In the 1900s , meat industry workers worked in awful conditions . A muckraker named Upton Sinclair exposed the meat industry in his book “ The Jungle “ . A muckraker is someone who seeks out the secrets of business or scandel and exposes them for the public to see . Sinclair himself was a writer . The meat produced in the plants was extremely unsanitary . When they first read it , the public was absolutely horrified .
In the slaughterhouses , there would be meat that had tumbled onto the floor , in dirt and sawdust , and had billions of germs on it . When it rained , water would fall onto it through cracks in the ceiling . Rats would often gather round the meat , and the meat itself was often covered in rat waste . Dead rats would be thrown …show more content…
Carcasses on hooks swing by and knock down workers . Meatpacking workers routinely develop back problems, shoulder problems, carpal tunnel syndrome, and "trigger finger" . The machines used in slaughterhouses would occasionally injure or kill workers .
The outrage was so great from reading “ The Jungle” that Theodore Roosevelt was forced to order an investigation of the meat industry . Other countries refused to import American meat . In that same year , 1906 , both the Food and Drug act and the Meat Inspection Act were passed . “ The Jungle eventually led to the creation of the FDA ( Food & Drug Administration ) . In later years , such as few years ago , other reports about the meat industry and slaughterhouse conditions have led to programs to put more healthy food choices in the cafeteria , most notably the “ Healthy Food Initiative “ .
I have proven my point by giving details about conditions of slaughterhouses . If the public didn’t care , none of those acts would have passed . Nor would the FDA have ever been created . The consumption of American meat would not have gone down considerably . Later that year ( 1906 ) , Roosevelt sent two undercover agents to report the activity in the slaughterhouses . When they came back , they verified Sinclair’s report as accurate