Final Food Assignment

The major industries that run our country have taken over and converted most natural agricultural farming into a process where products are becoming "mass produced" items and must be grown faster, fatter, bigger, and cheaper, which we now call, industrial farming. Natural, agricultural farming much like, "home grown" produce, is dying out. "If you can grow a chicken in 49 days, why would you one you can grow in 3 months?" Everything about our food culture is so automatic and all about speed and money. The faster the better.

In Jared Diamond's The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race he goes on to explain that the adoption of agriculture was in many was a "catastrophe from which we have never recovered." Agriculture has destroyed the land and with it came social and sexual inequality, epidemic disease, that "curse our existence." Before agriculture was adapted by humans our race consisted of hunters and gatherers. We fed on wild plants and hunted for other wildlife. But most of us would not go back to those ways of living lives because we have have become so attached to this new and better way of living. Where "we enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history." And we get "our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat." Life seems too good to change, why would we want to work more for the food we can get so easily from industrial farms? or at least that is what a majority of people think. Agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work, that is why hunters and gatherers adopted this method of living. Not that that is a good thing.

People started to domesticate plants and animals because it was an easier way to control them and then the animals were at a close reach when needed. Then this agricultural revolution began to spread and the hunters and gatherers who continued their original way of living began to die off. Agriculture still continues to spread today. I think now more than ever it is becoming even more apparent that industrial farming is a huge problem and creates many concerns: animal cruelty, sanitation, overdose of hormones, the spread of disease, etc. How is this affecting the food we eat? How is it or will it affect us short-term and long-term?

The life styles of Hunter-Gatherers vs. Farmers: Hunter-gatherers were better off because they had a wide variety of food to choose from, they gathered fresh plants, berries, and nuts everyday. While farmers grew fast growing crops that were high-carbohydrates like wheat and corn. Not a nutritious variety like the diet of Hunter-Gatherers, whose monthly intake of calories was approximately 2,140 and about 93 grams of protein. They also eat about 75 wild plants. Rather than a diet which contained mostly rice and potatoes. [If most of our food is derived from corn, where is the variety and nutrients in that?]



Much like Diamond's argument about Hunter-Gatherers adopting agriculture not by choice but because there was no alternative to surviving...

There are two films which show the effects of industrial agriculture and what it has been doing to the food we eat. In the movie Vrrrooomm! Farming for Kids, an introduction to industrial farming the man in the film tries to convince little kids that "industrial farming is cool!" You get to use big machinery and you don't have to do much work at all. The film has an underlining message that industrial farming is good and helpful to harvest crops. A similar sort of message is implied in a German film, Our Daily Bread, were the entire film takes place in the industrial farms of Europe. Their industries are immensely large and very clean (compared to the industrial farms of the United States). Whatever cattle they have they grow in numbers and most everything is machine automated, like a factory. The people in the film show no emotion, they are just there and they do their jobs.

One thing that surprised me the most was the job one woman had that was to use an air-pressurized clipper and when the pig carcass would swing by her on a hanging conveyer belt, she would just snip off the the pig hooves and let them fall into a bucket by her feet. She did this task with ease and senselessness. It bugged me because she did it so causally, without a care. Maybe she had no emotional attachment to the dead pig so it did not bother her to disembody the ligaments heedless and absentminded.


http://www.mnforsustain.org/food_ag_worst_mistake_diamond_j.htm