Communicating Food Through Muckraking: Ethics, Food Engineering, and Culinary Realism

Historically, one of the most effective forms of communicating food safety concerns to the public has been through the genre of muckraking literature. Muckrakers use the tools available through culinary realism in literature to communicate some of the major food safety issues of their time. The impact of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's 1906 muckraking classic, has been nearly unparalleled in US literature and history and is the foundation for many established food safety regulations in the United States. Sinclair uses culinary realism to describe hazardous conditions in Chicago's food production industry. Michael Pollan's nonfiction work Omnivore's Dilemma and his follow-up In Defense of Food once again expose potential dangers in the US food industry in an engaging narrative manner using culinary realism.