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While many people have contributed to helping the public understand the environment, Upton Sinclair used his platform to open up America’s eyes to the horror of what they put on their plates everyday. Sinclair wrote numerous books including “King Coal,” “The Fasting Cure,” “Oil!” but most notably, “The Jungle”.

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Written in 1906, this book exposes the atrocities of the United States meat industry and the dangers it poses to the environment and society as a whole. Within the non-fiction story, Sinclair stated how the conditions within the meat packing industry were horrific and could cause serious illness to those eating the food. Not only that, it exposed just how messy the plants were and the amount of pollution produced from the factories, especially with the use of toxic chemicals and pesticides such as rat poison. In one section of the book, Sinclair describes how rats were infested in the meat packing plants, the employees then added pesticides to areas right next to food to kill the rats. The employees sometimes didn’t even pick out the rat corpses from the meat, meaning some people bought rats unknowingly.

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The public outrage after this book was published landed Sinclair his fame. Not only that, Sinclair fought alongside the public to demand laws be put into action to control the sale of food. In response to the novel, the United States Congress was pressured to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act which prohibited companies from misbranding their products and using any poisonous materials in the production of their food. Not only that, this led to the development of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

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Upton Sinclair would fit into the module titled “Environment and Society” and would be related to lessons about human health, toxic waste, and other forms of pollution (air and water).  A major theme his work aligns with would be "Human survival depends on developing practices that will achieve sustainable systems" since his work proved how unsustainable the meat packing industry previously was and resulted in laws to make it sustainable. His discoveries helped improve the nation and the safety of foods which in turn improved society and the environment.