Jungle by Upton Sinclair: What

¶ … Jungle by Upton Sinclair: What is Upton Sinclair's portrait of industrial capitalism in the Jungle? How is the meatpacking industry connected to other institutions represented in the novel? Why does Sinclair focus on European immigrants in this book? Upton Sinclair wrote his expose of the meatpacking industry The Jungle partly as a way of demonstrating the rapacious and inhuman nature of capitalism, when it was not curtailed by some government controls regarding worker and consumer safety, and partly to demonstrate to the consumers of meat products themselves the dangers posed to their health when they ate such tainted foods.

Sinclair wrote his muckraking work when he was still a "desperately poor, young socialist hoping to remake the world when he settled down in a tarpaper shack in Princeton Township and penned his Great American Novel." (Blackwell, 2005) Meat was an ideal industry for Sinclair to target in his 1906 novel, because the production of food was not a commodity, like cloth, that could merely harm the producers of the good. Even readers far away from the factories were struck with fear as well as compassion, reading the text.

Over and over again Sinclair underlined that it was not only the individuals caught in the jungle of packing and cutting of who were at risk for disease and infection. Rather, the ordinary, middle class consumers who fed such products to their unsuspecting loved ones and children could also die from the unsanitary conditions the workers of The Jungle must suffer. Thus, the book was effective in that it 'hit' the early 20th century reader where she or he lived -- and ate.

The metaphors of meat in The Jungle also provided Sinclair with many potent metaphors for human life under capitalism. Americans of his day all dwelled in a capitalist society that was a jungle of unregulated human greed. Like wild animals stalking meat, the capitalists of Sinclair's jungle stalked the prey of higher profits, without a care for the consumers they serve, or the workers who make such profits possible.

In the novel's narrative, meat, the flesh of animals, constantly becomes a metaphor for how Sinclair's workers are ground into similar meat through the factory. The workers, over the course of the novel, become like the hamburger or sausages ground through the great, grinding mills and metal apparatus of the factory system. Later, the unwholesome meats are ground through the poor digestive systems of the consumers of the foodstuffs.

The production of food and meat does not have to be like it is depicted in The Jungle, however, in the author's view. Sinclair was no vegetarian. Sinclair focused on European immigrants in his work, partly as a reflection of the reality that such immigrants were usually chosen first and foremost for the low wages that accompanied the horrific task of working in the meatpacking plants. But these immigrants also represented a tie with an earlier and more wholesome relationship with the land.

Despite their desperation working in the factories, the European immigrants of Sinclair could remember a time, from their childhood in other nations, where food production was health and agriculturally focused, rather than something that was done purely for profit, without concern for worker's health.

For example, the Lithuanian delicatessen vender, Jokubas Szedvilas, begins by owning his own means of selling foodstuffs in a more healthful and independent fashion that the mechanisms of production destroy, in contrast to what Sinclair calls the "metaphors of human destiny," in the form of the miles of cattle to be put in chutes and killed.

(Chapter 3) Later, a young couple, Jurgis and Ona, recall they "had always been accustomed to eat a great deal of smoked sausage, and how could they know that what they bought in America was not the same -- that its color was made by chemicals, and its smoky flavor by more chemicals, and that it was full of 'potato flour' besides? Potato flour is the waste of potato after the starch and alcohol have been extracted; it has no more food value than so much wood, and as its use as a food adulterant is a penal offense in Europe, thousands of tons of it are shipped to America every year." (Chapter 13) European immigrants before they came to their new land could recall working on a farm and selling the goods they raised naturally for food.

Farmers were also able to reap the profits of the goods they sold, in contrast to factory workers who were always working for a wage and producing food they would never eat in such mass quantities, even if they should desire to consume the tainted product. The human animal under capitalism, Sinclair stresses, is reduced to a worker oxen, then.