GASTRONOMIC REALISM: UPTON SINCLAIR'S THE JUNGLE, THE FIGHT FOR PURE FOOD, AND THE MAGIC OF MASTICATION

Abstract

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is one of the great novels of working class life in America. It is also a central text in the broad movement where Americans revised their notions of what it meant to be a consumer-the rights consumers should enjoy, the responsibilities consumption ought to entail, and the potential for citizens in their capacity as consumers to reform society. The discourse of American realism (of which The Jungle is a part) was instrumental in helping consumers construct a version of themselves as having the capacity and, indeed, the right to know what a product really is. The pure food legislation that followed the publication of The Jungle attempted to enact the core tenet of realism as its most accomplished literary practitioners imagined it: true representation. The image of the consumer reading a product label became a kind of paradigm case of realism. When it came to food-writers, diet reformers, and legislators were forced to employ a realist logic. They became gastronomic realists.