Excerpts from the Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Section 1-Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore

that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the

butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a

person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere

lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss-

crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails, –

they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan.

There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial

light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour.

There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a

fearful kind of work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a

few years. 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. There were the wool-pluckers,

whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be

painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till

the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and their hands,

too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping

machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and

forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were the "hoisters," as they were called, whose

task it was to press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering

down through the damp and the steam; and as old Durham's architects had not built the killing room for the

convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the

one they ran on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking like

chimpanzees.

Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These

people could not be shown to the visitor, – for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a

hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there

were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they

were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting, – sometimes they would be

overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!

Underline any passages that describe the hazardous treatment of food in factories.

Section 2-Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions- a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no

odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut

up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was

moldy and white – it would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over

again for home consumption.

There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had

tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms;

and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark

in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls

of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them;

they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no

joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a

rat even when he saw one – there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned

rat was a tidbit.

There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a

practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of

smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be

dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers

enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out

of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale

water – and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and

sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage – but as the smoking took

time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax

and color it with gelatin to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came

to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.