The industrial food chain is one of the most popular food chains in America. This food chain makes up the majority of food that one can find in the supermarket. This chain covers everything from processed foods, to meat, and even to vegetables. The way to tell if something comes from the industrial food chain is based on this definition. According to Michael Pollan to belong in the industrial food chain the food must contain corn. However, as discussed in Travis Smith’s Food Ethics class the industrial food chain does not always have to have corn in it, but has to be massed produced using heavy chemicals. While the majority of things in the industrial food chain have corn in them, not everything does. For example, a tomato may not have …show more content…
Corn is the basis for almost everything that is massed produced. It is what the animals are fed, it is what vegetables are coated with to become shiny, and it is put into processed foods for flavor and preservatives. While this sounds like you are eating a lot of corn, it is not the corn that you would think of. The corn that is in most of what we eat is not the same corn as you would have as corn on the cob. The corn that is in processed food is called Zea mays. This corn has become the stable crop for the American diet. It is placed in almost everything that week eat and it is hard to escape. They have turned it into a sugar known as high fructose corn syrup that is placed in almost every processed food in America. This includes all desserts and sweets, but also lots of other things like breads, cheeses, and soups. While many people would not think about putting sugar in soup or cheese factories do because High Fructose Corn Syrup is a great preservative even if it is adding large amounts of sugar into our …show more content…
Every animal that you find in the average supermarket is fed mainly a diet of corn. This is true for the cow all the way down to the fish. If you know anything about nature you know that corn is not typically found in the ocean, so it is surprising to hear that fish are being fed corn. The digestive system of a fish is not designed to eat corn, but fish that are in fish farms are being bred to eat corn. They do this because corn is cheap and is easy to get ahold of. It is not just fish that are not designed to eat corn, cows and bulls are not designed to eat corn either. Cows are ungulates that basically means that they systems are only maid to digest grasses. Corn is not a grass and not easily digested by cows. If a cow eats corn for longer than 90 days the cow begins to get sick. This is why cows are given daily doses of antibiotics because the corn makes them sick. Like the fish the cows are fed corn because corn is cheap and easy to get ahold of. While this is true this is only what animals eat if they are part of the industrial food chain. On a farm that is not part of the industrial food chain then they eat more of a variety and eat what their bodies are designed to
Corn took over American farmlands at the end of World War II, when a new synthetic fertilizer was introduced and manufactured by former munitions factories. It allowed for the elimination of crop rotation, leading to the switch from family farms to the corn monoculture. Economically, this system seems to make more sense, but it destroyed the once sustainable, sun-driven fertility cycle. Now, farmers are trapped into making more and more corn by government policy. As the abundance of the crop causes prices to fall, farmers must plant even more in order to make ends meet, surviving off constantly decreasing government subsidies. What’s worse is that the New Deal system that allowed corn farmers to stay afloat has since been dismantled in an effort to lower food prices and increase production without considering the farmers
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.
Selling corn in massive quantity can lead to a greater profit. An ear of corn may averages about eight-hundred kernels in sixteen rows and a pound of corn consists of approximately 1,300 kernels. One-hundred bushels of corn makes approximately 7,280,000 kernels. Every year, a single U.S. Farmer may provides food and fiber for 129 people in the U.S. and 32 overseas. In the U.S., corn production is 2 times that of any other crop. Over 55% of Iowa’s corn goes to foreign markets and the rest is used in other parts of the United States of America.
Corn subsidies are driven by the major food and gas companies in our country that want to dictate what food we put in our plate and what fuel we put in our cars. The companies can do this because of the artificially low price tag on the items they sell because of the cheap cost to produce corn. The only concern for the major corporations is to please their respective shareholders by delivering high profits. They are certainly not concerned with the health of the consumer or the environment.
Fast food consumption is taking America by a storm and it is for the sake of our lives. Fast food relies heavily on industrialized corn because of how cheap and easy to grow it is. With that being said, animals are being fed with corn rather than being fed with grass. In the Omnivore’s Dilemma, Rich Blair who runs a “cow-calf” operation s...
...nergy from an acre of Iowa farmland. Unfortunately, for more than fifty years, farm policies is designed to encourage the overproduction of this crop and hardly any other. It simply because the government subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country. While the surgeon general is warning the epidemic of obesity, our government is still signing bills encouraging the river of cheap corn flowing. It is clearly shown that food production in America is partly a mixture of politic, economic and morality.
One of the most successfully crops was traded from the Americas to Europe. Once corn arrived in Europe it was used as animal fodder, but the value of corn as human food proved itself. Corn has been one of the stimulants to population growth in the ‘old’ world. It helped to improve diets by providing much needed nutrition and calories.
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,
We should be concerned about the health of the animals that we are eating because if they are not consuming any healthy food we will not get our required nutrients. In the movie Food Inc. it shows how cows are only supposed to eat grass which is essential to them however we are now feeding them corn which makes the cows bigger and fatter faster than usual but there are many things wrong with it. This could cause Cows to raise the acid level this also creates existence for the dangerous disease E. Coli. E. Coli is a bacteria that is inside your intestines that helps you break down food. When cows are fed corn it also decreases the healthy acids such as Omega-3 and increases Omega-6 which is unhealthy. We should also care about their living conditions because a cow is in one area for most of the day just eating corn and when cows eat corn they tend to poop a lot. It is crowded in the eating area for cows so when they poop it falls on the ground and they eat so much corn that they just keep pooping so eventually they start stepping in it and this would cause them to get diseases. Some farmers when they slaughter them they do check for diseases but some don’t, so the diseases travel with the cow and onto your dinner plate which means that you could be eating an infected cow without knowing it. This could give you diseases and it could cause death. In Food Inc. they showed an example of a boy called Kevin who died because of consuming some unsanitary meat. He got E. Coli and died 12 days later. This proves that this should not be taken lightly because many people die from diseases similar to this one.
Given the amount of resources that the world as a whole has access to why use corn as a source of fuel? Some would say that countries, such as the United States have an overabundance of food produce. Logically, those countries that have an over surplus of food MUST have enough to put a dent into the rapidly increasing costs of oil and gasoline. Unfortunately, that is a misconception. In order to produce enough corn to fuel the global economy it is important to analyze what that actually means for farmers and the government, not to mention the actual food supply. In order to produce corn ethanol, we must first grow an abundance of corn. Simple right? Wrong, corn is very draining on the soil it is grown, which, in short, means that whomever is growing the corn would have to rotate the corn plantation with something that will restore the nutrients of the soil. Unfortunately, that takes both time and money to do. The task would cal...
Although feeding corn to cattle speeds up the process until they reach slaughter time, evidence shows that feeding corn to cattle that are genetically wired to eat grass produces unhealthy beef which then plays a role in healthy people, minimizing the longevity in Americans. Furthermore, the logic of nature relies on complex mutual relationship where each animal contributes to the sustainability of their environment in a cyclic manner as stated in the chapter “All Flesh is Grass”:
According to the Organic Consumers Association, in 1970 there were approximately 900,000 family farms in the United States; by 1997 there were only 139,000 family farms. This number is continually decreasing by the year. Why is this a problem? Factory farms promote abusive practices in order to maximize production at minimal cost at the expense of the environment, the community, and even our personal health. They house thousands of animals and inject them with hormones in order to maximize their growth and food output. The techniques being used are inhumane and are used thousands of times a day. According to the Organic Consumers Association, two out of every three animal products in stores come from factory farms. Factory farms dominate food production throughout the country. Animals most commonly consumed that require large-scale farming practices are cows, chickens and pigs. The methods of farming are not only bad for the animals themselves, but it’s affecting the meat we put into our bodies, and is therefore affecting one’s health. Factory farms ultimately have a negative effect on the health of both the animal and the consumer of the animal product.
Poultry is by far the number one meat consumed in America; it is versatile, relatively inexpensive compared to other meats, and most importantly it can be found in every grocery store through out the United States. All of those factors are made possible because of factory farming. Factory farming is the reason why consumers are able to purchase low-priced poultry in their local supermarket and also the reason why chickens and other animals are being seen as profit rather than living, breathing beings. So what is exactly is factory farming? According to Ben Macintyre, a writer and columnist of The Times, a British newspaper and a former chicken farm worker, he summed up the goal of any factory farm “... to produce the maximum quantity of edible meat, as fast and as cheaply as possible, regardless of quality, cruelty or hygiene” ( Macintyre, 2009). Factory farmers do not care about the safety of the consumers nor the safety of the chicken, all the industrial farmers have in mind are how fast they can turn a baby chick into a slaughter size chicken and how to make their chicken big and plumped. Factory farming is not only a health hazard to the well-being of the animals, but the environment, and human beings ;thus free range and sustainable farming need to be put into practice.
Food is “composed of synthetic chemical additives, such as colorings, preservatives, sugar substitutes and trans-fats” (Fitzgerald, 2006, p.72). Fitzgerald reported that by the “1970s most meats and dairy products that were factory farmed were laced with growth hormones, antibiotics and a range of pesticides” (p.72). Furthermore, food that is frozen, packaged and canned is considered processed food. A brief explanation of the chemical additives in processed food. 1.
Food is taken for granted by many people in places like the Western World, especially in countries like the United States. There is no fear that the next meal will be an empty plate, nor is there reason to fear that the supply of food will disappear. The reason that there is no need to ration out supplies is that the food industry mass produces food to feed their ever growing population in factory farms. However, the public is kept generally unaware of what occurs inside these farms, which calls into question the integrity of the food production. While there is an acceptance of these farms due to the convenience they provide to the consumer, there are many negative consequences related to these slaughterhouses. The mass production of food from factory farming does not justify the negative affects and threat to the environment, to the health and security of animals, nor the violation of workers’ rights.