Persisting Injustices in the Food Industry

When someone thinks about the food industry 100 years ago, they might think of workers getting stuck in crazy unsafe machines, and not receiving any workers comp, or anything. They might think of immigrants flooding the industry with reduced pay. They might even think about animals trapped in horrible living quarters. Well, when they think about the present, the same thoughts might not pop into their minds, but in fact, the food industry has not changed. Workers are still treated poorly, animals are treated lousy and their main priority is to make cheap products. Food workers are treated poorly. In, The Jungle, while talking about the food industry, it states, “The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from

An example of this is in Food, Inc., when a struggling family says, the only way we’d be able to survive is because of cheap food (Kenner). Yes, cheap food does prevent them from starving, but at what cost? This is coming from an obviously obese family, so this cheap food, that is “saving” them, is also slowly killing them. Expensive food is expensive because people actually took time to create it. Cheap food usually comes from huge companies trying to create as much product while doing the least amount of work as

In, The Jungle, it says, “The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the knowledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down” (Sinclair 94). These rich company owners pay their workers nothing even though they have money to spare. In Food, Inc., the same obese family from before says, we don’t eat fast food because we want to, we eat it because that’s all we can afford (Kenner). This also supports the previous claim, but this family realizes the predicament that they’re in. They work for a food industry, and they get payed so little, they are forced to eat the crap they produce. Big companies are just recycling the money they pay to their workers by forcing them to consume their product. Since both instances have workers with excessively poor pay, it proves that then and now, companies are trying to get produce products as cheaply as