IT’S more than 100 years since Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle shocked America with its raw depictions of the country’s meat industry. The book scandalised the reading public, made its way on to the night stand of President Roosevelt, and contributed to the implementation of America’s first nationwide food laws. A century on, the scandals continue, and those laws are looking ropey.

Last month, one animal rights charity, the Humane Society, released sickening undercover video of the mistreatment of animals at a California slaughterhouse.

The cameraman caught workers kicking sick or lame cattle and forcing them to their feet with forklifts and electric prods. The cows were mainly old dairy animals past their milking years - named “downers” by the industry.

Downers have been linked to mad cow disease, and the video resulted in the Food and Drug Administration recalling 143m lb of frozen beef, dating back to 2006, from the Westland/Hallmark Meat plant.

Most of the contaminated meat, however, is presumed to have been consumed already. Some 37m lb of it went into school lunches - more than the entire previous record beef recall of 35m lb, in 1999.

The abuse took place even though the plant had five federal inspectors and a vet on hand to make sure that diseased cows didn’t join the human food chain. Worse still, the Humane Society said the plant was chosen at random, and not because of a tip-off.

It is not possible for the public to find out where this meat ended up. Unlike their potentially contaminated meat, a processor’s customer list is considered proprietary, and cannot be released for public consumption.

The beef recall has made a big noise in America, but it lacks the fire that would have attended a scandal of this scale in Europe. The hot topics of the day in America remain the economy and immigration.

So where is the political heat? This is an election year, and a regulatory system that allows potentially poisonous beef to be fed to kids, one would have thought, would be a hot topic for voters. Instead, while parents worried whether their kids had been dining on mad cow, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, was trying to ensure the world could eat more of it.

Rice took Andy Groseta, chief of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, to Seoul, with her, for the inauguration of South Korea’s President Lee Myung-bak. North Korea’s nuclear-weapons programme topped the agenda, but South Korea’s 2003 ban of American beef imports was also on the menu.

Why so chummy? Perhaps it has to do with money. In the 2006 election cycle, the US livestock industry funded lobbyists to the tune of $4.5m (€3m), and contributed $5m to politicians.

And while the unclaimed beef works its untraceable way through the nation’s food chain, a piece of advice for anyone going to America: bring your own pies.

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