Industrial Food System

 

     In this blog I will present my concluding perspective of industrial food system. Industrial food system, a system of agricultural industrialization, is operating in an assembly industrial model with high speed and high output. In this system, productivity is over everything.  Its high output is based on the donation of animal welfare, working security, food safety, government power and environmental protection and so on.  It’s a food system really need improving.


      Before I learned about the industrial food system, I just thought it is a system that can produce quantities of food efficiently. At the beginning of this semester, by reading Imhoff’ s book, The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories， I got to know its cruelty to  animals and its damage to the nature and the society gradually behind its productivity. Animals are confined without freedom to behave naturally. The ecological balance is broken. The whole society also suffers a lot because of food contamination and environmental pollution. How can it go ahead with its huge damage of animals, nature and the whole society? I started to think about this question. Then, I was surprised at finding the great support of government to this system from The CAFO Reader and another book, Slaughterhouse. The government gives subsidy to the food industries and relaxes  regulations for them.  Amazingly, the United State Agriculture Department even helps them cheating the whole society so that they can get away from producing unhealthy food, taking inhumane actions and polluting environment. Without reading these books, I should seldom know that the food industries are powerful enough to control the government in some way. The strong power of the industrial food system makes me start to doubt the food safety of America.  At present, I pay more attention to what I eat. For instance, I used to eat McDonald’s fried chicken, but I don’t want to eat them anymore right now.