Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Importance of healthy food essay
Importance of healthy food essay
Conclusion of corporate farming
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Importance of healthy food essay
On an average day do you take the time to investigate what you are eating? Do you examine the label fully to see if there are any additives or chemicals in the food? As the world population grows, sustaining it has become a problem. New innovations in technology and farming processes have been a result of the population growth. However these changes are not always for the better, with every new innovation a consequence will follow. Corporate Farming has led to negative health effects in humans. Before the mass production of food, farming was small and family based. People knew where their food was coming from and what was put into producing it. Real food consisted of fruits and vegetables that were in season and meats from animals that were grass fed and able to move freely throughout the pasture they lived in. As the population grew there was a need for a more efficient, cheap, and productive way of farming, therefore corporate farming was introduced on a large …show more content…
This increase in system sustains the growing population with cheap food that is open to anyone who can purchase it. People are now able to purchase a large quantity of food for a low price. Even though this is an advantage to consumers the quality of the food available has significantly decreased. People used to have access to healthy whole foods that they knew where it came from, however, people now have access to cheap food that is filled with additives, preservatives, and fillers because of corporate farming. To increase food production a cheap and efficient way was needed and it was found in additives. Corporate farms are flooding the market with food filled with chemicals because it is cheaper than the alternative. This cheaper way of farming does sustain help sustain the growing population but at a cost to the
Alice Waters, in her 2007 article “Farmer Bill Should Focus on Healthful Foods”, instead of focusing on the farming techniques themselves, makes a more pointed inspection over the products and produce
Although there are many dangers in the world, the necessity of eating shouldn’t be considered something that is dangerous. Bryan Walsh talks about the dangers of eating food in his article, “America’s Food Crisis,” that proves how the food industry has changed dramatically in recent years. Factory farming has become the new way of producing food for America, one that is slowly putting millions of people’s health at risk.
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
After reading McKibben and Hurst’s articles in the book Food Matters, both authors present arguments on “industrial farming”, and although Hurst provides a realistic sense on farming, McKibben’s suggestions should be what we think about.
...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.
Western diet causes many diseases; increases people’s medical need for supplements and vitamins. However one writer disagrees with him and suggests “Eat foods that are less processed” (Denis Burkitt) which is easy to say but hard to apply on. Future more Pollen’s purpose of writing this article was to show how bad the effects of eating Western dieting can be, and to introduce a way to escape and in order to create a healthier country. Pollan also mentions the fact that livestock is being raised on a Western diet too, which means they are raised genetically too which means nothing is healthy like it used to be. In order to strengthen his statement he shows the percent of income spent on food in countries where the diseases percent is smaller to prove indeed “Western diet” is unhealthy, this matters a lot because currently most of the people living in this country are suffering from chronic diseases caused by wrong diet. Michael
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,
The article highlights and includes the documentary Food, Inc. which exposes the inability of the profit system to provide safe and healthy food for the vast majority of the population. Eric Schlosser investigating journalist quotes, “The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000…now our food is coming from enormous assembly lines where animals and the workers are being abused, and the food has become much more dangerous in ways that are deliberately hidden from us”. Schlosser also quotes, “Birds are now raised and slaughtered in half the time they were 50 years ago, but now they’re twice as big”. He believes they not only changed the chicken, but they changed the farmer implying that capitalism has taken the place for the need of small scale farming. In addition, Michael Pollan also a journalist believes that the vast array of choices which appears in everyday supermarkets is nothing but an “illusion of diversity”. The advancement of technology and how consumers react to products has been further developed and continues to be in this generation. Food scientists are now genetically modifying and engineering products to satisfy and manipulate consumers to desire more of these unhealthy product choices. The biggest advance in recent years has
The 1920’s were the singularly most influential years of farming in our country. The loss of farms following the war, and new agricultural practices resulted in the dawn of modern agriculture in our country. The shift from small family to big corporation during this time is now the basis for how our society deals with food today. Traditional farming in the 1920’s underwent a series of massive transitions following WWI as the number of farms decreased and the size of farms increased.
...o. “The Great Agricultural Transition: Crisis, Change, and Social Consequence of the Twentieth Century US Farming”. Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 103-124.
Hunter-gatherer societies are healthier and more beneficial towards one’s body than an agricultural based society but due to the large populations around the world there is no possibility society can convert back. The only reasonable action that can be taken to live a healthier life is if the pesticides used to grown fruits and vegetables, the fattening products used on the animals consumed, and no other artificial product or chemical is used on the food consumed.
In order for us to maintain our lives, we need to consume food to supply nutrient-needs for our bodies. As the global population increased, the demand for food also increased. Increased population led to mass production of foods. However, even with this mass production, in under-developed countries, people are still undernourished. On other hand, in developed and developing countries, people are overfed and suffering from obesity. In addition, the current methods of industrial farming destroy the environment. These problems raised a question to our global food system. Will it be able to sustain our increasing global population and the earth? With this question in my mind, I decided to investigate the sustainability of our current global food system.
Agriculture has changed dramatically, especially since the end of World War II. Food and fibre productivity rose due to new technologies, mechanization, increased chemical use, specialization and government policies that favoured maximizing production. These changes allowed fewer farmers with reduced labour demands to produce the majority of the food and fibre.
Farming has been an occupation since 8,500 B.C. On that year in the Fertile Crescent farming first began when people grew plants instead of picking them in the wild. Then nearly 5,000 years later oxen, horses, pigs, and dogs were domesticated. During the middle ages, the nobles divide their land into three fields. The reasoning for this was to plant two and leave one to recover. This was the start of crop rotation which is a big part of farming today. Burning down forest and then moving to another area is a farming technique used by the Mayans called Slash and burn. Mayan farmers also were able to drain swampy areas to farm them buy building canals. In 1701 Jethro Tull invented the seed drill and a horse drawn how that tilled the land. In Denmark they would plant turnips in the previously unplanted field. The turnips help restore the nutrients in the ground thus crop rotation is born. In England people began moving there fields closer to each other for a more efficient way of planting. Later in the 18th century selective breeding was introduce which made bigger, stronger, and more milk producing livestock. In the mid 1800’s a steam plough was invented. By the 1950 tractors, milking machines, and combines were used by almost farmers. The latest f...
Contract farming was adopted from developed countries when agribusinesses started to source high value agricultural products from developing countries, initially in South America (Little