Meat Inspection Act of 1906
■
Introduction
The Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 (34 Stat. 674)
mandates that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other government agencies regulate
and inspect all meatpacking facilities, including slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, that conduct businesses across state lines. At the time the act was passed,
four large companies—Armour, Swift, Morris, and
National Packing—owned a significant majority of the
nation’s meatpacking facilities. All four companies sold
meat products and operated facilities in several states.
The Federal Meat Inspection Act was enacted on the
same day as its companion bill, the Pure Food and Drug
Act (34 Stat. 768). The two pieces of legislation sought
to remedy unsanitary conditions in the food processing
industry that had been brought to light by worker strikes,
Progressive Era reformers, journalists, and authors.
■
Historical Background and
Scientific Foundations
In 1904 workers in union stockyards and nearby meatpacking plants in Chicago went on strike, demanding
better working conditions and higher pay. The strike was
ultimately unsuccessful, but the news caught the attention of American journalist and author Upton Sinclair
(1878–1968), who was then writing for the Socialist
journal Appeal to Reason in New Jersey and looking for
ideas for a new political novel.
Sinclair visited the Chicago stockyards for two months,
spending most of his time in the tenement neighborhoods
that surrounded meat-processing plants. Technological
advances such as ice boxes and refrigerated railroad cars
enabled meatpacking to transition from seasonal winter
employment to a year-round industry. As stockyards and
meatpacking plants grew, so too did their need for workers. Mechanization and the advent of assembly lines provided jobs for unskilled laborers and recent immigrants
with little command of English. Sinclair spent time with
workers in their homes and talked with them about how a
meatpacking facility worked. He noted that small children
and women were also employed in some parts of the facilities in the same 12-hour shifts, but made a fraction of the
wages as adult male workers. Sinclair found illness was rife
in both the workers and the animals being slaughtered.
Sinclair’s book about the meatpacking industry, The
Jungle, was first published by Doubleday in February
1906. The story follows the plight of the main character,
Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, as he and his family live and work in Packingtown (the nickname of the
area around the Union Stockyards). Sinclair intended his
bestselling story to serve as a socialist allegory, but journalists, politicians, and the public largely ignored most
of the book, focusing instead on eight pages that graphically described the meatpacking industry.
Sinclair described the pervasive stench of the stockyards and the surrounding area, noting that workers returned home covered in animal remnants. Inspectors were
easily bribed. Diseased animals were knowingly taken to
slaughter, processed, and packaged. Ill workers, including
those with tuberculosis, were forced to work for fear of
being blacklisted from employment in spite of the potential danger of contaminating meat. Workers would relieve
themselves near their work stations. Potted meat and sausage products were contaminated with insects, rats, hair,
hide, sawdust, human urine and blood, and animal remnants that had been swept from the floors. Practices such
as these were later documented by government inspectors, but Sinclair added a particular element of horror to
his novel when he recounted a tale of Durham’s Pure Leaf
Lard, which occasionally contained the remains of men
who fell into the large lard processing vats.
Sinclair’s book quickly became popular with the
American public. Magazines and newspapers ran panicked stories of “tubercular beef” and meat industry
practices. Sales of U.S. meat products plummeted.
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)
later admitted to being sickened when he had read an
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Meat Inspection Act of 1906
advance copy of The Jungle. In response to the public
outcry raised by Sinclair’s book and the work of other
muckraking journalists, Roosevelt sent labor commissioner Charles P. Neill (1865–1942) and social worker
James Bronson Reynolds (1861–1908) to conduct a
secret inspection of the nation’s meatpacking industry.
The large meatpacking companies were tipped off about
the inspections. They ordered all facilities to be cleaned,
and instructed English-speaking workers not to talk
to inspectors without a supervisor present. However,
Neill and Reynolds ultimately confirmed the existence
of unhealthy practices within the meatpacking industry. The complete Neill-Reynolds Report indicated that
Sinclair’s novel may have underrepresented the scope of
the hygiene and corruption problems in food processing at the time. Roosevelt later invited Sinclair to the
White House and solicited his advice on how to reform
the industry.
■
Impacts and Issues
On June 30, 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food
and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Also created at Roosevelt’s request was the Food and Drug
WORDS TO KNOW
MEATPACKING: The process of slaughtering animals and preparing meat for sale to consumers.
MUCKRAKERS: Late nineteenth-century and early-twentieth
century journalists, authors, and photographers who
sought social change by featuring injustices in such a way
as to create maximum interest and action in the public.
PROGRESSIVE ERA: A period of social and political reform in
the United States from the 1890s to the 1920s. Progressive Era reforms included labor, education, food safety,
and anti-corruption laws.
REGULATION: Controlling behaviors, business practices, or
industrial practices through rules, restrictions, or laws to
encourage preferred outcomes or prevent undesired outcomes that may otherwise occur.
Administration, charged with oversight of the regulation
and inspection of medicines and foods.
The Federal Meat Inspection Act required four
main reforms. First, livestock must undergo a mandatory
An early-twentieth century cartoon features U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt taking control of the investigation into the meatpacking
scandal. © North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy.
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Meat Inspection Act of 1906
IN CONTEXT: NANO-SCALE
BATTLE AGAINST FOOD
POISONING
Nano-scale technology can be used to protect food from poisonous microbial infections. Scientists attending the Institute
of Food Technologists’ annual meeting in Chicago during July
2010 announced recent advances in reducing levels of foodpoisoning bacteria in foods by means of bactericidal nanoparticles. Bacteria killing and resistant nanoparticles can also be
embedded in packaging. Nano-scale particles of zinc oxide,
for example, take on new properties at such a small scale. The
nano-scale zinc oxide can act to disrupt bacterial membranes,
including potentially deadly E. coli O157:H7 membranes.
Independent experiments of packaging with embedded zinc oxide particles and coatings with nano-scale zinc
oxide mixed with food-grade polylactic acid were tested
against Campylobacter, Listeria, and Salmonella microbes. The
nanoparticle-containing linings and coatings both showed increased resistance. The addition of Nisin, an antibacterial agent
derived from bacteria (a bacteriocin), further enhanced resistance to the potentially deadly food-poisoning bacteria.
inspection before slaughter. Though several stockyards
and slaughterhouses conducted inspections to exclude
diseased animals, corruption, bribery, ineffective training,
and lax enforcement undermined such protocols. Second, every carcass must again be inspected after slaughter, but before processing. Third, meatpacking facilities
must abide by government regulations dictating cleanliness standards and sanitary practices. And finally, the U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA) is authorized to regulate, monitor, and inspect all processing operations.
The original Meat Inspection Act has been
amended several times, most significantly in 1967. Several companion laws have strengthened regulations on
the meatpacking industry to ensure food safety, purity,
and quality. In addition to focusing on meat processing,
subsequent laws set forth standards for slaughterhouses
and mandated more humane methods of killing animals.
Regulation of the meat industry continues to be
controversial. In 2001 Congress overturned reforms intended to reduce repetitive stress injuries among meatpackers. In 2005 the international watchdog group
Human Rights Watch concluded in their report “Blood,
Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and
Poultry Plants” that working conditions in the U.S.
meatpacking industry violated labor laws and basic human rights. The report cited dangerous working conditions, long shifts, repetitive work, unfair wage practices,
anti-union actions, and abuses towards the significant
population of recent-immigrant workers in the industry.
In 2006 the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an
average injury and job-related illness rate among fulltime meatpacking plant employees that was twice as high
as the national average of all manufacturing jobs.
After a series of food recalls occurred in the first decade of the 2000s, including several instances of large
amounts of contaminated meat that reached consumers,
U.S. President Barack Obama in March 2009 called for
re-evaluation of current meat inspection processes and
regulations. By 2011 the Food Safety and Inspection
Service expects to focus on increasing beef inspections
particularly, in order to identify and prevent hamburger
meat contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 bacteria from
reaching consumers. Currently about 70,000 Americans
per year experience illness due to eating foods, mostly
ground beef, that has been contaminated with E. coli.
■
Primary Source Connection
Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to describe the life of the
working class in 1906. He details the meatpacking industry,
from the horrible working conditions to the corruption of
the officials in power. Sinclair, a writer and reformer, was
born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1878. After attending
graduate school at Columbia University, he began to publish novels. Sinclair ran for public office several times as a
Socialist candidate, including runs for a U.S. Senate seat
from New Jersey and the governorship of California. In
1934, as a Democrat, he nearly was elected the governor
of California by promising government-owned factories an
elaborate pension plan. In addition to The Jungle, Sinclair
wrote two other muckraking novels. In 1943, he won the
Pulitzer Prize for the novel Dragon’s Teeth, which addressed
the rise of Adolf Hitler. He died in New Jersey in 1968.
The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 mandated federal
inspection of all livestock (cattle, swine, sheep, goats,
and horses, but not poultry) destined to be sold overseas
or in another state. The legislation is generally credited
to public disgust at the meatpacking processes that were
revealed in the pages of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
The novel provided readers with stomach-churning
descriptions of the unhealthy and corrupt conditions in
the Chicago meatpacking industry. Sinclair’s protagonist
is Jurgis Rudkis, a Lithuanian immigrant who firmly believes that hard work will lead him to success in America.
He perseveres despite one setback after another before
finally becoming disillusioned. Rudkis comes to see that
the forces of the meatpacking industry are too massive to
be overcome by one individual. He becomes a socialist.
Sinclair expected the novel to promote socialism. Most
Americans paid little attention to the book’s political message because they were too horrified by descriptions of
what went into sausages and cans of lard. According to Sinclair, canned meat products contained rats, rat droppings,
expectorations, floor filth, and the occasional unfortunate
worker who fell into a vat. As Sinclair himself declared,
“I aimed at the public’s heart and hit it in the stomach.”
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Meat Inspection Act of 1906
Despite Sinclair’s claim and the oft-told story of The
Jungle converting President Theodore Roosevelt into a
supporter of an inspection law, the book is not solely responsible for the 1906 inspection law. The United States
had been moving towards some sort of wide-ranging federal meat inspection legislation for some years prior to
the publication of The Jungle; however, the book brought
the issue to the forefront of American consciousness.
The first meat regulation appeared in Boston in
1692. These early regulations were not aimed at protecting the consumer from bad meat. Instead, slaughterhouses, with their noise and pollution, were public
nuisances. The regulations aimed to stop or reduce these
nuisances. By the late nineteenth century, increasing
knowledge about bacteria led to an attempt to understand the causes of disease. This development prompted
the rapid expansion of municipal health departments in
the early twentieth century. However, these departments
were badly understaffed and the few inspectors they employed were not professionally trained.
Meanwhile, the first federal meat inspection act
passed on August 30, 1890. It mandated the inspection
of salted pork and bacon intended for export. The law
was a response to strict European import laws aimed
at diseased American meat. On March 3, 1891, in reaction to continued European restrictions, Congress
approved a law that mandated inspection of all cattle,
sheep, and swine prior to slaughter only if the meat was
to be shipped in interstate commerce. Goats, horses,
and poultry were not included, since such animals were
rarely sold by processors.
Congress did not protect the local meat buyer and
did not guarantee the quality of meat after the initial inspection of the live animal. As Sinclair discovered, human
food was prepared under the most revolting conditions.
Meat inspectors sent to Chicago in 1906 by President
Roosevelt after the publication of The Jungle discovered
numerous processing problems. Workers, categorized by
inspectors as “indescribably filthy,” would typically climb
over diseased carcasses thrown on the floor and stand
with dirty shoes upon tables used to process meat. Supervisors were unconcerned with such unsanitary practices, indicating that the practices were common.
The Jungle
With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a sausage factory, the family had a firsthand knowledge of the great majority of Packingtown
swindles. For it was the custom, as they found, whenever
meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything
else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage.
With what had been told them by Jonas, who had worked
in the pickle rooms, they could now study the whole of
the spoiled-meat industry on the inside, and read a new
and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest—that
they use everything of the pig except the squeal.
Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of
pickle would often be found sour, and how they would
rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to
be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles
of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of
meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any
flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams
they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time
and increased the capacity of the plant—a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot,
a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And
yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled,
some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly
bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these
the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which
destroyed the odor—a process known to the workers as
“giving them thirty per cent.” Also, after the hams had
been smoked, there would be found some that had gone
to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as “Number
Three Grade,” but later on some ingenious person had hit
upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone,
about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the
hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no
longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade—there was
only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such schemes—they had what they called “boneless
hams,” which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed
into casings; and “California hams,” which were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut
out; and fancy “skinned hams,” which were made of the
oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no
one would buy them—that is, until they had been cooked
and chopped fine and labeled “head cheese!”
It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came
into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton
of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make
any difference. There was never the least attention paid to
what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way
back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and
that was moldy and white—it would be dosed with borax
and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made
over again for home consumption. There would be meat
that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust,
where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored
in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs
would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about
on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well,
but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and
sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats
were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread
out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and
meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy
story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts,
and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to
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Meat Inspection Act of 1906
lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that
went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to
wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they
made a practice of washing them in the water that was to
be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of
smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the
odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be
dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under
the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced,
there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long
time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste
barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would
be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water—and cartload
after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into
the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public’s
breakfast. Some of it they would make into “smoked” sausage—but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department,
and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to
make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same
bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp
some of it “special,” and for this they would charge two
cents more a pound.
Upton Sinclair
SEE ALSO E. Coli Contamination; Factory Farming;
Food Recalls; Food Safety and Inspection Service;
Humane Animal Farming; Meats.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Becker, Geoffrey S. USDA Meat Inspection and the
Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. Washington,
DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of
Congress, 2008.
Kallen, Stuart A. Is Factory Farming Harming America?
Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2006.
Singh, Vijender. Meat Inspection for Public Health. New
Delhi: Maxford Books, 2007.
Wilson, William. Wilson’s Practical Meat Inspection.
Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2007.
Periodicals
Ciftcioglu, Gurhan, et al. “Survival of Escherichia Coli
O157:H7 in Minced Meat and Hamburger Patties.” Journal of Food, Agriculture and Environment 6, no. 1 (2008): 24–27.
Razzaq, Samiya. “Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome: An
Emerging Health Risk.” American Family Physician 74, no. 6 (2006): 991–996.
SIN CLAIR , UPTON . THE JU N G LE. C AM BR IDGE ,
M A: R . BENTLEY, 1971.
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Adrienne Lerner
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