When you step in line at your favorite fast food place, you’re probably only thinking about how hungry you are, and how cheaply you can feed yourself. You aren’t going to be thinking of the personal, local, or global impacts that the dollar menu truly has. Only a small handful of corporations are in control of most of the food on the shelf at your local supermarket, according to Michael Pollan. With a virtual monopoly over the global food market, these corporations rely on coercion, scare tactics, and abhorrent abuses of humans and animals to deliver to you the cheapest but most costly meals in history, and it’s bound to get worse before it gets better. Sickness, poverty, and death are the backbone of the food industry, and the few that control it don’t dare to admit it. In just a few years we’ve managed to completely transform the ways we grow, handle, and prepare foods, and those changes are taking a toll on everyone involved, from farm to table, cradle to grave.

In 2008, Robert Kenner put out a film called Food Inc., featuring testimony from food and industry experts like Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, farmers, and representatives from the meat industry. Food Inc. sought to illuminate some of the atrocities that go on behind the scenes in the American and global food industry, from farm to table so to speak. The biggest problem that we face is that there are, as Pollan says in the film, only a handful of large corporations guiding how food is grown, packed, shipped, and marketed. Not only that, but there are government officials working in the USDA, FDA, congress, and other branches that are out to represent the desires of these faceless corporations and not the people that need the most protection; the average American. What’s worse is that what we do to our food in the US has a global impact. The bottom line is that corporate greed is undercutting food safety and the very concept of what food is, and this has started to snowball out of control.

Let’s think of your average cow, raised for slaughter. These cows, which can weight up to 2400 pounds, are confined in spaces where they often can’t even turn around if they can even stand up at all. Add to that the fact that they’re often wading ankle deep in pools of their own feces, and you’ve already got a good idea what kinds of problems are bound to happen once you get the beast to the slaughterhouse. Now, take the cows natural food source which it has evolved to consume — that’s grass, in case you didn’t know — and replace it with something they’d never have started eating unless humans were dishing it out. That something is corn. Cows are ruminants, meaning they’ve got stomachs designed to ferment the grass they’d naturally eat so that they can digest it. When that grass is replaced with something like corn, their stomachs are thrown for a loop and they start to produce E. coli. Now, you’ve got this cow hanging out in crap, growing E. coli in its gut, and it’s finally gotten fat enough to warrant killing.

The cow gets crammed into a truck and brought to a plant where it’s systematically murdered and parted out. According to a Consumer Reports article, the meat from one cow can be spread out over eight tons of ground beef. Remember, that cow likely had E. coli, and now its getting spread into eight tons of beef. And that beef is spread all over the US, Canada, Mexico. The way that we, the consumers, have been taught to consume means that we’re constantly seeking the quickest, easiest, and cheapest sustenance we can most of the time. We’re a nation that can afford the Dollar Menu but not a head of broccoli and the time to prepare it. We’ve been duped into thinking that the stuff at the fast food drive-thru is a necessary evil, and we’re paying a toll with our lives. Not only is the food absurdly unhealthy, but the industry that produces it is abusing everyone in the chain from farm to table.

The human and societal costs of our current food system are too high to be sustainable. Michael Hurst, a well-meaning farmer, claims that a national switch to an all-organic food production system would actually tax our land and people even more so than the current model, one that relies on GMO’s and persistent chemical pesticides. He claims that there would be such a large amount of land needed that it would be impossible to feed the US on it’s available arable land. He also states that people would need to leave other industries to work in farming and food processing. Unfortunately, he doesn’t provide any evidence to support these claims. What he also doesn’t do is bother to mention the ill-effects of persistent chemical pesticides that are used in conventional farming. Pesticides can leach into the water table and affect the groundwater supply in areas surrounding farms. Run-off can reach rivers and lakes and negatively impact ecosystems of some of our other food sources (fish, for example).

The human element is addressed by Food Inc., Consumer Reports, and Marion Nestle, although not completely. Most of what is addressed by the authors and experts of these pieces are due to foodborne illness or other persistent dietary problems like diabetes or malnutrition. What’s missing is a discussion of the horrible mistreatment of food industry employees, from those picking our fruits and veggies, to the people packing and handling them in various factories and plants, and the people that are turning those products into something we want to eat; the foodservice employees. It’s no secret that there’s a huge gap in the pay of corporate owners of food conglomerates and the people out there picking, planting, raising, slaughtering, packing, and preparing. Farmers are often horribly underpaid, especially if they are undocumented or illegal migrant workers. Hours are long, and pickers are paid by the pound, not by the hour. When this is the case, a person may resort to relieving themselves right where they stand so as to be able to get back to work as quickly as possible.

The mistreatment of the worker goes all the way to the restaurants and fast food joints that most Americans rely on for many of their meals. Foodservice employees are only just starting to get justice, with many areas offering a living wage of $15 an hour. Having worked for years in the industry, I can’t say that there truly is a fair price for our labor. But $15 is a good start. When foodservice employees are working for the current minimum wage, however, we’re often forced to go to work even when we’re exhausted, stressed, and sick. We can’t afford to take a day off to recuperate from the flu or a cold when we aren’t even earning enough to feed ourselves while we work 40 or more hours a week. One can see how this adds up to a further unsafe and unhealthy food industry.