Journal Entry #5
I found some important information in this book regarding the sale of diseased and unsanitary meat, and other methods companies used cheat and get a greater profit. Most companies sold the same product with a different label and a higher price. One example of this is the system the meat packing industry used to sell their chicken. The ingredient for their chicken did not even originate from a chicken.
Perhaps they had a secret process for making chickens chemically—who knows? Said Jurgis’ friend; 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. They put these up in several grades, and sold them at several prices; but the contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper. (Sinclair, 96)
In a second example the same idea came into play with sausages.
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 gelatine to make it brown. All of the 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. (Sinclair, 135)
The quality of the sausage meat was also never paid any attention either.
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 glycerine, and dumped in the hoppers, and made over again for 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 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. (Sinclair, 134)
