Today, the majority of people in the United States do not know where their food is coming from. This is probably because the people in charge of our food industry do not want people to know that our food system is completely corrupt.

Corruption is a simple matter of right and wrong. Anyone or anything can become corrupt based on the actions the person or thing practices. In this case, the food system that is used to circulate the majority of the world’s food products to public markets has become corrupt. The interesting part about our corrupt food system is that most of the people who consume the products have no idea where these products came from or how they were prepared. In the food system we have today, four or five large corporations own the majority of all food products sold in grocery stores today. There are hundreds of different brands of meat, produce, snacks, or whatever types of food you can think of that are sold in a supermarket but, its really only a handful of corporations that own the greater part of all of them. In the film Food Inc., Michael Pollan, an American author, activist, and professor of journalism at UC Berkeley talks about how big business has run our American food industry into the ground. Pollan goes on to say, “The average grocery store has 47,000 products which makes it look like there is a large variety of choice – but it is an illusion – there are only a few major companies and a few major crops involved.” Pollan and the rest of the experts go on to talk about how big business runs the food industry and how their methods to grow bigger and better food have substituted the quality of our food for higher profits. That’s the problem, if people knew that large corporations were behind our food and that they were making our food in an unnatural, inhumane manner, they would probably have something to say about it. Our food system is corrupt because the people in charge of it know what they are doing is wrong but, they still do it anyway. In an ideal world, the people who know the most about our food would be in charge of developing how our food system works. Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world.

The meat in our grocery stores is not prepared in a friendly, heartfelt way. The way most people want to believe that their meat is prepared is that the animal is born and raised on a farm where it was able to roam free and grow the way god intended it to live. They believe the animal was killed humanely by the farmers who raised it in a way that did not make the animal suffer. That would be nice if it were true. The fact of the matter is, in this corrupt food system we have today, animals are basically tortured in cramped quarters from birth up until the moment they are slaughtered. Eric Schlosser, another American author and journalist from Food Inc. discusses how the animals that are raised in these massive farms and slaughterhouses are inhumanely mistreated. Schlosser says, “Plus they are now feeding corn to animals like cows who, by evolution, are designed to eat grass and in some cases farmers are even teaching fish how to eat corn because it is so cheap.” Aside from not giving these animals the proper space and freedom to grow, these farms are feeding the animals feed that they cannot naturally digest. The farms use corn feed and growth hormones to fatten up these animals so we can harvest twice as much meat as these animals were supposed to carry. Several facts and statistics about how the chickens we eat every day are actually being grown are up on truthaboutchicken.org. Today, Chickens are being grown to twice the weight of chicken Sixty years ago in about half the time. An appalling fact found on this site included, “Many chickens lie in their own waste for much of their lives, with open sores and infections. These unhealthy conditions could potentially increase the risk of foodborne illnesses like salmonella.” The processes used in our food systems are horrific and mind-boggling but, the worst part is these corrupt practices are potentially life-threatening for humans. Because of the unethical methods used in today’s food industry, humans are contracting various foodborne illnesses from tainted meats that are sold every day in local grocery stores. These illnesses are the result of the unsanitary facilities that are used to raise and prepare these animals for slaughter. Cows and chickens are raised on farms with very little space and little to no maintenance, meaning these animals are constantly walking, living, and sleeping in their own feces which is a great way to get exposed to infections and other types of illnesses. The number of people that have been getting sick from these types of tainted meat have not necessarily been greatly increasing; the diseases have just been getting worse. Marion Nestle, a well known author and professor of nutrition at NYU, gives us some facts and statistics about these foodborne illnesses and how they’ve progressed. She says, “Some years ago, a carefully investigated Listeria outbreak among 142 people who had eaten a commercially produced unpasteurized soft cheese caused 48 deaths and 13 cases of meningitis.” Nestle goes on to talk about how foodborne illnesses used to be some small form of Salmonella or Staphylococcus or some pathogen that was easily treated and resulted in pretty standard, non-lethal symptoms like diarrhea, stomach pains, nausea, etc. However, since the early 1990s the versions of these viruses and bacteria have been getting much more aggressive and much more deadly than they have been in the past. Diseases are scary and its scary to know you can contract these types of diseases from the food you buy at the super market everyday.

If our food system is having all these problems, shouldn’t we be doing something about it? Shouldn’t there be some sort of authoritative body to watch over these food production systems to make sure our food is actually safe to eat? We do, the only problem is, the groups in charge of watching over how our food is made play a big part in how our food industry has become corrupt. Government programs like the FDA, USDA, and CDC are supposed to watch over food processing facilities and make sure there aren’t any health code violations, unhygienic processing practices, or any other method that could lead to possible contamination of meats or other food products. Consumer Reports, You are what they eat, discussed a great deal about how our government and how our food regulation departments, like the FDA, aren’t really doing anything about the way our food is being processed. The members of Consumer Reports were able to talk to feed-company executives and they said, “Our investigation raises concern that the federal government isn’t doing enough to protect the feed supply and that as a result the food we eat may not be as safe as it could be.” Even the executives from these corporations agree that the production of their food is a potential risk to the health of their consumer. A major reason for this is that there are not enough FDA and USDA inspectors to consistently watch over the vast number of slaughterhouses and livestock farms that are in this country. The FDA has around 700 employees in charge of inspecting all the processing plants that produce meat, eggs and poultry; which results in each one of these places getting an inspection every one to five years. Even when there are certain health and safety violations that are found in these processing plants, if the farm is owned by one of the large corporations, the heads of the corporations always has a friend on the inside of the FDA or somewhere in these government-based departments to help them get out of it. We learned a great deal about how former corporation executives from places like Monsanto land authoritative positions in departments like the FDA and USDA and are able to help their old business partners when they get into a bind. It is difficult to think of a way to free our food industry from the clutches of big business when these corporate executives have monopolized the industry around them.

The corruption that has overwhelmed our food industry starts and ends with big business. We cannot rely on greedy business owners to take proper care of our food. Large profits are not a reasonable compromise when it puts consumers at risk. We know what is going on behind the closed curtain of our food system; now its just about making an effort to do something about it.