Welcome to The Jungle, we play dirty games.
Food safety costs a lot, so fuck the FDA
-Food companies, basically.
Fun fact:
The precursor to the FDA was created during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. After the book was published, Roosevelt sent federal investigators to the Chicago slaughterhouses to validate the conditions detailed in the story.
The investigators reported that the conditions were worse than described in the book. And that was after the slaughterhouse owners got wind that the feds were coming and had everything cleaned from top to bottom.
Hard to imagine what “worse” looks like because the conditions detailed in the book are truly appalling.
Additional fun fact, The Jungle was meant to highlight the poor working conditions in slaughter houses, but the outrage was related entirely to the poor consideration for the meat that the public was eating.
Love the cover:
[Incidentally and entirely off-topic, it reminds me of the book(s) I’m reading right now: Josiah Bancroft’s Tower of Babel tetralogy - urban steampunk jungle, vertically]
The book cover has the same vibe as the album cover for Pink Floyd’s “Animals”, which also happens to be a scathing critique of capitalism.
Not sure if you intended this, but you can absolutely get what you wrote to work with the timing (and same rhyme sounds/pattern, basically) of the first few lyrics of Guns N Roses ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, with minor modifications.
Welcome to the Jungle,
where we play dirty games.
Food safety sure costs a lot,
so fuck the FDA.
We are the people who hate fines,
Whatever they may be.
If you got no money, honey,
We got your disease.
etc.
(Wonderful that some of the lyrics don’t have to change at all, nor really the chorus, yay internal bleeding.)
I read the original to the tune without thinking about it!
if Upton Sinclair was alive today he would flip his lid
such a good read. should be required by all.
Good ole Bubbly creek https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubbly_Creek
they used to put brick dust in chocolate bars, and sawdust in bread
edit: heck, they just caught someone recently intentionally putting lead in
applesaucecinnamon that was used in applesauce, which has been used off and on as a sweetener since at least ancient rome, where a bunch of people went crazy and died from consuming a sweetener made by boiling grapes in lead potsCopper sulfate used to be added to canned peas because it turns green when it oxidizes, making them look greener.
Copper sulphate is straight up poisonous, enough will kill a passion and low amounts will hurt them.
Anyone who wants to learn more about this history, there is a great episode of the “ridiculous history” podcast that goes into the story that finally got food regulations in the US. A team of people who volunteered to be poisoned to help prove that certain things are unsafe to put in food.
It’s also HEAVY, so something light sold by weight just needs a liiiiittle lead to be a lot cheaper to make
This is what caused that pet food scare back in the 00’s. Some Chinese manufacturer realized that they were being paid by weight, not volume, so they added heavy metals to their cat food and it poisoned a few cats here in the US.
China executed that guy btw.
I mean if you think about it, cinnamon is essentially sawdust right?
Not wrong…
Very wrong. Cinnamon is king.
Just in case you weren’t actually aware, that wasn’t a statement about the quality of cinnamon as a spice. It’s literally made frome ground up tree bark.
TIL
I just mean because cinnamon (the spice) is the bark of the cinnamon tree, which when ground up is a form of sawdust. Delicious sawdust, but sawdust, nonetheless.
Ha, I did not know that.
Fun fact: Cinnamon (Cinnamomum) is the genus not the species. There are Ceylon trees and Cassia trees and a bunch of others but no specifically Cinnamon trees.
TIL. Fascinating!
Wasn’t there lead found in other spices, too? Like tumeric or something?
Yep!
My favorite “we had to regulate this” is coal mining. You see, the larger a coal mine tunnel, the more work and time it takes. So smaller tunnels will be more profitable. So in some places they preferred smaller women and children, so they could make make smaller, easier tunnels. This one I only ever found one source on, but supposedly one mine owner noticed that snags on clothing were slowing things down in the narrow tunnels so he insisted on sending them in nude. Nothing more capitalist than naked coal mining children.
The fact that these fucks were not regularly dragged from their mansions and beaten to death blows my mind
as humans, our arguably greatest trait is the ability to adapt to almost any circumstance. unfortunately that also often makes us accept unacceptable living conditions because changing them involves too high of a personal cost.
I realy would like to fact check you on this, but i will definitely not search for “naked coal mining children”. “Trust me bro” will have to do it for this one.
That miners often worked naked or partially naked is definitely true. That children, men and women worked together in mines is also true. If it’s legally allowed, then it’s going to happen basically.
That there were owners who preferred children/women over men, is probably false. They will have tended to do different jobs in the mines, but I can’t recall having ever read anything about a mine that preferred to not employ any male miners.
That the workers worked naked because of owner mandates is also going to be false, because those miners used to be paid according to how much they extracted, so there was no reason for the owner to have such a mandate. Instead it was the workers their own choice: some clothes hinder them in their work (heat, snagging, dust) + the job eats up clothes + they have to pay for their own clothes = they’re not going to be wearing many clothes at work.
Damn, just five minutes ago I saw this link shared in another thread:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal
🤢🤮
It took us well over a century to establish some sort of framework that makes such horrors almost impossible, but no, regulations are bad 🙄
Same for workers btw, it’s not just about food security. That’s just easier to sell to a thoroughly egoistic constituency.
Gone in <100 days
There were no regulations that couldn’t ever n made unrefrigerated raw milk safe in cities at the time. You either sold milk from cows raised in the city itself(which means cramped quarters and disease) or carted it in on a wagon (which means unrefrigerated milk sitting for hours). Adding formalin likely made it safer, it was so dangerous. The scandal thing played like it was what they were feeding cows (we feed cows high protein spent grains today and it’s considered high quality feed), but the reality was milk in cities was always insane.
Good ole
safety rules and regulations are usually ‘written in blood’.
it seems they need to be rewritten in blood … because people are so contrarian and formed social relationships based on questioning the basics and not understanding the answers.
Whenever a corporation does something good (for example, make a charitable donation) rest assured it’s been calculated that the positive PR will make it financially worthwhile.
And it reduces its tax burden.
That’s a wild misrepresentation of how write-offs work.
If your tax rate is 30% and you make write off a charitable donation of $100, your tax bill goes down $30. Spending 100 dollars to save 30 isn’t the key to riches.
There’s no way to save money through charitable donations.
How is that a misrepresentation? You justified what I said.
The implication was that they make donations for the write-offs. That’s not accurate, because it’s never cheaper to make a donation and write it off than it is to just pay the taxes.
Eventually we Canadians won’t even have to boycott American agricultural products, they just won’t be able to sell them to us because they won’t pass our safety requirements.
I already subscribe to y’alls government emails about recalls, I suggest other Americans do too because many products are sold in both places, and hopefully it would be too expensive to set up two production lines, one for lower or nonexistant US standards and one for Canada. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en for 'muricans who are curious
You’ve heard of their eggs and their chickens right ?
Everyone who wants to remove food regulations should just be shot. I’m so tired of these absolute fools that slept through 10th grade history trying to take us back to the gilded age.
Vote with your dollar! If tainted baby formula kills your kid, simply refuse to buy that brand anymore!
3 stars. I dislike that it killed my baby, but shipping was really fast!
- review found under a pack of rechargeable batteries
This is why I’ve been trying to point out that the ground swell around raw milk seems to have less to do with any critiques of pasteurization (there are no good critiques) and more to do with the fact that if pasteurization isn’t mandated as the only way to make milk safe to drink, corporations will seek cheaper options, like mixing raw milk with formaldehyde…
But if no one FDA checking anything don’t we have to worry about getting milk that says its pasteurized, but actually has an emulsifier and some poison in it?
It was so much worse than just chalk. Additives included plaster of Paris, lead, cow brain, and fucking formaldehyde
Formaldehyde is natural, or bodies make some of it so it’s fine /s
Same logic with antivax people.
But RandLover1988 on YouTube told me businesses have to sell good things otherwise competitors will come in and they’ll go bankrupt, unless there are too many regulations and too much socialism, which is why he got banned for saying the N-word on YouTube. /s
