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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. Farmers are essentially the back-bone of the entire food system. Large-scale family farms account for 10% of all farms, but 75% of overall food production, (CSS statistics). Without farmers, there would be no food for us to consume. Big business picked up on this right away and began to control the farmers profits and products. When farmers buy their land, they take out a loan in order to pay for their land and farm house and for the livestock, crops, and machinery that are involved in the farming process. Today, the loans are paid off through contracts with big business corporations. Since big business has such a hold over the farmers, they take advantage of this and capitalize on their crops, commodities, and profits. Farmers are life-long slaves to these b... ... middle of paper ... ...g it. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Works Cited Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation. N.p.: Harper Perennial, 2001. Print. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma. N.p.: Penguin Books, 2006. Print. "Monsanto uses patent law to control most of U.S. corn, soy seed market." Cleveland National News. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Dec. 2009. . "Artificial Hormones." Sustainable Table . N.p., 1 Nov. 2011. Web. 29 Nov. 2011. . "U.S. Food System Facts Sheet." Center for Sustainable Systems . The University of Michigan , 2010. Web. 29 Nov. 2011. . Food Inc. . Prod. Robert Kenner. 2008. CD-ROM.
Moreover, this system of mass farming leads to single crop farms, which are ecologically unsafe, and the unnatural treatment of animals (Kingsolver 14). These facts are presented to force the reader to consider their own actions when purchasing their own food because of the huge economic impact that their purchases can have. Kingsolver demonstrates this impact by stating that “every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we
n.p.. 28 Jan. 2014. Web. The Web. The Web. 08 Feb. 2014.
I know, I know. What kind of company would even think to use unethical and borderline illegal methods to rise in power and wealth? Unheard of, I say! Yet, The World Trade Organisation’s Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement in a number of articles (27.2 and onwards) openly expresses the right to terminate or deny the placement of a patent if the invention is to protect human life and health, because their exploitation is prohibited by law. Furthermore, the patent is excluded if it involves the modification of a biological process, or alters the life and processes of plants used as crops. Considering that a seed is not an invention, and Monsanto did not invent a seed: they merely modified and “improved” it for our benefit, their attempts to sue and bankrupt farmers should only be, at most, semi-legitimate. But, they have money and political influence, and what do farmers have? Crippling contracts and a life sentenced to slavery for Monsanto on minimum wage. However, as earlier stated, Monsanto is looking out for our health and well-being. Their product, the soybean, is one of the few legumes that contain all essential amino acids for the healthy function of human beings. Because they are so essential to human health, a claim to patent the crop should
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.
Web. The Web. The Web. 6 Nov. 2011. Forer, Ben.
Our current system of corporate-dominated, industrial-style farming might not resemble the old-fashioned farms of yore, but the modern method of raising food has been a surprisingly long time in the making. That's one of the astonishing revelations found in Christopher D. Cook's "Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis" (2004, 2006, The New Press), which explores in great detail the often unappealing, yet largely unseen, underbelly of today's food production and processing machine. While some of the material will be familiar to those who've read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" or Eric Schlosser's "Fast-Food Nation," Cook's work provides many new insights for anyone who's concerned about how and what we eat,
N.p., 31 Aug. 2005. Web. The Web. The Web. 17 Apr. 2014.
...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.
Monsanto is getting bigger and is now supplying their genetically altered crops to over 70 different countries including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and China. That’s over three quarters of the world’s food dominated by one company. They can control everything from the prices, to the farmers crop itself. Without any say, farmers from around the world are forced to pay whatever Monsanto wants because...
In the movie “Food Inc” we saw how the food industry keeps their farmers under their control. Food incorporation sets new protocols that require the farmers to keep purchasing more on dept. As a result of loans and only $18,000 annually (Kenner) they are stuck in a hole that they can’t get out of. I find many things disturbing about this. First off, I find it disturbing that he picked a poorly educated farming area. It seems obvious that the farmers don’t know what they got into and don’t have any knownldge of how to get out. I find it an example of poor unionization within the small farmers that are to be blamed not the ones that find out how to exploit it (Kenner).
N.p., 1 June 2011. Web. The Web. The Web. 10 Nov. 2013.