Tomatoland Chapter Summary

One of the biggest problems facing American families today is the inability to afford fresh, nutrient filled food. In the United States today over 13 million families don’t have the money to buy fresh food and have to live on unhealthy diets. In the essay Prudence or Cruelty, author Nicholas Kristof talks about how much of a danger malnutrition is to poorer American families. Kristof mentions that the sole reason for such a high rate of malnutrition in poor U.S citizens stems from the lack of money to buy fresh goods. The price of fresh goods is too much compared to the amount of money these families are making. With multiple mouths to feed and a limited budget, going to the grocery store for these families is almost unheard of. These families

Food is the live line for all mankind. We can’t sustain or survive without food. According to the “What the world eats,” people spend as low as $ 1.23 up to $ 731.71 per a week. After I reviewed the pictures, I learned the family from Ecuador don’t eat animal product. However, they have variety of food that are healthy in their menu. They eat fruit, vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. Their favorite dishes is meatless or none dairy; therefore, I assume they are vegetarians. The family of nine spends $ 31.55 per a week for food.

The problem with food production in America is the mistreatment of livestock, the overproduction of corn in America, and the amount of corn feeded to the animals ; these issues affect consumers’ health because of the amount of diabetes has been increasing over years. Michael Pollan in "When a Crop Becomes King” he explains that the government pays for corn to be grown a lot more then it should be ,David Barboza in the article “If You Pitch it , They will Eat It” the way companies just want to get into kids mind by tricking them into telling their parents to buy them unhealthy food just for the toy it comes with, In “Pleasures of Eating,” Wendell Berry most of the people just rather be eating out then making food. There is uncertainty about the way food is produce because we cannot control people on what they

The USDA claims that each year, 25.9 million tons of America’s food is thrown away, the equivalent to a quarter of the total amount produced. Nationally, the wasted food is a damaging financial setback, amounting to $1 billion just to get rid of during a time of ascending food prices, nonetheless (Oliver, 2007). Food waste has skyrocketed since 1970 at an astonishing 50% increase rate, yet according to the FAO, one-sixth of America doesn’t get enough to eat.

About fifty million Americans are not certain when their next meal will be and in a society filled with food insecurities, the fact there this so much food waste is perplexing (King, 2015). Around the world, about two billion tons of food is wasted through production, transportation, distribution and retail, and post consumer (Glickman 2013). This amount of food

(Parker-Pope, 2007) “If you have three dollars to feed yourself, your choices gravitate toward foods which give you the most calories per dollar.” said Dr. Drewnowski, Professor of the Department of Epidemiology and Medicine at the University of Washington. He further stated, “Not only are the empty calories cheaper, but the healthy foods are becoming more and more expensive. Vegetables and fruits are rapidly becoming luxury goods.” (Parker-Pope, 2007) Much of these cost are due to our Governments Farm Policy. Farm policy encourages the production of commodities for processed foods instead of healthy foods. Whether by intention or not, because of the low cost of commodities like corn and soybeans, sugars and fats like fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated vegetable oils, current farm policy has directed food industry investment into funding ways of using these cheap food additives in processed foods, thus causing consumers to eat more added sweeteners and oils than is healthy. Because these highly processed foods can be produced at a very low cost, they give significant profit for the food industry which creates an industry incentive to market “junk” foods instead of healthier foods. (Food without Thought:How US Farm Policy Contributes to Obesity)

As seen in the film Fed Up, obesity in the U.S. can be traced back to changes in food production. The novel Gaining Ground by Forrest Pritchard describes an alternative food system option in which family farms and farmer’s markets become once again important components of the U.S. food system. The American food system has evolved

Americans today are no strangers to stretching every dollar earned in an attempt to live the American dream. Most people work long hours and eat on the fly with very little thought to what, or where, the food they have purchased came from. The reason food is so inexpensive has not been a concern to the average American, but the article written by Michael Pollan “The Food Movement Rising” attempts to convince the people that it is time to remove the blinders and take an accounting of the situation that America finds itself in. With obesity at epic proportions, and preventable diseases like

People get to choose what goes into their own food. If a person were only getting their food from their backyard or somewhere close by they would not be using resources to acquire their food. As well as resources being saved by not driving to large franchises, they would be saved by not having the food processed and by not purchasing foods from a large name brand store would save the resources used to refine the food and gas of the large trucks that ship the food from place to place. Thoreau, an American Literature author, wrote, “Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine to-morrow.” He thought that people rationalized that they were saving time or energy, but by saving a little bit they wasted much more. Conserving energy by not processing food would help preserve the environment along with helping with a person’s

Body mass index, or BMI, is used by doctors and health physicians to measure excessively high levels of body fat in relation to lean body mass in an individual. Having a BMI ratio that is considered above average or too high normally denotes persons at risk to several health adversities such as heart attacks, liver damage, diabetes, and even more widespread, obesity. In 2005, the United States Department of Health and Human Services estimated that over half of the adult American population was either overweight or obese, and many of these health concerns were correlated with a person’s diet and type of food consumption. In an attempt to assign blame for the cause, political and social commentators’ claim that long standing farm subsidies on particular food commodities correlate with rising obesity trends in America. In a documentary titled Food, Inc., opened to audience in 2008, award winning filmmaker Robert Kenner argues that current agricultural policies on these subsidized food commodities are allowing major food corporations to mass produce products that negatively affect the health of consumers nationwide. He contends that commodity crops such as corn, wheat, and soybeans are heavily subsidized by the government to produce snack foods that are high in calorie content but low in cost, becoming the prime choice for Americans looking for cheap and readily available foods to eat. Kenner believes that government subsidies need to either be

Pomeranz, J. L., & Miller, D. P. (2015). Research report: Policies to promote healthy portion

The basic survival needs of human beings include a small list of four things: food, water, clothing, and shelter. After watching an interview with Robert Kenner, the director of Food, Inc., I began to realize that the food humans are eating is actually decreasing are survivability. Within the excerpts from the movie and the dialogue amongst the interviewers, it was made apparent that the food industry has been able to completely deceive the consumers. Instead of choosing food for quality, individuals choose food by lowest price. As Kenner said in the video, “we have skewed our food system to the bad calories” (2:38). Instead of healthy home cooked meals, families are purchasing fast food for its convenience and low cost. However, the video made a very interesting stance in regards to this mentality. Although individuals are paying the lowest price for food in history, the cost of treating diseases caused by unhealthy eating has grown to be higher than ever before (8:04).

Michael Pollen’s book brought everything together and cleared all my confusion about American food system based on how he tracked the food we eat from the farm to when we swallow it. The environment and economy have been the main shapers of foodways and in many cases people will have crops that are cheap to grow, animal that will grow mostly cheap and which will sell at the best price, and that is what people will eat, they have no choice (Anderson, 2013). This is what exactly happening in America where most of the food we buy in supermarket or restaurant like Macdonald lack of quality. Pollan tracked the corn as the staple crop in America and showed how in most of the food at the supermarket consist of corn, but we buy those food without knowing,

Most Americans are not aware, or have not been exposed to the fact that part of their taxes are given to companies that take away the sources of income of the Mexican people who already live in poverty. Moreover, the encouragement of corn subsidies have created a greater demand from American growers, who are only getting wealthier from the tens of billions of dollars that the government pays them. Since 1995, $84 billion have been paid to agricultural subsidies, and currently the Farm Bill spending estimates that the total government aid to farmers will reach up to $23.9 billion in 2017 (Charles 2016). Most importantly, Americans should be more concern about the health issues and the environmental harm that comes with the overproduction of crops; which are mostly used for unhealthy foods like sweeteners and additives that can contribute to

Farming has historically been the number one occupation in America, but that fact changed long ago. The advent of the industrial revolution brought all types of people off of the farms and into the cities where they could make better money, and they could presumably build better lives. One of the problems with this influx though was that people still had to have food and that is difficult when famers are sometimes very far away. So, growers began taking their produce to plants where the food was processed, almost to an unrecognizable condition in many cases, and sold in cans, bags and wrappers to the people in the city who could not get fresh produce. This has helped expand the so called obesity epidemic over the past fifty years until over half of all Americans are considered overweight or obese. Another problem is that transportation of goods drives up the cost, and this meant that people paid more, if they were living in the city, than they would have if they lived out on the farm still. Many of the people who live in these city neighborhoods are people of color, mainly African Americans, who are experiencing the dearth of fresh, farm-grown vegetables and fruits more than any other population. The solution is to get farmers, specifically black farmers, to begin selling their produce in the inner city where no other farmers market exists, so that the people who live there can experience the