So I recently picked up The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. It’s good, in that way that really depressing novels are. But what astonishes me is how people COMPLETELY MISSED THE POINT of what Sinclair was going for. Yeah the disgusting and vile things that happened in the food making process were addressed, but the fact that people didn’t pay too much attention to the horrific lives the workers had to endure under a system that callously used them until they could no longer provide any benefit to the company and were discarded as though they were pieces of machinery instead of human beings…

I thought that maybe he had given almost equal coverage of both the health hazards and workers lives but it’s pretty much entirely the point of the novel. I want to ask how this got overlooked but I think I already know the really depressing answer.