While the fair was in its closing weeks, a young writer named Upton Sinclair headed to Chicago to visit the Packingtown slaughterhouses, and his investigations would be published as The Jungle in 1906. His efforts and those of other reformers culminated in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the first major piece of legislation to outlaw adulterated or mislabeled food products, and the beginning of federal oversight of the nation’s food supply. “Beware the Hamburger,” the Kansas City Journal warned in 1904. Far from being invented at the St. Louis fair, the hamburger was already a notorious public health threat. Dr. Cutler, Kansas City’s meat inspector, was hot on the heels of fraud among the city’s meat producers, one of whom, he alleged, “makes 1000 pounds of blue meat look like the reddest and freshest Hamburger” by dosing it with sulfurous acid. “He sells it to the lunch wagon men and they make sandwiches of it.”
