BOB GARFIELD: Robert Kenner, producer and director of Food, Inc., joins a long tradition of exposing unpleasant truths about the food industry. You can trace that tradition at least as far back as 1906, when Upton Sinclair published his most famous book. Historian Kevin Mattson joins us to talk about that staple of the middle school canon. Kevin, welcome to the show.

KEVIN MATTSON: Well, thanks for having me on.

BOB GARFIELD: So, tell me about the most famous work of Upton Sinclair.

KEVIN MATTSON: Well, that would be The Jungle, a book that is all about muckraking, but it’s also a novel, which makes it rather interesting because Sinclair is trying to write a novel about the meatpacking industry and about the people who work in the meatpacking industry. And along the way he hits upon the way meat is prepared for Americans’ consumption, and in that process he tells some pretty horrific stories about rats dying on piles of meat and poison being thrown out to kill the rats and being pushed into hoppers and coming out the other side, and that’s what is winding up on Americans’ breakfast tables. BOB GARFIELD: Rejected European sausage being thrown right back into the sausage hopper, a lot of horrifying details.

KEVIN MATTSON: Yeah, it’s scary stuff. That wasn't Sinclair’s intention. What he really wanted to try to focus on, because he was a socialist, was the exploitation of the workers in Packingtown and in the meatpacking plants. But, as he once famously said, he aimed for the hearts of Americans and he hit them right in their stomachs.

BOB GARFIELD: Unintended consequences but consequences, nonetheless.

KEVIN MATTSON: Exactly.

BOB GARFIELD: The publication of The Jungle, fiction though it was, was nonetheless an expose and it resulted in the first sweeping legislation that concerned food safety.

KEVIN MATTSON: That’s right. The Meat Inspection Act follows the novel’s publication. It’s dangerous to say that the novel caused the legislation to actually become reality, but it’s important to back up just a bit. This is at a period of time in American literary history when realism is very important, and so for the novel, what Sinclair decided to do was to do some first-hand research into the meatpacking industry. So he went to Chicago, moved there for a number of weeks. He disguised himself as a worker, putting on a hat and bringing a little lunch pail into the meatpacking plants. So he had a whole host of notes about what he had seen in the meatpacking plants. And his claim was that everything he'd said in The Jungle did, in fact, happen. And when Teddy Roosevelt learned of The Jungle and thought that something needed to be done about what Sinclair had written about, he demanded that Sinclair visit him in the White House and he asked him, essentially, did you make this stuff up, is what’s in The Jungle reality? And Sinclair said, oh, absolutely. You can send your people down there and they can investigate it for themselves, and you'll find out I told the truth. Roosevelt sent some men down there and they come back and they said, yep, looks like Sinclair pretty much told the truth; he might have even downplayed a few of the details.

BOB GARFIELD: Now, about 80 years later, when ABC News went into a Food Lion to document unsanitary practices in their butchers’ departments, they got into a whole mess of trouble essentially for misrepresenting themselves in order to become employees of Food Lion. Upton Sinclair didn't get into any trouble with the law, did he?

KEVIN MATTSON: No. He was worried that he would be attacked by the meat industry and that they would become very defensive. I think that they didn't go after him with as heavy a guns as they possibly could, in part because there was just this general fear, that for the most part they thought that Sinclair was pretty accurate in his descriptions, and, secondly, if they attacked him any more and went after him with their big legal honchos, they might actually gain more attention for the novel than they really wish. BOB GARFIELD: Not to maintain a change of consumer behavior on a grand scale. The Jungle actually persuaded people to eat a whole lot less meat, I guess, for a generation.

KEVIN MATTSON: Yeah, that’s right. You could see declines in meat sales once The Jungle came out. Again, you can't necessarily draw direct correlations but there’s no doubt, in most people’s minds, that the two had something to do with [LAUGHS] one another. When you read the parts of that novel in which you’re hearing about human beings falling into vats and then that becoming a part of the meat that people are eating at the breakfast table, it’s not really great inspiration to go out there and buy yourself a [LAUGHS] a sausage. So, no doubt it actually was something that created probably a downhill slide for the meat industry, in general. Sinclair himself actually was a vegetarian for a while, experimented with a lot of different and somewhat bizarre diets over the course of the years that followed from The Jungle.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because in many ways Upton Sinclair was quite the eccentric, in fact, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, a world-class weirdo, but a very prolific one. He wrote dozens of books, I think more than 90 books -

KEVIN MATTSON: Yeah.

BOB GARFIELD: - and tracts and plays, and what have you, and wound up eventually running for the governorship of California. Tell me a little about that race. KEVIN MATTSON: When he ran for governor in 1934, at that point in time The Los Angeles Times was a conservative newspaper, and one of the things that the paper did on a regular basis was to go back to some of Sinclair’s incendiary works, particularly those that dealt with issues pertaining to religion and to his belief in free love. And they essentially just took parts of his writings and parts of his tracts and reprinted them on the front page of the newspaper [BOB LAUGHS] to basically say, look, this is the guy you’re going to be [LAUGHS] voting for. The other people who were getting incensed about the possibility, and it was looking like it was a possibility that Sinclair could actually win the governor’s run, were people in Hollywood. And Hollywood was concerned that a left-leaning Democrat might actually try to socialize Tinseltown. So Hollywood essentially organized itself quite well, and what they created were what we can call fake newsreels, most famous of which was a shot of a bunch of hoboes coming off of trains, and the idea was this would be the future of California if you voted Upton Sinclair as governor because he’s going to create all these collective enterprises in the State of California that’s going to create an influx of poor people who are going to be moving to California. And it’s going to be horrific, and there’s no chance on earth that we really want this guy to be governor.

BOB GARFIELD: He wasn't swift-boated, he was – he was box-carred.

KEVIN MATTSON: Yeah, he was newsreeled out of the governorship in some ways because these things were seen by large numbers of people, and they reached the sort of people who, for instance, may not be picking up their latest copy of The Los Angeles Times. And, you know, they seem to have scared a number of people away from voting for Sinclair.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, it’s a jungle out there. [PAUSE] You can do better than that. [LAUGHS] Give me – come on, give me a break here.

[LAUGHTER] Gee whiz! [LAUGHS]

KEVIN MATTSON: I'm sorry, I'm not in my witty format, as I, as I usually am.

BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] I'm not going to beg.

KEVIN MATTSON: [LAUGHS]

BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHING] Kevin, thank you so much.

KEVIN MATTSON: Thanks for having me on.

BOB GARFIELD: Kevin Mattson is a history professor at Ohio University. His book on Upton Sinclair is called Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century. He also has a new book out called What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President? which takes a second look at Jimmy Carter’s infamous Malaise Speech.

[GROUP SINGING]: Food, glorious food! Hot sausage and mustard! While we're in the mood - Cold jelly and custard! Pease pudding and saveloys! What next is the question? Rich gentlemen have it, boys - In-di-gestion! Food, glorious food! [SONG, UP AND UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Jamie York, Mike Vuolo, Mark Phillips, Nazanin Rafsanjani, Michael Bernstein and P.J. Vogt, with more help from Sarah Fidelibus and Kasia Gladki, and edited by our senior producer, Katya Rogers. We had technical direction from Jennifer Munson and more engineering help from Zach Marsh. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.

John Keefe is our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from WNYC. Brooke Gladstone sends her regards from book-writing hell. I'm Bob Garfield.