Final Food Assignment

In the 233 years since the founding of the United States in 1776, we have gone through a period of the US as a farm based nation, to a Slave based plantation nation in the early 1800's, to an industrialized factory nation in the early 1900's, to a modernized nation in the last few decades. In every form, our country has been producing the most it can given the machinery and technology available. What has changed since the days of small local farming to the factories of today, is that a natural process which we did not yet know how to speed up, has become an industrialized process lead by technology which has allowed production to become nearly exponential from 233 years ago.

This is a basic noticing about our country, but what has remained more or less the same in these 233 years, is that what is being used, the product, has not changed. Cows are not cloned, Tomatoes are not grown in labs from chemical compounds. Because of this, we have been successfully increasing the capability to speed up the processing of livestock in factories, but failing to increase the natural production of livestock. Now that the companies have fully modernized the capabilities of their factories, they are now trying to modernize their product (the animals, and vegetables). What this has resulted in, is the factory farms of today which use antibiotics, animal bi-products as animal feed, economizing of space (fitting alot of livestock into a smaller more "efficient" area), and assembly line slaughter houses. In the movie "Unser Taglich Brot" (our daily bread), we get a look at all of these things, with no people speaking about what is going on, just what is their. What I took away from it was a feeling of concern for the future and uncertainty about the direction we are headed in if we allow the industrial world to determine how our food is processed.

What I think really needs to be done, is create a whole new approach to how we use our technology to effect how we handle our food. We have newer technology than we use in our processing plants, but try and use it at a larger scale which requires more recent technology. Because we don't use a more natural and modern approach with our livestock, factory farms pump cows and pigs full of chemicals and ingredients (most of which are illegal in other modernized countries) which are directly associated with super strains of disease and sickness, which in humans have no cure.

One such disease is mad cow, which in other countries has been prevented through strict laws making chemicals and practices known to cause mad cow, illegal. In America, laws have been made with lethal loopholes allowing practices such as the use of cow and pig blood plasma as a supplement in the milk of baby cows, a process which is a leading and known cause of mad cow disease. According to the Organic Consumers Association, in an article on Jan. 16, 2004, the US Center for Disease Control had been writing off hundreds if not thousands of annual deaths symptomatic of mad cow (Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease; CTJ in humans) as unexplainable and spontaneous cases of fatalities. This is really telling, because it shows just how much the US government cares about the health of its citizens.

In the video on the website chooseveg.com, it talks about how chickens are among the worst treated and most abused animals on the planet. One such way in which these animals are terribly treated is that they are pumped full of antibiotics and hormones which cause unnatural and rapid growth, so much so that it causes death by heart attack and starvation for these birds which are to big to move, so they die. This goes right along with what I am saying about how we use primitive and stupid methods of industrialized farming to screw around with nature to yield more of the product to meet the demand. Because we have the capability to process immense amounts of meat, companies use inhumane methods such as hormone growth and genetic engineering to breed enough chickens to use their machinery at its highest capability. What this causes is unnaturally grown birds which are low in health and cannot be properly maintained due to the shear amount of animals being farmed for meat or eggs.

To me, factory farms are one of the most ridiculous things in world history. It only takes one look at a pig farm where hundreds of pigs stand in crates side by side, or thousands of chickens stand with no room to spread their wings with dead and dying animals among them to realize that the ability to maintain this amount of livestock is simply not their. I feel like you need to be able to ensure quality of your food if you want to be a mass food producer, otherwise any jackass with a few bucks can be the owner of a factory farm, because its not very difficult to build a barn and put thousands of animals in it [as is the case today].

In Jared Diamonds article "The Worst Mistake In the History of the Human Race" he discusses the argument that the move from hunter- gather society to agriculture has historically been destructive to societies. I feel like this makes a lot of sense because it makes quantity the main concern and primary objective in food processing as opposed to quality which should be the main focus. The problem that I see with this as a comparison to today is that now we have the technology to move to a middle ground where quality and quantity are balanced, but because of the profit and industrial business aspect of the modern food industry we have not, meaning we are opting for a much lower quality of life in our society which in the past has proven to only have a destructive impact on the people's health in that society.

At the beginning of this food unit, I thought a lot about the food I ate and where it came from, but did not do much to change that in my daily life. I had always thought very narrow minded about how I could eat, either vegetarian or not. After this unit I realized that I just couldn't give up eating meat, but I could, and will give up eating non- organic meat, and non- free ranged meat.