Writing Across the Curriculum: A Prentice Hall Pocket Reader Book

Whenever I've asked someone if they have read The Jungle, and if they have not read it, they always respond, "isn't that about the meat packing industry?". I think that response is exactly what the author was trying to point out is wrong with his society at the time.
It is true that the main character of the book at one point goes to work in a meat packing plant, and its disgusting, and when the book was published apparently the FDA was created as a result, or something. The problem is, though, that this book is not about the meat packing industry- the book is about the plight of a poor immigrant family in Chicago, and about the plight of poor people in the country in general at that time. Sinclair is trying to bring light to the disgusting ways in which people in his time were forced to live, the way they were manipulated, ripped off, neglected and sometime even killed by the very community that profited from their cheap labor. Its an incredible book, and if you read it keep in mind that the atrocities that really occur in this book surround the way that these people were held down no matter what they did. I think that Upton Sinclair would be saddened to know, and maybe he did know, that the only thing that changed as a result of this beautifully written pro-socialist novel is that the middle class now has healthy meat products.