1904 sausage factory poem

 The passage focuses on the poor conditions in a sausage factory as well as how they are processed.  It is written by an American muckraking journalist called Upton Sinclair who published this extract in 1904. He intended to inform the population about how appalling and grotesque these canned sausages were. 

In the first paragraph, Sinclair writes a bit about what happens in a factory and packing the meat.

The second paragraph focuses on the grim processes to prepare the meat for canning, one example would be that they burn the spoiled meet off the carcass with a white hot iron. They would also inject pickle and vinegar into the sausage as well as rub in soda so that it would take away the vile smell. It is written that the smell of the spoiled, rotting meat was so bad that a man could hardly be in a room with them. All this casts a negative enthesis upon the factors production and it's poor methods. To further support this point the preparation process is a semantic field of medicine connoting that the meat was sick and diseased.

In the third paragraph, it talks about how the white, mouldy, old rejected sausages from Europe were shipped back to America, dosed in borax and glycerin then put into a hopper for re consumption. The "borax" and "glycerine" relate to my previous point about being medicinally related. The extract states the mouldy meat was "dumped into the hoppers" suggesting carelessness and lack of sanity when handling food. 

The last paragraph contains the shocking detailed facts about the factory overall. The passage states that the meat tumbled out onto the floor polymerising with the dirt, sawdust and spit. Furthermore, it is written that the factory was infested with rats and the rats would ingest the rat poison then ground up for canned sausages. All this highlights the foulness of what goes into the supposed "sausages". The vulgar processing, nasty extra chemicals, spit, dirt and sawdust as well as rats and rat poison disillusions their buyers into thinking they have a pure and tasty product.

In conclusion, the sausages were rancid and inedible. The sausage factory also exploited their audience as well as the factory workers who were mostly immigrants migrating over to America for a better way of life. At that time American industries were more concerned with mass-producing their food product instead of the quality of it henceforth the shocking food hygiene and quality.