Industrialized Farming And Food Systems Summary

The world continues to face a wide-scale food crisis. The effects of this crisis reach from the farmers who grow and raise the food to the very system of laws that are in place to govern the system itself. Food giants are reaching deep into their pockets for lobbying in order to take advantage of both the producers and the consumer all in the name of profit. Moreover, farmers are being driven to suicide, and the ecosystem’s livelihood is treading a fine line. Both Michael Pollan and Raj Patel bring to light these problems and offer suggestions to help lessen their severity. Though there are many philosophies on which they both agree, they both have their own ideas to fight back. Pollan seeks to challenge the consumer as an individual while

Trying to eat healthy food nowadays is expensive. Many people choose the cheaper food instead of purchasing organic food. In the video “What’s wrong with our food system”, Birke Baehr discusses how the industrial farms are producing the food in a rapid way but making the food to cause long-run diseases. He has found a sustainable way for people to get healthy organic local food. Birke encourages everyone to purchase their food at their local farm which have no chemicals. Furthermore, the article “Fixing Our Broken Food System: The Plate of the Union Initiative” explains how the food system is broken because the food that people can afford are from the industrial farms. It emphasis to fix this problem, people need to support the farmers by investing in research for sustainable

Throughout the book “Stuffed and Starved”, Raj Patel, the author, makes connections between the current state of the world food system, and the Malthusian and Rhodes dilemmas, the first, proposing that the world population is growing exponentially, but the resources to feed this growing population are finite, whereas the second suggests that hunger leads to unrest, hence as long as people are kept fed, they won't revolt. Patel sections the system and points out to the defects at all levels—starting from the fundamental unit—the seed, going broader touching upon redistributors, consumers, corporations, and, above all, governments and policies. The five major areas Patel criticizes I would like to emphasize are: prevalent selection of desirable

Nobody denies that the need for more food grows with the global population. Factory farms seem to be a solution to this problem since they produce mass quantities of food for cheap compared to their organic counterparts, which are forty-seven percent more expensive (Consumer Reports). The factory farming business, however, is not the best way to feed more people since it pollutes the environment. The factory

Berry begins the article by pointing out the consumer’s ignorance as they do not realize the connection they have with the agricultural cycle. Many believe that eating is an agriculture act, however, they do not associate themselves with this act because they do not have direct contact with the actual food production process. Berry explains that the reason why people think this way is because “they just buy what they want - or what they have been persuaded to want” without a second thought on the qualities and the states of the products (3). He appeals to the reader’s emotions as he describes the nature of the consumers because it demonstrates the reality of how little people nowadays care what they consume into their body. Berry further enforces his appeal on the audience’s emotions by claiming that “food is pretty much an abstract idea” to most of the urban shoppers (4). Shoppers understand that food is produced on farms, but have no knowledge on the locations of the farms, the type of farms, and the techniques that are involved in farming. This statement supports Berry’s claims on the consumer’s ignorance because it points out the important role that consumers actually play

It is very easy to be amazed at the variety of products that can be found in today's supermarkets, all over the world. The United States in particular is a society of consumers, and many in this country would expect no less than full shelves of everything from produce, to meats, to snacks, etc. However, what most consumers today fail to realize is that the variety seen in most supermarkets in this country is really not too varied at all. In fact, the point that Michael Pollan aims to make in the first chapter of his book is just that: everything comes from corn. The paragraphs below will detail this author's beliefs in relation to today's consumer market, and focus on the ways in which most of us consume the products we are offered (often without questioning anything). Pollan's point will be stressed in this paper as well; namely, that today's society is suffering from poor nutrition and a lack of variety, due to the fact that 'everything boils down to corn,' as Pollan states, as well as the relative lack of education about the places from which one's food comes.

In Raj Patel’s novel Stuffed and Starved, Patel goes through every aspect of the food production process by taking the experiences of all the people involved in food production from around the world. Patel concludes by eventually blaming both big corporations and governments for their critical role in undermining local, cultural, and sustainable foodways and in so doing causing the key food-related problems of today such as starvation and obesity. In this book of facts and serious crime, Patel's Stuffed and Starved is a general but available analysis of global food struggles that has a goal of enlightening and motivating the general Western public that there is something critically wrong with our food system.

as plants and meat, because that is all that there was around. People grew and hunted their food,

Guthman argues that agriculture in more “ecologically sensitive ways, is produced largely by mass production methods” (Guthmanyuppychow, 2003, 55). This means that many organic products are now being produce through large corporations since the only way to mass produce is with companies or corporations. On the other hand, Ayres and Bosia argues that “the public’s right to grow and eat food untainted by multinational agribusiness” should be accepted and practiced instead of having markets receiving corporations’ products (Ayres & Bosia, 2011, 48). In other words, Ayres and Bosia believes that there should be an end to the corporations’ capitalist system and local consumption should be practiced. Therefore, the authors disagree about localism and corporation agriculture

People can not survive without consuming food which is a vital part of the human’s life; they get benefits from food which gives them strength and continues life. The demand increasing on food caused the growth of the number of the food industries who provide products for people. It’s common knowledge that the food industry is a business which seeks profits at first. According to the article “The Pleasures of Eating”, the author Wendell Berry who “is among the first public’s attention to industrialized farming and the ethical and environmental problems of our system of producing food”(36), says that the food industrialists persuade people to consume foods which are already processed, and “they will grow, deliver, and cook your food and beg you to eat ... Because they have found no profitable way to do so”(37). Wendell also claims that the food industry’s “overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price”(39). Nowadays, many food

To sum up organic food can change the relationship between producer and consumer and has discusses various problems with the marketplace of local and organic food. Overall this paper demonstrates that anthropological methods are critical in understanding problems with the marketplace of local and organic

Agricultural practices throughout the ages have evolved dramatically. Having started off as simple pastoral management and shifting cultivation, these methods have been altered substantially in the name of “progress”, primarily in the US and other industrialized nations. Through this progression the energy inputs and outputs has been drastically altered. The industrialized food system as we know it is much more complex today than the simple agricultural practices used thousands of years ago. Today, the industrialized agricultural system is dependent on extraordinary amounts of fossil fuel inputs in order to maintain its complexity. Energy is needed for growing, processing, packaging, distributing, preparing and disposing of food. With the

We live in an age in which we have come to expect everything to be instantaneously at our fingertips. We live in an age of instant coffee, instant tea, and even instant mashed potatoes. We can walk down the street at 5 in the morning and get a gallon of milk or even a weeks worth of groceries at our discretion. Even though it is great that food is now readily available at all times, this convenience comes at a price, for both the producer and the consumer. Farmers are cheated out of money and are slaves to big business, workers and animals are mistreated. And, because food now comes at a low cost, it has become cheaper quality and therefore potentially dangerous to the consumer’s health. These problems surrounding the ethics and the

The Green Revolution, which spanned across the mid 20th century from about the 1930s to the 1960s, encompassed a time when mass production, agricultural advances and the speed at which livestock were raised drove the production of food to a level which had never been seen before (Simmons). During these three or four decades, the production of food skyrocketed for multiple reasons such as advancements in how livestock was raised, pesticides, fertilizers and artificial selection (Simmons). Although there were some negative effects of the Green Revolution, such as the loss of polycultural production or a decreased quality of food, there were far more positive effects upon the world and its people, such as an increased availability of food, the decline of world hunger, an eventual increase in world population and general world stability (Simmons).

Factory farming is a modern agricultural practice that produces crowds of animals to meet the food consumption of people. Factory farms are homes to large number of animals to be raised for food in a confined space of farms to minimize operation cost, and the mass production reduces the food prices as they could produce excess amount of animals to meet the demand. However, except for offering human profuse amount of cheaper food, factory farming is an unhealthy agricultural practice to both human and the environment. Factory farming contributed to serious pollution problems, the animal treatments are inhumane and it has smothered the business opportunity of traditional farms and its workers by occupying their markets . Therefore, I strongly support that factory farming should be banned. I shall explain my point of view in the following essay.