It's still a jungle out there

01/01/2003

The café in the basement seemed like the perfect place to curb passions that reason must rein.

The fervor ached to herald the words of Upton Sinclair, who did not spare any details in The Jungle, his 1906 account of the meat processing industry.

..the air motionless, the stench was enough to knock a man over...for there was never any washing of the walls and rafters and pillars, and they were caked with the filth of a lifetime.

Thoughts over the relevance for the reference intertwined with exchanges of pleasantries with co-workers while waiting to get some coffee.

Then it happened.

The woman behind the counter did the unthinkable. She licked her finger clean of peanut butter and then pulled a bagel from the toaster with the same hand and wrapped it up.

That's relatively minor when compared to other incidents, like the listeria monocytogenes bacteria in the floor drains at a Wampler Foods plant, which led to a Northeast outbreak and the largest meat recall in U.S. history. This was one in a series of recalls because of other pathogens like E. coli, which most often stems from feces.

Then, there were reports of mold and rust found in cleanrooms at Abbott Laboratories' Austin, Texas plant, which sent intravenous solutions containing "brown floaters" to market.

...a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats...there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.

Standing there, stunned, the finger-licking lunch lady handed the bagel over, served up a hot, yet questionable, cup of joe, and it was back to work with the idea that perhaps it's still a jungle out there.

Mark A. DeSorbo
Associate Editor