Welcome to The Jungle, we play dirty games.
Food safety costs a lot, so fuck the FDA
-Food companies, basically.
I sang that in the style of Guns N Roses.
Fun fact:
The precursor to the FDA was created during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. After the book was published, Roosevelt sent federal investigators to the Chicago slaughterhouses to validate the conditions detailed in the story.
The investigators reported that the conditions were worse than described in the book. And that was after the slaughterhouse owners got wind that the feds were coming and had everything cleaned from top to bottom.
Hard to imagine what “worse” looks like because the conditions detailed in the book are truly appalling.
Additional fun fact, The Jungle was meant to highlight the poor working conditions in slaughter houses, but the outrage was related entirely to the poor consideration for the meat that the public was eating.
My favorite “we had to regulate this” is coal mining. You see, the larger a coal mine tunnel, the more work and time it takes. So smaller tunnels will be more profitable. So in some places they preferred smaller women and children, so they could make make smaller, easier tunnels. This one I only ever found one source on, but supposedly one mine owner noticed that snags on clothing were slowing things down in the narrow tunnels so he insisted on sending them in nude. Nothing more capitalist than naked coal mining children.
The fact that these fucks were not regularly dragged from their mansions and beaten to death blows my mind
as humans, our arguably greatest trait is the ability to adapt to almost any circumstance. unfortunately that also often makes us accept unacceptable living conditions because changing them involves too high of a personal cost.
That’s because you view things like this as isolated acts done by a few people. But don’t forget, only 1/3 of US voters tried to stop a man who openly declared himself a fascist, had already had a direct hand in the spread of a world wide plague that killed millions.
The “they didn’t know what they were getting into” excuse is no longer valid. And yet 2/3 of voters were fine with him being reelected . The reason those people weren’t dragged from their mansions and beaten to death was because of all the other monsters who were protecting them. The people who weren’t committing atrocities themselves, but benefited from it enough to help it keep happening.
Someone somewhere recently pointed out that fascism tends to rear its ugly head every 100 years because everyone that experienced it last time has to be dead before it can happen again.
Americans specifically have had it generally good for so long that anyone incapable of picking up and absorbing information from a history book, which is most Americans, simply don’t know how bad it used to be. So they fucking sleepwalk into fascism or allowing regulations to be rolled back.
You’d think that having a written language to chronicle all our mistakes would ensure that we moved forward without repeatedly making those mistakes, but the catch is the majority of people have to read the fucking words for that to matter.
Hence, the defunding of education, and specifically critical thinking. That is by design. You can’t easily control the population when they can read and think for themselves.
Exactly. Critical Thinking is the literally the most imoportant skill you cn learn. Critical Thinking is what allows people to recognize nonsensical propaganda immediately upon hearing it, and reject it.
It worked for me back in the late 80s, when Rush Limbaugh got started. He had a very entertaining delivery, but I was easily rejecting his unsourced bullshit and blatant lies, while people were calling in praising him for “opening their eyes.” Dude, he’s entertaining, I get that, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t lying to you.
I was 12 or so when my dad started listening to Limbaugh. I had zero clue about politics, but I could tell the guy was a scumbag. So glad he’s dead. I danced a jig in my cubicle when I found out.
He used to support tobacco companies, was a tobacco cancer denier, and wanted to end the embargo with Cuba so he could get their cigars cheaper. His cigar habit ended up killing him prematurely.
He deserved the cancer that killed him, but I wish his death had been so much worse.
I think it would help to have history-oriented comics and manga in schools. I learned to enjoy history, in no small part on account of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe series. Making things approachable is how people progress from knowing nothing to being a college graduate.
they used to put brick dust in chocolate bars, and sawdust in bread
edit: heck, they just caught someone recently intentionally putting lead in
applesaucecinnamon that was used in applesauce, which has been used off and on as a sweetener since at least ancient rome, where a bunch of people went crazy and died from consuming a sweetener made by boiling grapes in lead potsI mean if you think about it, cinnamon is essentially sawdust right?
Not wrong…
Very wrong. Cinnamon is king.
I just mean because cinnamon (the spice) is the bark of the cinnamon tree, which when ground up is a form of sawdust. Delicious sawdust, but sawdust, nonetheless.
Fun fact: Cinnamon (Cinnamomum) is the genus not the species. There are Ceylon trees and Cassia trees and a bunch of others but no specifically Cinnamon trees.
Copper sulfate used to be added to canned peas because it turns green when it oxidizes, making them look greener.
Copper sulphate is straight up poisonous, enough will kill a passion and low amounts will hurt them.
Anyone who wants to learn more about this history, there is a great episode of the “ridiculous history” podcast that goes into the story that finally got food regulations in the US. A team of people who volunteered to be poisoned to help prove that certain things are unsafe to put in food.
Everyone who wants to remove food regulations should just be shot. I’m so tired of these absolute fools that slept through 10th grade history trying to take us back to the gilded age.
Safety regulations are written in the blood of those who died from unsafe practices.
Vote with your dollar! If tainted baby formula kills your kid, simply refuse to buy that brand anymore!
3 stars. I dislike that it killed my baby, but shipping was really fast!
