Boss Hog

The gorging that is Thanksgiving that made me think of this...

When I last wrote about Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, I neglected to mention Jeff Tietz's horrifying article about modern pork production, "Boss Hog" posted December 2006 on Rolling Stone online.

I won't go into details but trust me when I say that after reading this article I could not eat pork for weeks.

Okay I'll post just the first paragraph:

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

That's just the start. It gets much worse. Very eye-opening.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

A few days ago, I finished reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Even though it was well written and the plot was captivating, I had a hard time reading The Jungle. You just felt so sad for all the characters; Jurgis & Ona Rudkus; Marija Berczynskas & Tamoszius Kuszleika; Teta Elzbieta; Dede Antanas; and all the little children.

The graphic descriptions of the inhumane working conditions, of the disgusting meatpacking industry, of the problems of non-English speaking immigrants, it just made me want to stop reading.

I can see how this book outraged the public when it was published in 1906 and led to the passage of pure food laws.

Even with the pure food laws, it is clear from reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore’s Dilemma that we still don't know what goes into our food. We think "free-range" is a clear enough term but most of us don't what it really means. We can read the ingredients of a product, but how many of us know that citric acid, lactic acid, glucose, fructose, malodextrin, ethanol, sorbitol, manitol, xanthan gum, dextrins, and monosodium glutamate (among many other common ingredients) are corn-processed additives!

Even though it did not succeed in converting Americans to socialism, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle continues to ring true today. Can you imagine the public outrage and the call for change that would happen if we all knew the truth of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO)?

I am eager to read Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (a non-fiction book about the problems facing American workers -- click here to view all my posts about this book), to learn about the problems facing the modern poor and the middle class alike.

More Library Books

I went to the library yesterday to return a few books, and I could not resist borrowing a few.

• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
• Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds by Bernd Heinrich

You've probably heard of the first two and the third was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year (click here to read David Quammen's review titled "Bird Brains" and published August 1, 1999). Heinrich, who I am not familiar with, is a well known science writer who focuses on animals.

Lately, I've been feeling like it would be good to re-read some of the classics so expect to see me read books like Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe this summer.