A jungle no more

摘要

"There would be meat that had tum-bled 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." Thankfully, much has changed since Upton Sinclair published "The Jungle", a best-selling novel exposing the unsanitary conditions, labour practices and animal handling in the Chicago stockyards at the start of the last century. Sinclair's book helped bring into existence, in 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspec- tion Act, the first in a series of sanitary and consumer-protection laws. Chicago continued to be America's slaughter capital until the 1950s, when slaughterhouses moved away because it was cheaper and more efficient to put them close to ranches and then to ship the meat around the country in refrigerated lorries.