Hidden Food Industry
The Hidden World of the Food Industry
Corey Biller
Com II
J. DePue
August 17, 2010
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Abstract
The food industry is hiding many secrets on how the world’s food is being produced. The
government and the FDA attempt to form laws to regulate and document the work of the food
empires but these giant companies have so much power that they get the laws over turned. The
growing, processing and handling of food needs to change in order to keep the people of the
world healthy. Without these changes e coli outbreaks will continue to get worse and the health
of every person on the planet will be at risk.
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The Hidden World of the Food Industry
Where does the world’s food come from? It seems like a simple question but the answer
may make a person think twice about eating anything from the supermarket or restaurant ever
again. American’s food is now made in giant factories where added chemicals and preservatives
to make the food last longer and make it safer to consume. But adding these dangerous additives
is destroying the health of every human being who eats this food. Living a healthy life style is
almost impossible due to food that is prepared quickly and without care.
Anyone attempting to live a healthy life style knows that eating fruits and vegetables is
monumentally important. However, most do not know that those fruits and veggies are not
grown on a farm. Most of the fruit starts its life outside, where it is meant to be. But the normal
life span of that fruit or vegetable ends swiftly when workers begin spraying them with harmful
pesticides. Then they get picked weeks in advance so that the produce will be just ripening when
it hits store shelves. Consequently, this means the produce must be ripened unnaturally. They are
chemically colored by ethylene gas, stripping them of most of their nutrients.
Moreover, fruit juices are negatively affected by the chemicals used by these companies.
For example, everyone knows that orange juice is one of the healthiest and most wholesome
juices anyone can drink. Consequently now that oranges are sprayed with pesticides, picked
early, and ripened unnaturally, the juice that is now on store shelves is not nearly as nutritious as
it seems. Furthermore, the companies that produce the juice add harmful preservatives, sugar,
high fructose corn syrup and other ingredients that are unnatural and not health conscience.
The meat section of the supermarket is full of options from chicken breast to ground
beef to whole hams. Animals of the food industry are subject to some of the worst treatment and
chemical alterations. Chickens for example have been physically altered over years of steroid
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injections, chemical additives and antibiotics to the point that their physical makeup is
completely different. They have been engineered to have bigger breast due to the overwhelming
demand for white meat chicken. The chickens grow so quickly that they can never stand on their
own feet. They sit cramped side by side with hundreds of other chickens in windowless buildings
never seeing sunlight.
The life of a cow is not much better than that of a chicken. Cows raised how they should
be would be fed a diet of grass. But grass is difficult to come by when the beef companies have
the cows standing knee deep in their own feces. Instead, they are fed corn which seemed
perfectly fine for some time. But then E Coli breakouts became quite frequent. Scientist found
that while in the stomach of a cow, the mixture of corn and digestion fluids creates and
incredibly deadly, incurable form of the already dangerous virus. Furthermore, cows standing in
their own waste are not washed properly and feces was found in meat packages all across
America. However, the beef companies came up with an inexpensive way to clear out the deadly
virus. Simply drench the raw meat in Ammonia to kill off any bacteria in the meat. Again the big
meat companies decided that the cheap and unhealthy ways of meat processing are better than
doing it the way nature intended.
If one looks on the ingredients sticker on the back of any given food product, they will
probably see some sort of corn product. The corn industry has grown tremendously in the past
half century. Fifty years ago, farmers could get around twenty bushels of corn per acre yet today
two-hundred bushels is normal. The overwhelming demand for corn has pushed farmers to use
harsher pesticides, genetically reengineered fertilizers, and industrialized seeds to produce
astonishing amounts of corn.
Hidden Food Industry
Due to the increase in corn production, scientist began to experiment with it. Now with
corn, food companies have over twenty ingredients at their disposal. These ingredients are
obscure and difficult to pronounce so that the public will not ask questions about them. These
ingredients include high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, saccharin, xanthium gum, ascorbic
acid, calcium stearate and many more. This is what Larry Johnson from the Center of Crops
Utilization Research at Iowa State University had to say about corn and the way food is made
today. “We are now engineering our food…we bring all these pieces together and engineer new
foods that don’t stale…if you would go to the supermarket shelf…ninety percent of them [food
products] would have a corn or soy bean ingredient (Food Inc, n.d.). Even the scientists behind
these ingredients see that the extensive use of them is careless, unhealthy and wrong.
In addition, corn is so cheap and readily available that it is now the main food source for
most all farm animals today. As well as cows, pigs and chickens scientist are attempting to train
fish how to eat corn. As stated above, feeding a cow corn causes the bacteria in their stomach to
become acid resistant forming the deadly and incurable e coli virus 0157:h7. Coupled with the
feeding of corn, cows also stand ankle deep in a mixture of hundreds of cow’s manure all day.
Therefore, if one cow on the feeding lot has the virus, the meat from the other cows can get
infected with the virus causing thousands of pounds of meat to be infected.
In order to kill the e coli in the beef, these companies drench the meat in ammonia and
ammonia hydroxide. Instead of just changing what they feed the cows, they went with a cheaper
and easier way of fixing the contamination problem. Unfortunately for anyone who eats beef,
seventy percent of all beef on store shelves has undergone this ammonia treatment. These
methods of contamination defense are disgusting and harmful.
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In 1972, the FDA conducted over fifty thousand food safety inspections. In 2006, they
conducted just nine thousand (Food Inc, n.d.). In the 1970s, there were thousands of slaughter
houses. Today, there are thirteen massive slaughter houses that control all the meat in America.
This means that if one group of animals has a disease, there is a good chance that other meat will
be contaminated while at these giant slaughter houses.
There have been many attempts to make laws to control these giant industries and stop
the spread of disease through food. As soon as these laws were passed, the companies of the food
industry would sue the FDA for creating what they viewed as an unfair law. Due to the size of
these companies, they are very strong and capable so they always win and the laws are
overturned.
There are some issues with taking the food industry back to being a clean, safe and
healthy industry it was fifty years ago. First off, due to the cheap ways of manufacturing food,
food is inexpensive. If the food industry would never have changed, food would be much more
expensive that it is today. Secondly, some argue that the population of the world has reached the
point that typical farming, without the use of engineered products, is insufficient to supply the
world with food.
Although these arguments seem valid, there are very simple solutions to these problems.
If one would look at the cost of medicine and doctors visits, they would see that buying more
expensive and healthier foods would cut nearly all of the medical costs of diabetes and cancers
that these cheap engineered foods cause. Likewise, if one looks at all the inefficiencies of the
modern food industry they would see that with every new contamination problem, another step is
added to the process of getting food to the supermarket. Without the chlorine and ammonia
baths, the deaths of cows and chickens by overcrowding, and the train and semi truck trips
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around the country moving food, the old version of the food industry may actually be faster and
more efficient. The ethical way of growing food would make it easier, more efficient and most
importantly safer and healthier.
The environment would be positively affected by changes in the production of food.
Pesticides are toxic and pollute the earth. Most food products travel over one-thousand miles to
get to the supermarket. The everyday pollution of semi trucks hauling food all over America
would be greatly reduced if there were more small farms producing instead of big industries. The
way we feed and genetically alter animals pollutes the earth as well do to their waste not being
able to properly decompose. All the benefits of changing the food system seem so obvious, but
these food empires do not want to see change. They will spend millions of dollars to see that
there operations stay the same.
The need for drastic change is obvious. The health of every man, woman and child has
been placed second to fast and cheap production. The amount of people with diabetes and cancer
has increased immensely since the industrialization of food production. Sugar, fat and salt, which
are all rare in nature, are readily available now in massive doses. Soda, energy drinks and even
fruit juices have incredible amounts of sugar and high fructose corn syrup packed into them. The
meat that is produced today has more fat than ever. With fast food being so cheap, most children
are subjected to eating a burger, fries and a soda at least once a week.
Organic foods, which are foods made only using natural ingredients without preservatives
and other harmful additives, have become quite popular since the public started asking questions
about the source of their food. These organic companies have made a serious effort to offer
citizen the options of healthy, natural and tasteful foods that can be eaten without worrying about
e coli and artificial ingredients.
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Food preparation today needs change in order to not harm citizens of the world further.
Food production giants need to work by health standards and laws to make sure the food that
every child in the world eats is safe and nutritious. Every citizen has the chance to act against big
food corporations by buying organic. As the profits in the organic market increase, these big
industries will see that in order to stay alive, they must change the way they produce. How much
can these companies do without the people and the government finally stepping in? Ammonia
showered beef, genetically altered chicken, pesticide ridden veggies and artificially ripened fruits
are all legal do to the lack of control over these companies. These companies will not take
responsibility therefore, the people must. The health of every human on the planet depends on it.
Hidden Food Industry
References
Kenner, R. (Director). (2009). Food, Inc. [motion picture]. United States: Magnolia Pictures.
Little, S., Llwellyen, H., Clarke S. F. J. (2010). Sensory ataxia associated with
chronic organophosphate pesticide exposure. Human and Experimental Toxicology.
Retrieved Form http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9099/ehost/pdfviewer/pdf
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