昨天在一个英文班里读到一篇美国高中的范文，是摘自美国作家厄普顿·辛克莱的小说《屠场》（又译作“丛林”）中的，时隔110年，仍觉的触目惊心和“似曾相识”，虽说米国是“祖师爷”，但事实是人类的贪婪“丛林”本性在不同的地域、时间一直延续着，只是疑问我等天国也要历经百年才能图治吗？伊嘘唏，危乎远哉！
以下内容是这篇节选范文的梗概译文，但奉劝：
“你读《丛林》之前，务必不要吃东西，那是要吐出来的！”
“读过《丛林》之后，我再也不想碰香肠和肉食品了！”
这是2006年两位读者对于1906年小说的评论。辛克莱（Upton Sinclair）在小说《丛林》（The Jungle）里，对于肉食品加工厂的肮脏环境做了仔细描写，今天人们读了还想呕吐。辛克莱恶心了美国人一百年。
厄普顿·辛克莱（1878-1968）是二十世纪一位著名多流派诗人。出版于1906年《屠场》揭露了芝加哥肉类加工产业和类似产业的一些城市的恶劣情形。此书的出版发行引起公众的强烈反响，并迫使美国国会通过了《纯净食品和药品法》和《肉类制品监督法》。同年，也催生了大名鼎鼎的FDA。
故事梗概
芝加哥的帕克镇，座落着达哈姆家族的联合畜产品加工厂。
有个名叫吉盖的工人的工作是给打晕的牛放血，红刀子进白刀子出——这么说不一定对，因为他常常来不及擦掉刀子上的血迹，从第二只牛起，就红刀子进红刀子出了。比起上一道工序的伙伴们，抡着大锤砸晕几千条牛，算是轻松。
一个工人掉到大炼油钢罐里，人们最后从中捞到了他的骨头，而他本人已被制成“达哈姆牌纯猪板油”！（注：这两段红字的内容并没有放在高中节选的范文中，因为太过血腥和恶性刺激）
乔纳斯则透露：他们利用了猪身上的一切，除了它的叫声，在这里，不管是已经腐烂的碎肉内脏，还是猪鬃猪皮，任何有机物质都不会被浪费掉。从腌肉车间里取出的猪肉常常发酸，就搓上苏打粉，去掉酸臭味，经过化学处理，需要什么颜色、香味、味道就能有什么颜色、什么香味、什么味道，然后再卖到自助午餐柜台上去。作火腿有巧妙的机器专门灌注盐水。欧洲退货回来的火腿，已经长了白色霉菌，公司让工人们把它切碎，填入香肠；商店仓库存放过久已经变味的牛油，公司把它回收，重新融化。经过去味工序，又返回顾客餐桌；公司的技术人员的才干就是把发臭的肉类去掉味道，他们发明了添加硼砂、甘油；技术员们靠调味剂和染料就可以把同一种鸡肉做成松竹鸡、子鸡等不同品种的罐头；绵羊和羔羊肉都来自山羊身上……
香肠车间的情况更可怕。仓库的生肉在地板上堆成垛，你站在高处用手掌抹一把顶部，就能抹出一把老鼠屎；工厂为制伏成群的老鼠，到处摆放了有毒的面包做诱饵，工人却漫不经心地将毒死的老鼠和生肉一起铲进绞肉机的进料漏斗；车间没有专用洗手池，工人就在一个水槽里搓洗油污的双手，这水槽里的水是要配置调料加到香肠里去的；肉仓里的肉就丢在地下，和垃圾、锯末混在一起，工人在上面践踏，吐痰、留下成亿的结核细菌。
生活在这个肉食加工王国里的工人并不愉快。腌渍车间的工人走来，大老远就闻到他们一身的腥臭气。他们在腌肉的同时，把自己也腌透了：先是指尖发炎，脓肿，随后指甲脱落。老工人的手指，比别人短了一截。
屠场的内部情况简直难以形容，但辛克莱把它形容的绘声绘色，令人寒毛倒竖，难怪读到这本书的美国总统会当场把香肠甩飞，就连我这位远在一百一十年后的普通读者此时也暗下决心以后绝不吃火腿类食品……
EXCERPT FROM THE JUNGLE
by Upton Sinclair 1906
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) was a famous twentieth century poet who often experimented with different genres. The Jungle, published in 1906, exposed the harsh conditions of the meatpacking industry in Chicago and other similar industrial cities. Public pressure during the aftermath of the book’s publication led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act, which helps ensure that meat is packaged under sanitary conditions. As you read the text, take notes on Sinclair's use of imagery and tone in describing the conditions of the meatpacking industry.
With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great majority of Packingtown swindles. For it was the custom, as they found, whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage. With what had been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms, they could now study the whole of the spoiled-meat industry on the inside, and read a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest—that they use everything of the pig except the squeal.
Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus,1 by which they saved time and increased the capacity2 of the plant—a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor—a process known to the workers as “giving them thirty per cent.” Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as “Number Three Grade,” but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade—there was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such schemes—they had what they called “boneless hams,” which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and “California hams,” which were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy “skinned hams,” which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them—that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled “head cheese!”
It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions- a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white – it would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption.
There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one – there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.
There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water – and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage – but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatin to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.
