Why is Sinclair's The Jungle important?

The Jungle was written to raise "social awareness" by contrasting the corruption of the meat-packing industry with the appalling conditions and day-to-day hopelessness the "lower classes" work and live in.

Upton Sinclair's account of workers' falling into rendering tanks and being ground into "Durham's Pure Beeff Lard" as well as the exploitation of women and children workers, caught the publics imagination & sparked widespread outrage.

The outcry resulting from the brutal and unsanitary conditions of the meat-packing industry lead to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which established the Bureau of Chemistry that would become in 1930, the Food and Drug Administration.