Industrial Food Paper 2nd Draft

The United States and other developed countries have developed a complex Industrial Food System (IFS) over the past 50 years. Industrial Food is the mass production of cattle, poultry, fish and crops by utilizing methods used to produce the highest output at the lowest cost. This includes cramming animals together in small areas before they are slaughtered and used for food. Industrial Food is also heavily dependent on fossil fuels and genetic engineering.
The food industry has turned from a system in which independent farmers sell all their livestock, fish and crops with their own conditions into a system in which large corporations, such as Fast Food chains, essentially have a vertical monopoly over the industry. This means that the corporations engage in the many aspects of the production. McDonalds, for example, owns the farms that have the crops and animals. It owns the plants that process the food and it owns the fast food restaurants. Most of us are part of the IFS whether we work for the food corporations, buy food from supermarkets, eat out for dinner, work on the farms or work in the processing plants.
Food corporations attempt to use as much as they can from the crops and animals that they grow and raise. One instance is corn, perhaps the most important crop in the country. According to Iowa Corn, 11.2 billion bushels of corn was produced in 2005. It can be argued that every processed food in our houses can somehow be extrapolated from corn. This essential crop isn’t only used as food for us. Corn is fed to livestock, used as fuel ethanol, used in plastics and even processed for paper.
The food industry has evolved in the ways that were aforementioned because of the necessity of providing for the inhabitants of our country. The United States population reached 300 million this year and is rising sharply. Thus, it is imperative to efficiently produce enough food so no one will go hungry. As a result, the Industrial Food System has been effective in providing food for Americans. It is easy for us to eat already made food at fast food restaurants and to purchase processed foods that are easy to eat, so the IFS has ultimately become our primary source of nutrition.
The Industrial Food System has some benefits, but there are far more problems inherent in it. Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser, summarizes this very well. “The transformation of cattle into industrial commodities has created labor, environmental, food-safety, and animal-welfare problems.” (p. 8) Animals are overcrowded in the factories and are given synthetic antibiotics, animals are given enormous quantities of food, some of which are not natural for them, to make them much bigger. Animal wastes are improperly recycled by being dumped into rivers or not being removed from the pens in which animals are raised. This causes disease and pollution. Moreover, lots of natural resources are used up and the methods of killing livestock and poultry are considered inhumane. In addition, the workers in the factories that work on assembly lines can catch diseases from animals and inadvertently harm themselves while using machinery.
The consumers of the IFS face various health problems. So many Americans do not know their limit and eat too much. Whether it is caused by food from the supermarket or fast food, Americans are becoming extremely overweight. According to U.S. News and World Report, 32% of American adults are obese. (p. 44) Also, one out of three adults eventually gets Type 2 diabetes. In addition, many cardiovascular problems are associated with obesity. These problems include Hypertension (high blood pressure), stroke and blocked arteries, which leads to heart attacks.
The renowned German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, once said, “Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.” This is the true essence of the current food industry because livestock and poultry aren’t viewed as animals, but as commodities. They are intended to be created into as many products as possible by utilizing technologically advanced methods that are considered by some to be unethical. Furthermore, the earth is being stripped for its rich resources and huge portions of land in the United States is being set aside solely for farmland and industrial factories.
The IFS is significant to us because it affects our lifestyle and how we eat. Food might be taken for granted sometimes but it surely used up all the time. The earth is being stripped for its resources to provide food for all the human beings on this planet and to keep the IFS going strong. People are always worried about money. For the economy to stay strong, for food to be available all the time however way we wish it to be and for the prices of food to stay low, we must continue investing into the system unless we find a better alternative. This is because the IFS represents this ideology of producing as much as possible and getting the most out of our resources while making as much money off of it or saving the most money.