By DR. LARRY MOSES

No one asked me but…While my wife and I were on our regular social outing, a trip to Lin’s Market, we met Monte Bledsoe of the infamous Quail Hollow gang. I have had many occasions to met Monte and he has always been a very happy and upbeat fellow and he was no less so this day.

He apparently has survived his dreaded encounter with an overzealous Southern Nevada Health Department hack. Monte did not seem overly anxious to rehash the issue and we, instead, discussed last week’s column on gun control.

However, the encounter did set me off in search of the history of meat inspection in America.

The issue came to the forefront of America in 1905 with the publication of Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle. The book was the effort of an unsuccessful socialist writer from the turn of the century. Sinclair’s first four novels were non-sellers. I know how he feels. However, The Jungle was an instant best seller.

Sinclair had intended it to be an indictment of the working conditions of meat packers and the oppression of the economically challenged.

By the way: don’t you just love the term economically challenged? I heard it used by a TV newscaster. They are the poor, not the economically challenged. That is like calling a drug pusher an unlicensed pharmaceutical salesman, or an illegal alien an undocumented worker. Oh! Wait the federal government does that. I hate euphemisms. Things are what they are. They’re poor.

Using language like the quote below Upton Sinclair hoped to call attention to the plight of the exploited packinghouse worker and bring about reforms in their working conditions.

Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, …There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers… a fearful kind of work, that began at four o’clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. …those who worked in the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was …five years. …wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces … for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. …Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there…and not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were the “hoisters,” … They ran along upon a rafter, …at every few feet they would have to stoop under a beam … which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any …were the fertilizer men,… who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, …they fell into the vats; …sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!

Had Sinclair stopped, here his book might have been a cry to reform work conditions, but it probably would not have sold many copies. After describing the work conditions of the packing plants, he described the product they were putting out.

“…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 glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers,…for home consumption. …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. …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. …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. …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. …(in) waste barrels. Every spring … 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.”

President Theodore Roosevelt, who read twenty to twenty-five books a week, read The Jungle. He called Upton Sinclair to the White House to verify what he had read.

Roosevelt had little sympathy for the immigrant workers of the Chicago packing industry but was quite concerned about the meat that would appear on his table. In 1906, he had the Federal Meat Inspection Act passed. No other major act was passed until 1957 with The Poultry Products Inspection Act. The USDA was given authority over inspection in 1967. In 1970, The Eggs Production Inspection Act was added.

I understand the need to monitor the meat producers in America. However, one must question whether a private party for people who have chosen to eat locally produced food products must be harassed by a government bureaucrat.

As a city boy who thought milk came from a truck until he was eighteen and was not real excited when he found out the truth. I like the fact that the food I eat is inspected, but if my neighbor knowingly chooses to drink raw milk and un-inspected locally grown meat, it should be his/her choice.

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