Episode · Stuff You Should Know · 2024-02-13
Books mentioned on What Americans Ate When There Were No Food Laws
There was a brief period in America’s history – after people left the farm to work in the city and before the government started regulating it – when there was a total, lawless free-for-all in the food industry. Things were bad.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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The Jungle
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is a muckraking novel exposing the brutal working and sanitary conditions inside the early twentieth-century American meatpacking industry.
Discussed“Like you said, he was a hardcore socialist and a writer who wrote the very famous book The Jungle about... Well, most people who have never read The Jungle probably say, 'Yeah, it's about exposing the meatpacking in Chicago, right?'”
Where to get it
