The Jungle

In the early 1900s or maybe late 1800s when we started getting the railroad systems in place, they centralized meat production right around Chicago area.

The Jungle is a book that came from that period.

It's when a lot of industrialized supply chains started, particularly around agriculture and the meat industry.

And you should read The Jungle by Upton St. Clair, I think.

It's a disgusting environment that they created.

Milk, for example, that they sold as country farm milk was blue because it was coming from cows that were in four walls and not outside, things like that, and being fed crap.

Once you see it, The Nickel Hamburger.

In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel exposing the horrors of Chicago's meatpacking industry.

This wasn't Sinclair's intention.

He was telling the story of those men on the killing floor.

They wanted to know it was clean, pure, safe.

They had to trust that it was.

As Chris Sacka says, good stories beat good spreadsheets, and The Jungle was a damn good story.

It left a mark on everyone.

Some early synthetic dyes contained dangerous chemicals that caused serious health problems.

The turning point came in 1906 when muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, exposing the horrific conditions in America's meatpacking industry.

Public outrage led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, giving the government its first real authority to regulate food additives, including dyes.

By 1931, 15 coal tar dyes had been approved for use in food.

We believe in adapt, improvise, and overcome.

You know, I read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

I understand that industrial revolutions have downsides to them as well.

I'm not sure that this industrial revolution is not going to be – way faster than anyone that we've ever had.

But herein lies the countless love crafting horrors that are various pathogens, can contaminate our food

and if you want to kind of look at some of the early part of that i recommend you have you read the jungle by upton sinclair yeah if you want to look at kind of as we're moving into this more mechanized world of of food production and what that looked like at the turn of the last century that's a really it's an amazing amazing read yeah yes

yeah According to the Centers for Disease Control in the US, they actively monitor and report on foodborne outbreaks, with the top five most common trash contaminants being clavulobacter, E. coli, listeria, salmonella, and botulism.

Mm-mm.

This isn't just US, this is everyone.

And I also want to point out that the reason in the US that these organizations were formed was specifically because, and we've talked about this in past episodes before, giant lobbyists for food safety, you know, all the big organizations, big... big companies who knocked down something crazy like 150 bills in a 50-year period regarding food safety.

And it actually wasn't until Upton Sinclair's The Jungle that people got mad enough that they started pushing through these legislations, which ultimately ended up in the creation of these protections for us.

Exactly.