¶ … Jungle, Upton Sinclair describes horrific conditions within the meatpacking plants, and writes of men falling into tanks and being ground up with animal parts and then made into lard (Sinclair pp). He writes that it was Jurgis's job to slide the cows into the trap, calves and all, and on the floor below they took out these slunk calves and butchered them for meat and even used the skins (Sinclair pp). Sinclair describes that cattle that came in hurt, with broken legs, or had died from causes no one knew, were called 'downers,' and the packing house had a special elevator upon which they were raised to the killing beds, where they were handled with businesslike nonchalance and eventually scattered here and there with the rest of the meat so that they could not be identified (Sinclair pp). The author also described that there was never any washing of the walls and rafters...

Moreover, when the meat would be shoveled into carts, the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one, and that there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tid-bit (Sinclair pp).
In "The Chain Never Stops" which appeared in the July/August 2001…