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Food symbolizes the fundamentally corruptive nature of capitalism. Ordinarily, food nurtures the body and unites the family, as it does during the traditional marriage festivities at the book's beginning. The food in Packingtown, however, is toxic and unnatural, and the meatpackers are too focused on their bottom line to bother selling healthy goods. Moreover, the poor—the ones who work in the factory packing meat for others to consume—are often reduced to foraging in dumps for food for themselves, and this struggle for sustenance further illustrates the industrialists' blatant disregard for the well-being of their workforce.
Food Quotes in The Jungle
The The Jungle quotes below all refer to the symbol of Food. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 14
Quotes
With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great majority of Packingtown swindles. For it was the custom, as they found, whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage. With what had been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms, they could now study the whole of the spoiled-meat industry on the inside, and read a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest—that they use everything of the pig except the squeal.
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Food Symbol Timeline in The Jungle
The timeline below shows where the symbol Food appears in The Jungle. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...burly working man. The wedding party is a boisterous, raucous, and emotional affair with elaborate food, drinking, music, and dancing. Guests of all ages, from babies to the elderly, fill the...
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Chapter 2
...pools of stinking water, hordes of flies, and garbage dumps where children gather scraps of food. They notice a brickyard where bricks are made out of garbage and a festering pool...
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Chapter 5
...the slaughterhouse. When cows come along that are about to calve and are unfit for food, their entrails are removed and their "slunk" (unborn) calves are processed with the rest of...
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Chapter 7
The children are not well. All the food and medicine available in Packingtown has been doctored with chemicals and dyes. It is impossible...
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Chapter 17
...Connor's, and has been selling papers downtown; his mother has been reduced to begging for food. Jurgis, devastated, must tell Stanislovas that he cannot help them. As Stanislovas is about to...
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Chapter 20
...are relatively good. The workshops are big and clean, and the on-site restaurant offers affordable food. Each assembly-line worker handles a highly specialized sliver of the manufacturing process: Jurgis's job is...
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Chapter 21
...family while Jurgis looks for work. Teta Elzbieta's one-legged son Juozapas resorts to scavenging for food at the dump.
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...conditions the immigrants endure. To help them out of their destitution, she gives the family food and arranges for Jurgis to be hired by her fiancée, a superintendent at a steelworks...
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Chapter 22
...who are mostly hostile to him, Jurgis sleeps in fields and abandoned buildings and forages food from fields. He doesn't worry about money, because he knows he can work paying farmhand...
(full context)
