Voting with Your Dollar: Influence in the Food Industry

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You amble your way into the grocery store, picking out products from carefully stocked aisles and surveying choices from cereals, frozen meals, to assorted fruits and vegetables. In this moment, you are choosing to exchange your money for goods. You are voting with your dollar. Nutrition and health are paramount to one's lifestyle and to aim for greater can occasionally mean spending more. There is no denying the economic intricacies food industries implement into selling their products. Using one's voice is important; however, where one spends their money is just as influential when it comes to speaking to corporations associated with the food industry. In the works "How Junk Food Can End Obesity" by David H. Freedman, "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food" by …show more content…

In Shapin's work, "What Are You Buying When You Buy Organic?", he explains the definition of organic and how it came to be. As a humble start, it was a movement, one to shift away from big corporation; yet, instead it has faltered to become catch words in advertisements. Shapin expresses the phrase "organic" to no longer coincide with "local" nor "sustainable," stating "large-scale organic growers have embraced not only the logic of capitalism but the specific logic of California agribusiness." Growers of the produce we consume aiming only to "[maximize] monetary yield per acre" (pp. 431). Agribusiness can be defined as agriculture that is conducted on commercial principles. Therefore, the food industry sees the green it grows only as the greenish hue of dollar bills. As consumers, if we continue to purchase products from companies that disregard the cries of health advocates and persist to use additives and ingredients that harm our well-being, we should only ever expect our money to promote the demand of detrimental products that aim to satisfy taste buds and be addictive to

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