Over a hundred years ago the idea of farming and food consumption was very different then it is today. Regulation, education about health, research and technology, food processing, marketing, and wholesale has changed the food industry and the agriculture itself. Before going to the market or grocery store meant going to your back yard where you knew where everything was being grown and how it was being taken care of. Nowadays the majority of people do not raise their own animals or grow their own vegetables they go to a big chain or even a smaller local store to buy their food. When it comes to food safely and food production large farms and small farms are being negatively affected in many different areas. The current issues dealing with food safely and food production are, because there are a few big plants running are production of food its causing nation wide food poisoning and contamination, the public wants more regulation and centralized on farms which is then putting financial pressure on local farms, feedlots for animals, and our food is subject to terrorist attacks because only more then half our nations food is produced in the same place. I believe the way to fix our problem is to be informed and get involved.
One of the main issues facing farming safety and production today is the fact that a few big plants are producing the mass majority of our food. Because our food is being produced, cleaned and handled in one place its causing nation wide poisoning and contamination of our meats and vegetables. For example, four companies produce eighty percent of Americans beef and one company produces thirty percent of our milk. (p.388) This means when an outbreak occurs it’s harder to re-call all of the produced because most stores all over the nation are selling the food. It also means that more people are going to be affected and become ill. If a local store were to sell bad spinach to five costumers in a small town its easier to control, manage, trace and inform those customers instead of have a large amount of people getting ill. Two hundred Americans in 26 states were sickened by spinach that had E. Coli. (p.388) The Center Disease Control for and Prevention approximation that our food supplies sickens 76 million, putting more than 300, 000 in the hospital and killing 5,000 Americans every year.
The tactics used for gaining land in foreign countries is a causing these developing nations to continue to have problems with food security. The mistreatment of the agro-workers and animals is just a way to get the most money in the least taxing way possible. The truth behind the global food system is told in this part of the book. The pros and cons are both listed, and even though the cons severely out-weigh the pros, I don’t believe there is going to be any change to peoples’ behavior towards food. I think this because although most people are informed that their food wasn’t grown in the best conditions, or treated as a family pet, but rather a means to an end, nothing has changed except for the fact that there are more documentaries like Food Inc. coming out. Something completely detrimental has to happen to the global food system in order for people to realize that what we are doing is not safe, healthy, or beneficial in the long run. Being aware of all these ethical issues in our food system is just the first step. Knowing how to provide a different solution to the problems we now face is the
In conclusion, there are many ways to feed America at a reasonable value and a healthier way. Michael Pollan had some great models that he discussed in his book like fast food, industrial organic, and beyond organic food. My models consisted of combining fast food restaurants with farms like Polyface, shopping at farmers markets because it is natural, and paying the extra price on organic food. I believe that my models would work because they are fresh, natural, and the price would be the same thing that one would pay for fast food. With that being said, I believe that it can better our future for America because we will know what we are eating. Remember, you are what you eat. Choose wisely on what you eat.
...in the market. Diversified mid-sized family farms used to produce most of our meat, but now, only a few companies control the livestock industry. This has resulted in driving family farmers out of the market and replacing them with massive confined feeding operations that subject the animals to terrible living conditions that subject our food to contamination. Major food corporations are only concerned with minimizing overhead in order to deliver the consumer cheap food, regardless of the health implications.
The world in which the human race lives in relies heavily on factory farming to provide food to over seven billion people. This method of food production is deemed normal and efficient in today’s society, yet has minute advantages. If we took the time to learn the conditions and technicalities of how factory farming actually operates, we would discover that the overall effects to the environment and human health are detrimental. Realistically, people are not going to stop consuming animal products, so instead, people should be conscious of how their food is being produced so that they may be informed in order to make changes in their dietary habits to better their own well being, as well as that of the environment’s.
...struggling to earn any income at all and sometimes do not even get the opportunity to eat. Another issue that Raj Patel did not touch on is the lack of care consumers have for the farmers. It seems that consumers care about farmers about as much as the corporations do, which, in my opinion, is not a lot. When consumers only care about low prices and large corporations only care about making a profit, the farmers are left out to dry. Many consumers believe “food should be available at a bargain price, a belief that relies on labor exploitation and environmental exhaustion at multiple points along the commodity chain.” (Wright, 95) Corporations as well as consumers generally tend to be selfish and I think Raj Patel is afraid to mention this. If only these people cared a little bit more about each other I believe the hourglass of the food system will begin to even out.
Furthermore, food safety is a major issue in the United States. Foodborne illness has caused an estimated 1 and 6 Americans to be sickened, 128,000 hospitalizations, and cause 3,000 deaths each year (http://www.sustainabletable.org/). These numbers may seem shocking, but they are all too real. All of the high levels
Nowadays more and more people are unaware of where their food comes from. Mankind now lives in an age where technology is the main focus and the rural way of life is becoming a thing of the past. The ability to produce food is so efficient and effective that some people do not even realize how their food gets to their plate. But that was not the case in the 19th century. In 1837, a man named John Deere changed farming forever.
Agriculture has been a part of American life for tens of thousands of years. The modern world today has changed a lot since then thanks to technology and new scientific studies in order to improve the way we see agriculture today. A specific change is a term call biotechnology which is the use of living organisms or other biological systems in the manufacture of drugs or other products or for environmental management, as in waste recycling. Biotechnology has changed agriculture by making plants resistant to certain diseases or to the animal aspect of changing the sex of a cow its just remarkable on how much science has changed and how far its come. Of course everything comes with its good and bad and this is sure a controversy that has gone on forever about its health risks and if its actually healthy for you but it is one part of science that has changed they way we farm and plant crops today.
On January 4, 2011 President Obama signed into law The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). This law has shed new light on the safety and security of our food supply. The last update to the food safety laws in the United States was in 1938. The food safety modernization act pays special attention at trying to modernize the food safety policies in the United States in hopes to prevent problems and concerns before they happen. As we all know, most of our food comes from overseas or sometimes from your neighboring state. The food products travel by car, truck, airplane, boat, or even train. We are all very happy to be receiving our bananas from Costa Rica and all of our other fresh fruits and vegetables that are imported into the United States, but we never stop to think about what pathogens are contaminating our produce and other foods on the way over and if they are safe for us to eat. In an article by Neal Fortin, he states that the law also gives the FDA new standards to hold imported foods to the domestic food standards and it also encourages the FDA to establish and develo...
American society has grown so accustomed to receiving their food right away and in large quantities. Only in the past few decades has factory farming come into existence that has made consuming food a non guilt-free action. What originally was a hamburger with slaughtered cow meat is now slaughtered cow meat that’s filled with harmful chemicals. Not only that, the corn that that cow was fed with is also filled with chemicals to make them grow at a faster rate to get that hamburger on a dinner plate as quickly as possible. Bryan Walsh, a staff writer for Time Magazine specializing in environmental issues discusses in his article “America’s Food Crisis” how our food is not only bad for us but dangerous as well. The word dangerous could apply to many different things though. Our food is dangerous to the consumer, the workers and farmers, the animals and the environment. Walsh gives examples of each of these in his article that leads back to the main point of how dangerous the food we are consuming every day really is. He goes into detail on each of them but focuses his information on the consumer.
If I were to ask people, “Do you see anything wrong with the food system in America?” the majority of people would respond “No”. After all, America is the best country on Earth. How could the alleged best country on Earth be running on a tainted system that only cares about profit? It was not until I did my own research that I uncover the many, many flaws. After watching the documentary Food Inc., it is very evident that the current system providing the nation with food and food safety is broken. In order to amend the current system, there needs to be changes in three key areas: the government, the producers, and the consumers.
history at over half a billion was caused by a salmonella outbreak at an Iowa farm with such unsanitary conditions as “[chickens] forced to pile atop their dead and rotting cage mates as they laid their eggs” (Carlson). In 2007, the U.S. imported 3 million broiler chicken from China, which had been “fed pet food containing toxic wheat gluten [which was then] sold to restaurants and supermarkets all over the [nation]” (“Food Safety”). Humans are being affected on a greater scale in recent years by factory farms because of a lack in sterilization and the sheer amount of product produced. The U.S. alone butchers more than nine billion animals per year, and globally there are over seventy billion deaths for meat, dairy, and eggs. Public health is jeopardized when pollutants in such excess are released from these farms, and often municipal water systems are forced to remove waste at a costly expense to prevent contamination of drinking
Thomas Jefferson once said: “agriculture is our wisest pursuit because it will in the end contribute most to the real wealth, good morals and happiness.” However, the advents of modern agriculture through food industrialization may have brought him to question his own predictions. The industrialization of food is the narrowing and simplification of the food chain into a system that meets standards of quantity, uniformity and cost ultimately leading to a Western diet that threatens sustainability of life and the environment.
At some point in time, human populations decided to settle down and harvest their own food instead of searching for it in the woods. In modern times, people tend to view this as a great advancement or revolution. Why would people want to search for food daily and forage for tubers or berries when they could just head to the supermarket or their own backyard? Scientist have determined, however, that this development brought many negative effects to the human population. The societies who adopted agriculture were malnourished and unhealthy, but they gained enough of an advantage over hunter/gatherer populations that the benefits outweighed the cost – at least in their eyes. Our society today has been shaped by this “revolution” and its effects,
We live in an age in which we have come to expect everything to be instantaneously at our fingertips. We live in an age of instant coffee, instant tea, and even instant mashed potatoes. We can walk down the street at 5 in the morning and get a gallon of milk or even a weeks worth of groceries at our discretion. Even though it is great that food is now readily available at all times, this convenience comes at a price, for both the producer and the consumer. Farmers are cheated out of money and are slaves to big business, workers and animals are mistreated. And, because food now comes at a low cost, it has become cheaper quality and therefore potentially dangerous to the consumer’s health. These problems surrounding the ethics and the procedures of the instantaneous food system are left unchanged due to the obliviousness of the consumers and the dollar signs in the eyes of the government and big business. The problem begins with the mistreatment and exploitation of farmers.