bers on. Perhaps they had a secret process for making
chickens chemically -- who knows? said Jurgis's friend;
the things that went into the mixture were tripe, and
the fat of pork, and beef suet, and hearts of beef, and
finally the waste ends of veal, when they had any. They
put these up in several grades, and sold them at several
prices; but the contents of the cans all came out of the
same hopper. And then there was "potted game" and
"potted grouse," "potted ham," and "deviled ham" --
de-vyled, as the men called it. "De-vyled" ham was
made out of the waste ends of smoked beef that were
too small to be sliced by the machines; and also tripe,
dyed with chemicals so that it would not show white;
and trimmings of hams and corned beef; and potatoes,
skins and all; and finally the hard cartilaginous gullets
of beef, after the tongues had been cut out. All this
ingenious mixture was ground up and flavored with
spices to make it taste like something. Anybody who
could invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune
from old Durham, said Jurgis's informant; but it was
hard to think of anything new in a place where so many
sharp wits had been at work for so long; where men wel~
comed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding, because
it made them fatten more quickly; and where they bought
up all the old rancid butter left over in the grocery-stores of
a continent, and "oxidized" it by a forced-air process, to
take away the odor, rechurned it with skim-milk, and sold
it in bricks in the cities! Up to a year or two ago it had
been the custom to kill horses in the yards -- ostensibly
for fertilizer; but after long agitation the newspapers had
been able to make the public realize that the horses were
being canned. Now it was against the law to kill horses in
Packingtown, and the law was really complied with -- for
the present, at any rate. Any day, however, one might
see sharp-horned and shaggy-haired creatures running
with the sheep -- and yet what a job you would have to
get the public to believe that a good part of what it buys
for lamb and mutton is really goat's flesh!
There was another interesting set of statistics that a
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