Speaker 1: School of Humans. If you haven't had the pleasure of
Speaker 1: eating old, rotten, contaminated beef before, it's not great. Spoiler.
Speaker 1: I recently went to a waffle house with one of
Speaker 1: my friends, and while she did not realize at the time,
Speaker 1: she indeed was eating some gross, nasty meat and she
Speaker 1: suffered accordingly. Here is her historical account.
Speaker 2: When I took my first bite, it tasted oddly sweet,
Speaker 2: and I thought, gosh, this dinerlike establishment is way fancier
Speaker 2: than I thought, because they must have some sort of
Speaker 2: tomato jam or something that's making this burger taste really sweet,
Speaker 2: kind of sickly sweet, like nothing I had ever tasted before.
Speaker 2: And when did I realize that something was wrong, I
Speaker 2: would say within seventy five seconds, when my stomach started
Speaker 2: digesting in a violent manner, and I realized that no
Speaker 2: one's stomach should make those sounds. I eat the whole burger.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna lie. I thought, maybe if I keep going,
Speaker 2: this will get better. And then I felt the sensation
Speaker 2: of everything I've ever eaten rising up into my thoat,
Speaker 2: and I said, I'm gonna throw up. So I stood
Speaker 2: up and walked into the bathroom and put my face
Speaker 2: closer into the toilet than I ever thought I would
Speaker 2: as such an establishment, and I threw that bad boy
Speaker 2: right up.
Speaker 1: Don't worry, she is healed today and she, you know, luckily,
Speaker 1: has had the courage to return to waffle House since
Speaker 1: the incident. But it's crazy that I mentioned that, because
Speaker 1: that's what I want to talk about today, because as
Speaker 1: the thing is, tomorrow, we Americans all across the land
Speaker 1: will gather and gorge ourselves on various food items to
Speaker 1: celebrate Thanksgiving, the holiday that commemorates when Pilgrims and Indigenous
Speaker 1: Americans sat down and feasted together in the ongoing crisis
Speaker 1: of a European colonialism that had already wiped out about
Speaker 1: ninety seven percent of the Native Americans in New England
Speaker 1: from you know, white people introducing disease and other various
Speaker 1: acts of genocide. As a little treat, I just wanted
Speaker 1: to give you something to ruminate on that will just
Speaker 1: really enhance your experience of eating turkey, ham and other meats.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is about a rotten beef scandal, yes, and
Speaker 1: what it took to stop having so much poisonous meat
Speaker 1: on grocery store shelves. Theme song This is American filth.
Speaker 1: I'm Gabby Watts. Every week I tell you a film
Speaker 1: the story from American history. Today's episode the Embalmed Beef Scandal.
Speaker 1: So let's go back in our fifth time machine to
Speaker 1: the Spanish American War. So Cuba had been trying to
Speaker 1: get independence from Spain for a while. You know. First
Speaker 1: of all, there was the Ten Years War in eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, which ended, can you believe it in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight, exactly ten years later, But they continue fighting,
Speaker 1: and eventually the United States was like, hmmm, we should
Speaker 1: get involved in this conflict because you know, we love
Speaker 1: it when people fight for independence. That's what we did.
Speaker 1: Let's help you Just kidding. That was not our motivation.
Speaker 1: The US got involved for its own political and economic interest.
Speaker 1: The US wanted to get Spain aka European mega powers
Speaker 1: out of the America region. Also, some historians have hypothesized
Speaker 1: another reason that the US might have gotten involved was
Speaker 1: that the US wanted to make sure that the black people,
Speaker 1: who made up two fits of the population of Cuba
Speaker 1: would not make their own nation state on the island. So,
Speaker 1: to summarize, the US got involved for the usual reasons
Speaker 1: White supremacy and capitalism. At least we are consistent. What
Speaker 1: really escalated the war zeal in the public was in
Speaker 1: February of eighteen ninety eight, one of the US's battleships
Speaker 1: was destroyed in Havana by a mysterious explosion that killed
Speaker 1: two hundred and sixty eight men. And what's really fun
Speaker 1: about that was that it was it's never proven what
Speaker 1: caused the explosion, but the US was like, whoops, I
Speaker 1: guess this proves we for sure need to get involved.
Speaker 1: So the US entered the war in April eighteen ninety eight,
Speaker 1: and it only lasted a few months. The United States
Speaker 1: emerged victorious. By August eighteen ninety eight, Cuba was independent,
Speaker 1: but somehow the US had acquired Puerto Rico Guam in
Speaker 1: the Philippines. And the cool thing about all of this
Speaker 1: is that no Cuban representatives were invited to the peace talks.
Speaker 1: During the Spanish American War, the United States deployed about
Speaker 1: two hundred and seventy four thousand soldiers and about three
Speaker 1: thousand men died. But the thing is only two hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty got killed in battle. The rest two thousand,
Speaker 1: six hundred and thirty died from other stuff, and some
Speaker 1: people suspected that some of the soldiers were dying from
Speaker 1: the food that the army had provided to them, specifically
Speaker 1: the beef. Apparently, this beef was so good that everyone
Speaker 1: was calling it red horse mm horse. Once older described
Speaker 1: the canned beef that they had gotten. Here's what he said.
Speaker 1: A tin of red horse would be handed to one
Speaker 1: man who opened it. He put it to his nose,
Speaker 1: smelled of it, wrinkled up his face, and took a spit.
Speaker 1: The next man did the same, and the next till
Speaker 1: the eight men of the mess had smelled, grimaced, and spit.
Speaker 1: Then that tin of red horse was thrown overboard for
Speaker 1: any of the fishes of the Atlantic Ocean who might
Speaker 1: like it. What we called red horse soon had all
Speaker 1: our country scandalized with its new name of embalmed beef. Yuma,
Speaker 1: embalmed beef. Doesn't that sound appetizing? What do you guys
Speaker 1: think that the taste palette of this embalmed beef was?
Speaker 1: I'm thinking a rancid acid with undertones of dead grandma yummy.
Speaker 1: The soldier continued, It was so embalmed with all flavor
Speaker 1: of life and every suck of nourishment gone from it
Speaker 1: through having nevertheless a putridity of odor, more pungent than
Speaker 1: ever reaches the nostrils from a properly embalmed cadaver. They
Speaker 1: used to talk different. Anyway, this soldier had the wisdom
Speaker 1: to not actually eat this beef, but a lot of
Speaker 1: soldiers were getting sick. So the news of this nasty
Speaker 1: meat reached the public and they were upset. They were like, oh,
Speaker 1: you send their boys to war and then you give
Speaker 1: them nasty beef. That's horrible. One concerned mom complained to
Speaker 1: the president, President William McKinley, and was like, we are
Speaker 1: living under a generous government with a good kind man
Speaker 1: at an head, willing to give the army the best possible,
Speaker 1: and yet thieving corporations will give the boys the worst.
Speaker 1: So where did all this nasty embalmed beef come from?
Speaker 1: Most of the meat contracts that the army had were
Speaker 1: with these meat packers based out of Chicago, the land
Speaker 1: of wind and poorly constructed pizza. Chicago became the place
Speaker 1: for meatpacking in the eighteen sixties. There are five main
Speaker 1: meat packing companies, and the men who ran these companies
Speaker 1: developed a lot of innovations that solidified their meat packing prowess.
Speaker 1: They came up with assembly lines, ice cold rooms so
Speaker 1: you could process year round refrigerated freight cars. At first,
Speaker 1: people were very suspicious of refrigerated beef. It was like,
Speaker 1: what you want me to eat meat that has been
Speaker 1: out for more than a week after it has been killed.
Speaker 1: That's crazy. But the thing is money. The refrigerated beef
Speaker 1: was a lot cheaper than fresh meat, so people were like,
Speaker 1: never mind, give me that Old Meat. Side note, I
Speaker 1: did briefly have a country band called Old Meat, but
Speaker 1: it never took off. Here are some of the song
Speaker 1: titles Highway sixty nine, fat Boys in big trucks, road Headache,
Speaker 1: drinking whiskey on the Lord's Day, and of course big
Speaker 1: old Pussy. So yeah, I have no idea why nobody
Speaker 1: liked us anyway. Not only was their refrigerated meat, canned
Speaker 1: meat was also on the up and up, and canned
Speaker 1: meat was generally the worst meat out there, just very
Speaker 1: low grade. It was boiled, packed into cans and broth
Speaker 1: and then sterilized technically. And if you can believe it,
Speaker 1: the meatpacker bosses didn't really give a fuck about their workers.
Speaker 1: They were all about doing it fast. All the meatpacking
Speaker 1: plants weren't a part of Chicago that everyone called packing town.
Speaker 1: The plants were these huge, sprawling yards, and most of
Speaker 1: the laborers were immigrants working in these very dangerous and
Speaker 1: crowded conditions. The rooms were dark and unventilated, and they
Speaker 1: were paid atrociously mere pennies an hour. The only people
Speaker 1: who got a better wage were the people who did
Speaker 1: the pace setting, basically the managers on the floor who
Speaker 1: had just speed up the assembly lines so they had
Speaker 1: to work at a faster and faster rate. And because
Speaker 1: these meat packer dudes controlled so much of the production,
Speaker 1: they were able to set their own prices. A lot
Speaker 1: of muckraking journalists at the time were doing stories on
Speaker 1: them and called them the Beef Trust. I would have
Speaker 1: called them the Beefy and the piggy Boys, but that's
Speaker 1: just me. But yeah, as you can imagine, in these
Speaker 1: working conditions, nothing bad could ever happen with the meats.
Speaker 1: But anyway, back to the embalmed beef in the Spanish
Speaker 1: American Wars. President McKinley was taking these embalmed beef accusations
Speaker 1: very seriously, you know, because he was concerned about the
Speaker 1: quality of beef in his soldier's health. He was definitely
Speaker 1: not concerned about the fact that Congress might lose its
Speaker 1: Republican lead in the upcoming election if he didn't do
Speaker 1: anything about it. Anyway, McKinley set up a commission to investigate.
Speaker 1: They found a witness, Major General Nelson A. Miles, who
Speaker 1: was convinced that the beef had something injected into it
Speaker 1: that was making all the soldiers sick, and that the
Speaker 1: beef was being preserved with secret evil chemicals. Miles talked
Speaker 1: about the accounts of a doctor who was a chief
Speaker 1: surgeon with the army in Tampa. The doctor had seen
Speaker 1: a large hunk of meat hanging on the deck of
Speaker 1: a boat in the sun, and he said that after
Speaker 1: sixty hours, instead of it being brotten and decomposing, the
Speaker 1: meat looked fine, and he was like, that would have
Speaker 1: been impossible without the use of dangerous chemicals. The doctor
Speaker 1: also observed some other beef that had an odor similar
Speaker 1: to an involved human body, and when cooked, it tasted
Speaker 1: like decomposed boric acid, and some of the soldiers said
Speaker 1: it smelt like a bouquet of cesspools. Mmm. Miles report
Speaker 1: about what this doctor had seen made the Commissary General
Speaker 1: Charles Patrick Egan pissed because he was like, Wow, are
Speaker 1: you accusing me of buying poisoned beef for the army?
Speaker 1: Fuck you, Miles, you bitch ass cook. You're a goddang
Speaker 1: stupid ass liar. He didn't say that exactly, but he
Speaker 1: did use such foul language against Smiles that Egan got
Speaker 1: court martialed for conduct unbecoming of an officer and was
Speaker 1: suspended from the Army for six years. Whoopsies. Anyway, most
Speaker 1: of this meat had been provided by one of the
Speaker 1: beefy and piggy boys, Philip Armor, whose company was called
Speaker 1: Armor and Company. Can you believe it? He had sold
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand pounds of beef to the army in
Speaker 1: May eighteen ninety eight, and an Army inspector tested this
Speaker 1: meat specifically, and he found that there were seven hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty one cases of rotten meat. And then in
Speaker 1: the canned meat he found several tins that had been
Speaker 1: busted open and quote the effervescent futrid contents of which
Speaker 1: were distributed all over the cases. So, anyway, there is
Speaker 1: a bunch of various cases from soldiers to generals who
Speaker 1: were like, yeah, this beef was nasty, it smelled bad.
Speaker 1: There was probably something evil injected into it. Also, it's rotten.
Speaker 1: You gave us bad meat. But the meatpackers were like, actually,
Speaker 1: the refrigerator beef was fine. Y'all just didn't handle it properly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: y'all didn't have enough ice for the refrigeration. I heard
Speaker 1: that y'all transported the meat in wagons that had also
Speaker 1: transported manure and garbage and was crawling with maggots. So
Speaker 1: that's not our fault. You guys are dumb. Also, no,
Speaker 1: we didn't put dangerous chemicals in the canned meat. Who
Speaker 1: do you think we are? And actually, the meat packers
Speaker 1: did directly address that beef that was hanging up on
Speaker 1: the deck of the boat. They were like, yeah, we
Speaker 1: sent some cows that had some preservatives in them, but
Speaker 1: we were just doing an experiment. We weren't meaning for
Speaker 1: anyone to eat those beefs. We were just seeing what
Speaker 1: would happen. Okay. So, yet, no one can prove that
Speaker 1: harmful chemicals had been used to preserve the beef that
Speaker 1: were making the soldiers sick and die. What the studies
Speaker 1: did conclude was that maybe the beef wasn't poison it
Speaker 1: was just normal gross meat. You're getting nauseated not because
Speaker 1: it's poisoned, but because it tastes bad. Easy mistake. Also,
Speaker 1: through these investigations, it was becoming clear that a lot
Speaker 1: of the death and sickness during the war was due
Speaker 1: to unsanitary conditions at the army camps, which led to
Speaker 1: a lot of people getting typhoid fever. Like, for example,
Speaker 1: a one camp, all the soldiers were drinking well water
Speaker 1: that hadn't been boiled. But this well was within three
Speaker 1: feet of an outhouse. So basically people were getting sick
Speaker 1: not from beef, but from drinking their own shit. Aha,
Speaker 1: we love to hear it. So even despite these findings,
Speaker 1: a lot of people were still like, I don't trust
Speaker 1: the beefy and the piggy boys. I think something suspicious
Speaker 1: is going on. In nineteen oh three, a New York
Speaker 1: Times article quoted an official from the Association of Manufacturers
Speaker 1: and Distributors of Food Products that said quote, since the
Speaker 1: embalmed beef scandal after the Spanish American War, everyone has
Speaker 1: looked with doubt on any food which has been known
Speaker 1: to contain preservatives, and in general, at the turn of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, people were more and more concerned about
Speaker 1: adultery in food. There was the pure foods movement. It
Speaker 1: was a hot button issue because you know, as cities
Speaker 1: populations were dramatically increasing, that meant that I was taking
Speaker 1: longer to transport enough food from farms to markets, so
Speaker 1: they needed solutions, hence preservatives. One of the main purveyers
Speaker 1: of the clean food movement was Harvey Washington Wiley, who
Speaker 1: became the chemist for the Secretary of Agriculture and eventually
Speaker 1: became the first Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
Speaker 1: So interesting, but that's all later. But even Wiley had
Speaker 1: participated in the involved beef studies and he hadn't found
Speaker 1: any dangerous preservatives inside of the meat. So in the end,
Speaker 1: the meat packers were not at fault at all, and
Speaker 1: nothing bad has ever happened with American food. Everything is
Speaker 1: great haha. So yeah, the embalmed beef scandal, it does
Speaker 1: have a bit of an anti climactic ending, but that's
Speaker 1: not the end of the episode. People were still going
Speaker 1: after the meat packers, but it would take the work
Speaker 1: of an unsuccessful socialist writer to really make things change. Okay,
Speaker 1: I feel like probably most of you had to read
Speaker 1: The Jungle in high school, right right. It was written
Speaker 1: by Upton Sinclair, who later went on to write almost
Speaker 1: one hundred books, won the Pulitzer Prize YadA, YadA, YadA,
Speaker 1: but before that he was an unsuccessful loser like the
Speaker 1: rest of us. Sinclair was also getting into socialism at
Speaker 1: the time. He had joined the Socialist Party in nineteen
Speaker 1: oh three. He was like, yep, big corporations are evil.
Speaker 1: The government should take over the ownership of big business.
Speaker 1: I'm sick of this shit. He was inspired to go
Speaker 1: to Chicago when meat packing workers were on strike in
Speaker 1: nineteen oh four. But the big corporations, the Beefy and
Speaker 1: the piggy Boys, they just hired replacement workers who kept
Speaker 1: the businesses going, and so the strikers fell into poverty
Speaker 1: and lost everything. Sinclair went to Chicago incognito at the
Speaker 1: meat packing factories to see what was going on, and
Speaker 1: what he found was that it was nasty and gross,
Speaker 1: and the workers were treated terribly. What can you believe
Speaker 1: it a corporation treating its employees badly? Uh huh. Luckily
Speaker 1: it's nothing like that today. And here are some of
Speaker 1: the terrible things he observed at the meat packing plants
Speaker 1: that he included in the book. He found that the
Speaker 1: meat packing workers worked on assembly lines and moved at
Speaker 1: a dangerous pace, leading to bodily injuries like lost fingers
Speaker 1: and limbs. Men had to haul one hundred pound hunks
Speaker 1: of meat on their backs, which would lead to debilitating injuries.
Speaker 1: They are often sick. Sometimes they even had tuberculosis and
Speaker 1: would cough constantly and spit blood on the floor. And
Speaker 1: the thing is, if you got injured or sick on
Speaker 1: the job, the beeping the piggy boys didn't give a toot.
Speaker 1: No workers comped for you. And besides these grueling and
Speaker 1: hazardous work conditions, the sanitation and the meat packing plants
Speaker 1: was abysmal. There weren't enough toilets, so sometimes workers would
Speaker 1: just pee on the ground, and there was no soap
Speaker 1: or water to clean your hand ants anyway. Sinclair also
Speaker 1: wrote about how disease rotten and contaminated meat was still
Speaker 1: processed and then filled with harmful chemicals for preservation and
Speaker 1: then mislabeled when sold to the public. Mmmm. And after
Speaker 1: the meat was slaughtered, they just put it on the ground.
Speaker 1: And on the ground, remember there was urine and blood
Speaker 1: spit all over the floor, and then it would be
Speaker 1: transported around the plants and these carts that also had sawdust, rat,
Speaker 1: dung rat poison, and sometimes even dead rats in them,
Speaker 1: and then all of that was just tipped into the
Speaker 1: hoppers to make a canned meat and sausage yummy. And finally,
Speaker 1: the most disserving thing was sometimes workers would fall into
Speaker 1: the vats and when this happened, quote when they were
Speaker 1: fished out, there was never enough of them to be
Speaker 1: worth exhibiting. Sometimes they would be overlooked for days till
Speaker 1: all but the bones of them had gone out to
Speaker 1: the world as Durham's pure leaf lard. Anyway, Sinclair faced
Speaker 1: a lot of challenges when trying to publish The Jungle.
Speaker 1: At first, it was distributed as a serialized version that
Speaker 1: circulated in a socialist newspaper, and he had found a
Speaker 1: publisher who was going to print the whole thing as
Speaker 1: a novel, but then the company backed out because some
Speaker 1: of the claims in the novel were so salacious that
Speaker 1: they were like, uh, I don't want to put the
Speaker 1: bill for a lawsuit against the Beefy and the piggy boys.
Speaker 1: So Saint Clair started looking around for other publishers. He
Speaker 1: mostly got rejections, but then had a meeting with a
Speaker 1: publishing house called Doubleday, Page and Company. One of their
Speaker 1: editors had the book was fabuloso but also cuckoo crazy,
Speaker 1: so they wanted to get fact checked. They sent the
Speaker 1: manuscript to the Chicago Tribune and they were like, does
Speaker 1: this sound like it's for real. A representative from the
Speaker 1: Tribune wrote back and was like, this book is definitely
Speaker 1: cuckoo crazy and definitely not for real. But Saint Clair
Speaker 1: was like, h that's dumb. This is for real, And
Speaker 1: even the editors at the publishing house were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is kind of sus how much they are denying
Speaker 1: these claims. They sent like a multi page document. So
Speaker 1: then the publishing house had their own investigation into the
Speaker 1: Tribune and found that a publicist at the paper had
Speaker 1: written the critique and that that publicist worked for the
Speaker 1: meat packers. Uh, whoopsies. They decided to publish the book,
Speaker 1: but they also wanted Sinclair to make it less preachy
Speaker 1: about socialism, and Saint Clair, being so desperate at this point,
Speaker 1: was like, fine, I'll do it. So he cut about
Speaker 1: thirty thousand words like can you imagine how many social speeches?
Speaker 1: That was? And the book finally came out as a
Speaker 1: novel on February twenty six, nineteen oh six. In its
Speaker 1: first year alone, it sold more than one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand copies and was translated into seventeen languages and
Speaker 1: has since been forced upon every American high schooler. Saint
Speaker 1: Clair was stoked. He was like, hell, yeah, people are
Speaker 1: reading it. But he was also kind of upset because
Speaker 1: in the book, the main character loses everything because of
Speaker 1: the meat processing plant, but he finds hope at the
Speaker 1: end because of socialism, and that was Sinclair's main reason
Speaker 1: for writing it. But what the public latched onto wasn't socialism,
Speaker 1: but how all the meat was icky. Saint Clair was like,
Speaker 1: I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident, I
Speaker 1: hid it in the stomach. Sinclair's publishers and several other
Speaker 1: people send the novel to the President, who was now
Speaker 1: Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had actually been in the Spanish American
Speaker 1: War and really did think that beef was embalmed. He'd
Speaker 1: been a colonel in Cuba and he had testified about
Speaker 1: how gross the meat was. He said that he would
Speaker 1: have eaten his old hat as soon as he would
Speaker 1: have eaten embalmed the beef. So Roosevelt, like so much
Speaker 1: with the public, was like, yeah, that meat was trash.
Speaker 1: I don't care if you think it wasn't poisoned. There
Speaker 1: was something wrong with it. Roosevelt was far from being
Speaker 1: a socialist, but he was also anti trust. And at
Speaker 1: this point, the beef and piggy boys had created their
Speaker 1: own meat oligarchy, just reigning supreme, and Roosevelt thought it
Speaker 1: was sus because as the cost of labor and production
Speaker 1: was going down, the consumer price was going up. Roosevelt
Speaker 1: was like, no, no, no, I don't like that. I want
Speaker 1: to bust up this trust. So Roosevelt read The Jungle,
Speaker 1: or had someone at least summarize it for him, and
Speaker 1: at first he was like, yeah, okay, things might be
Speaker 1: bad at the meat packing plants, but this is a novel,
Speaker 1: not an article. We need to verify some of this info.
Speaker 1: So he also sent some investigators to the plants and
Speaker 1: they're like, hey, President, it's actually kind of worse than
Speaker 1: what the book says. One of the investigators saw a
Speaker 1: slaughtered hog fall into a toilet and then the workers
Speaker 1: just pulled the carcass out and without cleaning it, hung
Speaker 1: it back on the rack. Yum yam a diarrhea bacon.
Speaker 1: This book was exactly what Roosevelt wanted. It proved that
Speaker 1: legislation was necessary. Also, at this point in time, Europe
Speaker 1: was already like, we don't want this American meat. It's gross.
Speaker 1: And then once the Judgle came out, meat sales in
Speaker 1: the US were dropping. All around the country. People were
Speaker 1: writing to the White House and their legislators being like,
Speaker 1: there needs to be reformed, We need things to change.
Speaker 1: The meat needs to be inspected at every step of
Speaker 1: the process. So Roosevelt was like, brus, look how bad
Speaker 1: it is. We got to pass this legislation. And so
Speaker 1: in June nineteen oh six, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act.
Speaker 1: This law authorized inspectors from the US Department of Agriculture
Speaker 1: to make sure that the meats weren't contaminated or mislabeled
Speaker 1: in any way. And the law also expanded federal government
Speaker 1: regulation of corporations and other private businesses. And then the
Speaker 1: same day that the Meat bill was passed, Congress also
Speaker 1: passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which regulates food
Speaker 1: additives and prohibits misleading labels of food and drugs. And
Speaker 1: then this Act eventually led to the creation of the
Speaker 1: Food and Drug Administration and all this this was a
Speaker 1: huge deal because this was the first time that food
Speaker 1: was being regulated in the US. And so, yeah, today
Speaker 1: all of our food is safe to eat now and
Speaker 1: nothing ever goes wrong. Sure, according to the CDC, every
Speaker 1: year about forty eight million people in the US get
Speaker 1: sick from food born illnesses. But that's just like a
Speaker 1: six of Americans. We're fine anyway. What about the beefy
Speaker 1: and the pay boys, Well, obviously they weren't pleased with
Speaker 1: this shit. But when the Meat Inspection Act was being
Speaker 1: passed at nineteen oh six, the meat packing lobbyists, they
Speaker 1: were actually able to persuade legislators to water down some
Speaker 1: of the requirements. One of them was that it would
Speaker 1: be the federal government, not the meat packer, who would
Speaker 1: have to pay for all these additional inspections. And the
Speaker 1: thing about these lobbyists, while they're still active today, they're like,
Speaker 1: this is still too much regulation. I want to sell old, nasty,
Speaker 1: poisoned meat, please, And in fact, under sith Lord Trump,
Speaker 1: he did roll back some of the key elements of
Speaker 1: the Meat Inspection Act for pork processors, So now in
Speaker 1: pork processing plants, the duty of inspecting the meats has
Speaker 1: gone back to the pork processors, not Federal safety inspectors. Cool.
Speaker 1: So it's basically the same way it was before The
Speaker 1: Jungle was published. H huh. And the beef boys, they're
Speaker 1: trying to get the same thing passed for them. The
Speaker 1: end is nigh. Ha ha. I don't know why I'm
Speaker 1: still not a vegetarian after doing this episode. And Saint Clair, well,
Speaker 1: you know, he was still a little better about how
Speaker 1: people didn't suddenly become socialist, but after the Jungle came
Speaker 1: out he did become. I'm very rich and famous, so
Speaker 1: how socialist is that? Really? As always, we learn a
Speaker 1: lesson from American filth, and the lesson here is that
Speaker 1: if you drop a hog in a toilet, wash it off.
Speaker 1: Wash off your hogs. Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving, I hope you
Speaker 1: enjoy all your meats. American Film is a production of
Speaker 1: School of Humans and iHeart Podcast. This episode was written
Speaker 1: hosted by me Gabby Watts. Our senior producer is Amelia Brock,
Speaker 1: and our executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Chide Poli, and
Speaker 1: Brandon Barr. If you liked this episode, leave us a review, subscribe,
Speaker 1: Do All the Things. Also, you can find the podcast
Speaker 1: on Instagram at American Filth Pod. Follow me please, School
Speaker 1: of Humans