Officer Alex B. Powell even said in a letter
to the Commissary that the meat was immediately tarnished as soon as it was
removed from the ice boxes, and that he would even pay a half cent per pound
for proper shipping!
The reason for all of the tainted meat was a call for
volunteers to fight which caused a huge jump in troops from 28,000 to 280,000,
causing the supplies to run thin. With
big, heavy coats in the Caribbean, and eating tarnished meat, it’s no wonder
how around three thousand troops died from disease or sickness and only around
three hundred died from battle, and that is including the Philippine War! Something obviously needed to be done, and
quick. Meat could not keep going around
and being served like this. Theodore
Roosevelt even said to congress that the canned meat was making all of his
troops sick and that “I’d rather eat my hat than another tin of meat”.
The FDA was the answer.
The FDA, or Food and Drug Administration came around in 1906, ironically
the same year that “The Jungle” was published.
The two main proponents of the disgusting meat scandal coming to an end
was, of course, the publication of “The Jungle” and, oddly enough, the assassination
of President McKinley. Before you start
scratching your head too hard about our president’s assassination being a
proponent for the FDA, you must know that after his assassination, someone who
actually had eaten the meat before became president, Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt was one of the, if not the
biggest, proponent of the Pure Food and Drug Act. The Pure Food and Drug Act along with the
Meat Inspection Act, both associated with the FDA, helped eliminate many
diseases transmitted by impure meat.
June 30, 1906 was a busy day for the FDA, and ironically
enough, it was their first day with their official title. On June 30, 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act
was put into effect, along with the dawn of the FDA. The FDA was initiated in response to the
public outrage at the shockingly gross conditions of the Chicago stockyards
that were brought to light by Upton Sinclair in his revolutionary book. Not until 1906, was our food finally being
inspected by professionals. Just one
hundred and nine years ago we could all have been eating tainted meat that was
simply labeled “potted chicken”.
Sources
Sources: Food
Production and Safety during Spanish American War
Primary Sources:
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Cambridge, MA: R.
Bentley, 1971. Print.
-I received a sheet from Ms. Lawson that had an excerpt on
it straight from the book. I thought
this would be helpful in my research since the publication of the book was an
enormous part of the formation of the FDA.
"Primary
Source" American Decades Primary Sources: 1900-1909 Ed. Vincent Tompkins.
Vol. 1. Gale Cengage 2000 eNotes.com 18 Feb, 2015
<http://www.enotes.com/topics/fda-federal-meat-inspection-act>
-This is an “EText” of the Meat Inspection Act itself. Instead of going to the library to find an
actual hard copy of the Act I just found it on an electrical format. This was the end result of all of the beef
and meat scandals that were going around in the United States.
Spanish American War, 1898, Government Documents: Pamphlet
Collection. Washington, D.C.: Govt. Print. Off., 1897. Print.
This is a 996 page government document that covers every
phase of the war that one could think of.
It covers everything from how to deal with enlisted men, rankings of the
men, casualties, and of course, the canned food scandal the soldiers were
forced through. The document was
written 25 years after the war was over, so all aspects of the war are covered.
Tucker, Spencer C. The Encyclopedia of the Spanish-American
and Philippine-American Wars: A Political, Social, and Military History. Santa
Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Print.
This encyclopedia has facts of not only the Spanish American
war but the Philippine-American War too.
The encyclopedia, not surprisingly, goes into great detail of the beef
scandal. Giving specific numbers and
people throughout the chapter titled “Embalmed Beef Scandal”. It even has old pictures of men in white lab
coats inspecting meat carcasses hanging from the ceiling of the Swift &
Company packinghouse in Chicago.
FDA. "U.S. Food and Drug
Administration." U S Food and Drug Administration Home Page. FDA, 18 June
2009. Web. 11 Feb. 2015.
This is the official website of the FDA. Not only does it have basic background
information of the FDA such as founding date and founding reasons, but it also
has some information of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act after the publication
of The Jungle. It even has a picture of
an advertisement for the silent film of The Jungle in 1914.
Brinkley, Alan. American History: A Survey. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1995. Print.
Images
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| Chemical bath that the meat was pulled through with big sticks. |
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| Theodore Roosevelt scooping around with his "investigation" stick in the meat scandal. |
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| Men removing backbones and hides in Chicago. |
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| The Jungle by Upton Sinclair published in 1906, the book that showed the public just how awful the meatpacking business was in Chicago in the late 1800's and the early 1900's. |
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