The Chicago Meat Works Scandal.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 8102, 31 May 1906, Page 5

The Chicago Meat Works Scandal.

Anterior 4ppaHed.

Loathsome Details

(By Electric Telegraph— Copyright) (Per Press Association.) Received May 31, at 9.5 a.m. . NEW YORK. May 30 MM?w Ca i 18 - a PP alled at the Chicago mu 8 relations. The Beef Trust is panic-stricken.: «J i j rmanand Ja Panese orders are already decreasing. t plion Sinclair \whose book " The Jungle initiated the revelations) declares that two men fell into the lardrendenng vafs and were converted and sold as lard. ™^I!i )orn ca^ves largely utilised in potted meats. Decomposed chickens were Jrozen, deodorised, and tinned. libel ir challenges an actioh for Mr Sinclair's Revelations. Mr Upton Sinclair's book, •« The Jungle," mentioned in to-day's cable message, has only just been issued. It is described as a powerful book illustrative of the methods of Chicago's ' i ackmgtown." Writing in Collier's Magazine recently, Mr Sinclair describes some of the precautions he took to verify his investigations connected with his book. " About three months ago I submitted my story of Packingtown to a well-known JNew York publishing house, which offered to publish the book, provided that I could satisfy them £hat it was true, and after examining the evidence which I offered them they decided to make one more investigation. Accordingly they sent their attorney, a personal friend of the head of the firm. SHOCKING CONDITIONS. " The report of the lawyer when he came back from Chicago was that I had not told the worst about the shocking conditions which prevail. He reported that he saw with his own eyes hogs, which had been condemned for cholera and loathsome skin diseases, being rendered into lard. He brought with him a signed statement from a physician prominent in Chicago, a professor in the Illinois State University, and the former head of Ihe City Bureau of Inspection. This physician had discovered that hogs, which had died of cholera in shipment, were sent to a place called Globe, in Indiana, and rendered into lard, and that carcases of steers which had been condemned as tubercular, and were supposed to be ' locked up m bond,' were left upon an open platform and carted away at night. Under the law the responsibility for all this rested with _ three city inspectors, politicians oppointed by the Democratic machine, and the doctor, when he found be was powerless to prevent the graft, armed liis inspectors with syringes and ordered them to inject kerosene into the condemned meat, with the result that he was removed from his position and the city inspection bureau abolished.

LAWS TO KEEP TAINTED MEAT

AT HOME

" Quite recently it occurred to me to read the laws of the United States concerning the inspection of meat—something which not even the Lancet correspondent had thought of doing. I found that they had apparently been phrased for the precise purpose of making this graft impossible of prevention ; and upon further inquiry I learned that the whole system of Government inspection had been established at the request of the packers, and for their benefit, to enable them to certify to the governments of Europe that all the jointed meat is kept at home. The Federal inspectors have not definite authority over meat which is condemned as unfit for export; the law directs that it shall be disposed of according to the laws of the municipality in which the slaughtering is done—which means, in Chicago, that it is turned over to the city grafters. It a packer is not shipping for export or interstate commerce, he does ;not have to have inspection at .all; consequently, there are innumerable cheap places outside of the yard secretly owned by the packers and used by them for: the purpose of slaughtering meat that Tis so bad that it cannot be got past the. Government inspectors. As for microscopic inspection, the law specifically states that there shall be none except witli hogs intended for export, and as one jind onehalf per cent, ot those inspected are found to be infected, we Americans consume not only our own one and one-half per cent,, but also the one and one-half per cent, of Europe. I ADULTERATED MEATS. " Major Seaman declared that the food products shipped from Packingtown are pure. In a bulletin of the Food Commissioners of the State of Minnesota I find the lard, ' summer sausages,' boiled ham,' and other products of Armour, Swift, Morris, Cudahy, and others, set down as' illegal.' In a bulletin of the State of Pennsylvania I find that these packers have, on numerous occasions, pleaded guilty to criminal charges for selling preserved and adulterated sausages. As regards the 'tinned meats' of which ihey send out millions of pounds every year, I have been making a study of the report of the.Court of Enquiry appointed to investigate the ' embalmed beef' scandal at the close of the Spanish War. This is a document of nearly three thousand pages, recording the results of an official and duly certified experiment, conducted under Government auspices, to ascertain the effect upon human beings of the continued consumption of packing house canned meats. I will close this letter with a few lines from the sworn testimony of the Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, then Governor of New York, and shortly before Lieutenant-Colonel of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry : " The canned roast beef was utterly and hopelessly unacceptable. I should say iliat, roughly, not a fifth of it was consumed. The cans when opened would show usually on top what looked like a layer of slime, a very disagreeable looking substance. The beef inside was stringy and coarse. _ It was like a bundle of fibres. Sometimes we could stew it. . . The great majority of the men, if put upon it for two or three davs, would become sick." PRECAUTIONS IN NEW ZEALAND. It :-s scarcely necessary to reassure New Zealanders that they do not'run such risks in eating tinned meats as the Americans are reported to have done. But lest there should be any doubting

hearts, a of; the Post shafted a copy of the cable messags.ta : the head aof the leading 'meat fiirmsi in Wellington. He was assured that all; meat, before it; was tinned, had; to be : inspector, "anci the labels hid to bear his imprimatur before the contents of the cans could be sold. Nothing like the American scandal was -possible in New Zealand, even if any person could possibly be found who would be disposed to perpetrate the outrages described, for the large freezing companies which controlled the potting industry were under very close Government supervision. The official examiner marked any carcasc which he condemned, and it went straight to the digester to be converted into rough tallow and manure. INo dyes or chemicals were used in the preparation of these foods. Clean salt was the only substance that might be used in the meat preserving and tinning processes. One authority mentioned that Now Zealanders were not large consumers of tinned meats. The canned foods that ■jtfere prepared here were exported for the most part.