I have been reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the book that turned America off hot dogs and launched the food inspection industry.
I first read this book when I was a young teenager. The book is about the difficult lives of immigrants working in the meatpacking industry in Chicago at the turn of the century, but what I remembered most was its descriptions of what ended up in the meat.
Here is an excerpt:
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 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. ... 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.
And here the description of a young boy's death:
And now he died. Perhaps it was the smoked sausage he had eaten that morning—which may have been made out of some of the tubercular pork that was condemned as unfit for export. At any rate, an hour after eating it, the child had begun to cry with pain, and in another hour he was rolling about on the floor in convulsions. Little Kotrina, who was all alone with him, ran out screaming for help, and after a while a doctor came, but not until Kristoforas had howled his last howl.
"Howled his last howl."
As a result of Sinclair's description of the vile unsanitary meatpacking practices, President Teddy Roosevelt help pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act that established the government's role in protecting the public from unsafe food.
Upton Sinclair later wrote "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
Reading the book now, I am struck by the terrible working and living conditions experienced by immigrant laborers and their families. I am a card-carrying union man, and it made me fear for the loss of union rights. But back then it was t the description of the rats in the hot dogs that made the most lasting impression on me.
For many years the only hot dogs I ever ate were when I went to Fenway Park. I mean, come on, you gotta have a hot dog at the ball park.
In 1986, I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota and had a job in a plant that made Pork Ribs. Now, my plant had nothing to do with the slaughtering of the animals, the meat arrived already cut. We just cooked and packaged it. It was assembly work. Everyday I was on a different part of the line. Most of the time my job was working the tree. I'd grab two long ribs, put them on hooks, hand the hook in the tree and then when the tree, a big device that hung from the ceiling, we'd send it into the ovens to cook. When they'd come out, I'd grab the hooks, pulls the ribs off them, dip the ribs in a vat of barbecue sauce and then drop them in the plastic bags the women held, and then they'd close the bags and put them on a conveyor belt where they'd get sealed and labeled and then packed. On the days I did that I wore a long yellow raincoat they provided to keep the barbeque sauce off my clothes, but I still got it soaked in my jeans. After work, I'd stop at the liquor store to buy a 12-pack of Grain Belt Beer to $3.99, and I'd look like I was a mass murder with the barbeque sauce staining my clothes.
My point to all this was the plant was crawling with food inspectors. If you dropped a rib on the floor and tried to put it back in circulation, they were on you. One day when I was on the cooking side and we were making up a batch of pulled pork, I was hungry and raised a piece of pork to my mouth, but before it could touch my lips, I had an inspector snarling at me.
Based on that experience, I feel pretty safe about eating hot dogs purchased at the supermarket. Eating food in a restaurant though, I am a little less easy about. In my traveling days, I was also a line cook. On buffet night, we had a big vat of beef stew. One of the dish pigs (dishwashers who also helped carry food out to the buffet table, tripped and the beef stew want all over the yellow greasy floor. Beef stew takes a long time to prepare. The Chef had them scoop it back up into the vat and take it out to the table. Sometimes, we served spoiled meat and seafood. I told the chef the shrimp was bad. We always defrosted some so we could could up and order quick, but no one had ordered shrimp for a few days. He smelled it, told me to serve it as teriyacki shrimp which he then listed as one of the night's specials. Baked chicken on Wednesday was Chicken Almondine on Thursday, barbecue chicken on Friday, and chicken chow mein on Saturday. Same batch of chicken. After that experience I didn't eat in a restaurant for almost 9 months. That was a small country club restaurant in Iowa. I think things are better nowadays both in restaurants and in meat packing plants.
Although...
A 2015 report from Clear Labs found 2% of hot dogs contain human DNA. Their report, which was not peer-reviewed, has come under a fair amount of skepticism. Their testing is likely sophisticated enough to pick up tiny trace amounts of DNA that may come from skin cells that are shed from humans during the manufacturing process are are not considered dangerous. Most of the human DNA was found in vegetarian hot dogs that are subject to less rigorous manufacturing rules.