Hot Dogs

Happy April!  I avoided posting anything yesterday to avoid the whole 'April Fools' thing;  I like the jokes that are silly and obvious rather than the ones that head towards the territory of being mean tricks.  I thought I'd do a little food-related update today.

I'm still keeping up with Fed Up with Lunch, and now that the embedding tool on YouTube is working again, I'll embed the video I linked to last time, which shows the modern process of making hot dogs:



One fantastic thing that Mrs Q's blog has inspired me to do is to reread Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle.  I've read it twice before, both times for school -- once in eighth grade and again in college, both times for history classes.  The first time I couldn't bring myself to eat anything at all for a couple days afterwards and then avoided meat for a few weeks afterwards.  For a hardcore omnivore like me, that's a loooong time.  The second time I knew what to expect, and it didn't really hurt my appetite like it did the first time.  This time it's still not really affecting my appetite, but it's more disturbing to me than the previous reading, probably because of the added attention I've been paying thanks to Mrs Q.  I was reading the following passage during my break this morning, and the fact that it's so close in description to the video above really creeped me out.  The novel itself is old enough to be public domain, and can be read in its entirety on Project Gutenberg, here.  This particular passage can be found at the end of chapter 13; in my copy (Bedford/St. Martin's 2005 edition), it can be found on page 165.

"The sausage-room was an interesting place to visit, for two or three minutes, and provided that you did not look at the people; the machines were perhaps the most wonderful things in the entire plant. Presumably sausages were once chopped and stuffed by hand, and if so it would be interesting to know how many workers had been displaced by these inventions. On one side of the room were the hoppers, into which men shoveled loads of meat and wheelbarrows full of spices; in these great bowls were whirling knives that made two thousand revolutions a minute, and when the meat was ground fine and adulterated with potato flour, and well mixed with water, it was forced to the stuffing machines on the other side of the room. The latter were tended by women; there was a sort of spout, like the nozzle of a hose, and one of the women would take a long string of "casing" and put the end over the nozzle and then work the whole thing on, as one works on the finger of a tight glove. This string would be twenty or thirty feet long, but the woman would have it all on in a jiffy; and when she had several on, she would press a lever, and a stream of sausage meat would be shot out, taking the casing with it as it came. Thus one might stand and see appear, miraculously born from the machine, a wriggling snake of sausage of incredible length. In front was a big pan which caught these creatures, and two more women who seized them as fast as they appeared and twisted them into links. This was for the uninitiated the most perplexing work of all; for all that the woman had to give was a single turn of the wrist; and in some way she contrived to give it so that instead of an endless chain of sausages, one after another, there grew under her hands a bunch of strings, all dangling from a single center. It was quite like the feat of a prestidigitator—for the woman worked so fast that the eye could literally not follow her, and there was only a mist of motion, and tangle after tangle of sausages appearing."

Interesting, no?