Our food industry has grown to be so large and complex that government agencies cannot enforce safety regulations and prevent consumers from becoming sick.

The FDA has 700 inspectors on staff for a nation of people who consume 137 pounds of meat per person, per year. An understaffed agency that doesn’t see, touch or smell the food cannot decide if it is safe for you to eat.

“We a eat a lot; an average of 137 pounds of beef, chicken, fish and shellfish per American in 2002.” (Consumer Reports You Are What They Eat)

With the increased amount of food demanded, more food must be farmed in less time, so new farming practices are adopted, and the USDA and FDA simply cannot regulate them.

Because of this, as Food, Inc. stipulates, our food is no longer farmed or grown, it is produced.

100 years ago a farmer could produce 20 bushels of corn in an acre. Today, 200 bushels can be produced in one acre (due to pesticides).

The image of a farmer in a straw hat harvesting corn is no longer the reality. The reality is that our food production process is an industrial one.

In The Government’s Role in Food Safety, U.S. Senator Jon Tester discusses his choice to pass an amendment to the Food Safety Modernization Act.

His goal is to explain the amendment that excludes small farmers from the same regulations as big corporations. In the process, he highlights an important point

“Four companies own more than 80 percent of the beef market, and one company, Monsanto, controls 85 percent of the corn and 91 percent of the soybeans”.

“These types of complex production chains have created consumers who have no idea where their food comes from and government regulations tailored to multi-billion-dollar corporations.”

These companies have changed the way food is produced and control the market as well as the governing bodies. The side effect is consumer sickness outbreaks.

The question, therefore, is not longer only ‘what are we eating?’ It is also ‘what are they eating?’

“In the U.S. alone, 14,000-plus companies sell as many as 200 basic feeds”.

“Companies produce more than 308 billion pounds of animal feed annually.” (Consumer Reports, You Are What They Eat, 26)

One may think that there are not enough natural ingredients in the world to feed our annual food supply, which is correct. Other ingredients then must be substituted, ingredients that these animals do not eat naturally and do not process naturally.

According to Food, Inc., cows are fed corn, instead of naturally grazing and eating grass. The corn in their stomach is known to accelerate the growth and spread of e. coli, yet it is still common practice.

“Processed feathers are an acceptable source of protein in cattle feed, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as is poultry litter – floor wastes from coops, including feces.”

The amount of meat demanded by the consumers is so great that our nation is no longer able to feed our cattle the way they are naturally meant to eat. The USDA was not intended to regulate hundreds of billions of pounds of animal feed annually.

As a result chickens are genetically enhanced to develop larger breasts and as a result cannot walk more than a few steps on there own two feet. They fall to the dirty ground of a chicken coop.

It comes as a shock to most people that the USDA allows poultry litter, including feces, to be fed to the cattle raised for human consumption. However, it is just another example of how the food industry has grown to become so big that government agencies are unable to regulate the production companies.

The USDA and FDA were intended to work as filters to ensure that only safe and healthy products make it from the farms to each table in the United States. Well clearly we need to increase the number of filters, or increase the size of the existing ones because according to Marion Nestle in “Resisting Food Safety,” 76 million people within the Unites States develop a case of foodborne disease or illness every year.

Increasing the amount of food taken in over time leads to more contaminants passing through the food we eat to us. This presents a larger amount of people with the risk of foodborne illness and disease. The government is simply not able to uphold safety standards for the increased amount of production.

Outdated laws and red tape hinder governing agencies from making the changes necessary to ensure consumer safety.

Marion Nestle writes in Resisting Food Safety that food regulation laws are outdated.  “Federal oversight of food safety remains unshakably rooted in policies established almost a century ago, in 1906.”

“Congress designed those policies to ensure the health of animals, in an era long before most of the current microbial causes of foodborne illness were even suspected, let alone recognized.” (Nestle, Resisting Food Safety, 26)

Laws designed for smaller scale true farming applied to current situations do not allow agencies enough power to maintain safety.

Hurst, in his article Organic Illusions, asserts that food demand and supply has grown at such large rates that there is no clear solution.

“If food demand nearly doubles over the next 50 years, as it’s predicted to do, there just isn’t enough arable land available to support a wholesale adoption of organic methods.” (Hurst, Organic Illusions, 7)

Now there is the issue of what do we do; the situation is not black and white, there is no simple solution because the problem has become so complex. The food industry has become a different animal it is now a matter of risk management, nobody wants to take the blame for foodborne illness.

“Producers blame processors for foodborne illness, and processors blame producers; government regulators blame both, and everyone blames consumers.” (Nestle, Resisting Food Safety, 28)

“Because federal policies cannot ensure that food is safe before people bring it home, government agencies shift the burden of responsibility to consumers.”

It has become the job of the consumer to ensure our safety because the government is no longer able to enforce regulations that do so themselves.

The structure of the federal food regulatory agencies contributes to the lack of ability to properly govern the industry. Nestle describes the system, “25 separate laws administered by 12 agencies housed in six cabinet-level departments”.

“At best, a structure as fragmented as this one would require extraordinary efforts to achieve communication let alone coordination, and more than 50 interagency agreements govern such efforts.”

When it comes to the issue of food safety, regulation should be prompt, organized and efficient, because food borne illness is a true threat. Preventing consumer risk requires agencies that can stand up to the corporations of the food industry and ensure safety for the people.

The growth of the agencies must also match the growth of the food system itself. If, according to Hurst, food demand doubles over the course of the next 50 years, the agencies should in size double as well.

Recently, especially with the current public relations and public image issues for Chipotle, food borne illness is becoming more a part of public conversation.

It is not the first major outbreak in the United States. Numerous outbreaks of Salmonella, Listeria and e. coli O26 have occurred from produce contaminations. Whatever the source of the Chipotle contamination, it should have been caught earlier before the food got to the table.

The government agencies such as the FDA and USDA should delegate their responsibilities to a larger number of employees or other separate agencies so that they can ensure that the food industry will be properly regulated.

Ideally, the consumer should not bear the brunt of ensuring their own safety. The issue should be controlled while the food is being produced, so that the chance of any food borne illness or disease reaching the consumer is minimized.

The USDA and FDA should have more power, and be able to administer legislature promptly to allow consumers to feel safe when buying produce.

We must remember that at the end of the day, the concern is the safety of the public consumers, and it should be taken as seriously as possible.

 

Reflection Questions

1. The “writer’s project” is essentially the goal of the writer. I was able to identify the texts’ project by looking for the major claim in the beginning of the texts. By reading through the rest of the body paragraphs and conclusion of the text I was able to narrow in further on the project.
2. The “Sorting it Out” workshop helped me in general to identify the project of each text and to find the paths through which the texts connect. Finding quotes from the texts that relate to each other helped me get into the specific arguments supporting the claim of my article.
3. Synthesis was important when bringing together the content of multiple texts to build a larger claim. By synthesizing five texts in my article, I was able to make a claim about our food industry and the agencies that regulate it.
4. I learned how to understand the project of each piece and synthesize the information to form a claim. During this unit I learned how to write an article style-piece properly, including how to write an engaging lede.
5. The main idea was there there was some major flaw with our food system if food borne illness is such a prevalent issue. I expanded on this and argued that the source of the issue is that the demand for food has become so large that it cannot be regulated by current methods.
6. I organized my writing by generally building up my argument of my claim. I started by giving useful background information on the topic, and identifying the issues with it. I then moved on to how the regulating agencies play a role, their shortcomings, and a general solution.
7. In the final draft I use a quote from Consumer Reports “You are What They Eat” to explain how large the food demand has become. I then use “The Government’s Role in Food Safety” to show the size of the corporations that control the industry.  The quote also mentions how the government is controlled by the food industry, not vice-versa. Lastly, by looking to Marion Nestle in Resisting Food Safety, I use a quote from her on the number of consumers suffering from food borne illness each year.
8. The lede in my earliest draft attempted to use humor in a metaphor by saying “the chicken has grown to be larger than the coop” in an attempt to portray my message. I felt that this didn’t have any sustenance and did not make the claim clear, so I moved on to “Our food industry has grown to be so large and complex that government agencies cannot enforce safety regulations and prevent consumers from becoming sick.”
9. I would like to work on developing better structure of my next piece by defining a strong claim which I can build from.