Next time you’re in line at your favorite fast food place, read between the lines on the Dollar Menu. It takes some doing, but when you finally see it, it’s pretty obvious that the biggest seller on the menu is exploitation.
Michael Pollan is concerned with the exploitation of animals. Consumer Reports backs up what he says in popular food documentary Food Inc., by director Robert Kenner. Michael Hurst has a counter to this in an op-ed he wrote on the apparent evils of organic farming. Marion Nestle, a nutrition scientist, sociologist, and compelling author, ties it all together with a concise history of the decrepit government bodies that are supposed to ensure our food is safe.
But the exploitation includes all of that and more. From the farm to the table, exploitation has become the base for a lopsided food pyramid. Farm workers and owners, cattle and poultry ranchers, seed cleaners, and consumers are all on the losing side of a battle aimed at cutting food costs right to the bone, bringing the end consumer more, faster, cheaper, and more dangerous than food has ever been in American history.
But there is hope for some of those caught in our tangled food web. NPR has featured many articles on the myriad number of localities across the US that have been in talks to increase the minimum wage of fast food workers to a living wage of at least $15 an hour.
Luckily, our own state of New York has finally passed such a bill.
Let us shift our focus at the start of the chain of woes that have befallen our food system; the farm.
According to testimony in Food Inc. the government subsidizes corn below the cost of production, to the point that American farms dedicate enough of their land and resources to produce around 30% of the world’s corn on 30% of American farm land.
That corn is used, as Pollan discovered, in pretty much everything.
“So much of our industrial food turns out to be clever rearrangements of corn,” states Pollan. He went looking for the source of the so-called diverse food products on most grocery store shelves.
What he discovered was that most foods contain a number of corn-derived ingredients, one of the most common being much maligned High Fructose Corn Syrup. What’s worse is that humans aren’t the only ones subsisting on a corn-rich diet.
In an effort to fatten up feed animals in record times, farmers have fundamentally changed the diet of most farm animals to rely on, you guessed it, corn.
Pigs never evolved to eat corn. Neither did chickens. Fish, well, there’s a lot of stuff we feed fish that they never would find in the rivers, lakes, and oceans of the world. But cattle — ruminants — definitely didn’t evolve as corn-sumers.
In order to make the cows bigger faster, and because corn is so much cheaper than any time in prior human history, farmers began putting it in the feed.
This is fundamentally bad for cattle, animals that have special stomachs designed to help them digest their primary food source; that is, grasses. Those special stomachs contain bacteria, actually E. coli bacteria.
In a truly grotesque scene in Food Inc., a man with his hand stuffed into the rumen of a cow through a hole in it’s side says, “There’s some research that indicates that a high-corn diet results in E. coli that are acid-resistant. And these would be the more harmful E. coli.”
Anyone who’s read the news or turned on the radio knows that E. coli is a hot-button topic that keeps popping up, year after year, month after month. We all know that Chipotle, the fast Americanized Mexican joint beloved by college students everywhere, has had to contend with an E. coli outbreak in just the last couple of months.
Back on the farm, we’re feeding the cows corn. The corn is causing the cows to produce the harmful strains of E. coli in their stomachs. That doesn’t even get to the fact that those cows are sometimes too fat and weak to stand, and where they’re sitting, laying, or standing is often ankle deep in cow feces and urine.
The next link in the chain, and final stop for the sickly cows, is the slaughterhouse. No longer looking like the slaughterhouses of 1800’s America, these monstrous factories are contending with E. coli and other bacteria in interesting ways, such as dipping slaughtered animal parts, meat products now, into tanks of ammonia.
E. coli, as mentioned before, has grown acid-resistant, and also antibiotic resistant. According to Marion Nestle, “nearly 25 million pounds of antibiotics are used in animal agriculture, whereas just 3 million are used for human infections.” In the end, if contaminated meat does get through this process, just one slaughtered cow can contaminate up to eight tons of ground beef, according to Consumer Reports.
Now that meat is packed up and sent all over the country and even globally. If that meat is contaminated, so then become the people that eat it.
What, if anything, is the solution? Some argue that a shift back to organic farming methods, what our great-great-grandparents would have just called ‘farming’ in their time. But Michael Hurst thinks that such a change would actually be worse for the environment than current ‘conventional’ methods which utilize persistent chemical pesticides and fertilizers.
Hurst makes the argument that, “it takes fewer acres to produce the same quantity of food conventionally than it does organically,” but doesn’t offer any source or research to back this claim up.
Even if conventional farming takes up less land, and produces more, do we really want companies like Monsanto to hold a monopoly over our seeds? Moe Parr, a seed cleaner interviewed extensively in Food Inc. certainly doesn’t think so.
Monsanto was, as Parr said, “suing [him] on the basis that [he is] encouraging the farmer to break the patent law by cleaning their own seed.”
Monsanto, a multi-national corporation that holds a virtual monopoly over seeds in the United States, felt it necessary to intimidate farmers out of cleaning seeds which those farmers would have used to grow more plants next season. But instead, they must buy new seed from Monsanto every season. And, even if you don’t use Monsanto seed, you can be sued by them if they find any of their products growing in your fields. So if the wind blows a little Monsanto pollen your way, you’re fucked as well.
We’ve got a corporation holding our seeds hostage for ransom, and we’ve got a government subsidized food system that can’t even police itself for food safety producing meat that can kill. But let’s look at another link in the chain: the foodservice employee.
From first-hand experience, having worked in it for over a decade now, I can explain what the foodservice industry is like.
We’re criminally underpaid, often earning only what the state minimum wage is. We’re expected to work long hours in dangerous (350 degree deep-fat fryers, chargrills, ovens, knives), often cramped, high-stress environments producing food, you guessed it, fast and cheap.
When we’re sick, we can’t afford to take the day off. Cooks work with tissue stuffed up their noses just so they can pay rent. Dishwashers duck out of the kitchen to go barf behind the dumpster and then come back to clean your plates. We often have to work multiple jobs, more than 40 hours a week, especially in fast food, because those corporate behemoths know they don’t have to offer benefits if their employees aren’t full-time.
If that doesn’t sound fair, it’s because it isn’t. When we’re worried about out own well-being, the phrase “the customer is always right” really means “the customer has no idea what it’s like in the kitchen” and yet they expect it faster, cheaper, and exactly how they ordered it. And they sure as hell don’t expect to get sick from it.
If we want to see our food system made safe again, we need a radical shift in how food is produced, distributed, and managed from farm to table.
Critical Reflection:
1- The writers project is their end-goal. It encompasses what they are writing about and why, who it’s being written for, and what they intend for the reader to gather or learn from it. Each of the texts for this project had easy-to-grasp writer’s projects. Food Inc. dealt with a few specific themes (corn, food costs, sickness, and corporate greed. Hurst was blatantly obvious in attacking organic farming. Nestle also dealt with themes of illnesses and government oversight. The Consumer Reports article was very clear in addressing issues of food safety and foodborne illness, and how that all impacts humans.
I wanted to focus on the fact that in all of this, one thing is clear: exploitation, in an unfair and unjust manner, is at the heart of the American food system. From harming animals with improper feed and how that harms people with foodborne illness, to how the cheap/fast model of consumption in the US makes for unfair treatment of foodservice workers.
2- The Sorting It Out workshop seemed redundant to the notes and the chart that was made that included all of the pertinent information found in each text. However, the way it helped to connect the dots between texts by quotations and themes helped to synthesize an argument and draw parallels between each text in a manner that made it easier to synthesize my own project.
3- Synthesis is the fundamental core of most of the academic writing I’ve done as an anthropology student. By drawing on multiple sources, sometimes disparate, synthesis helps to draw conclusions or back them up. It gives credit to the author by sort of saying, “I understand these sources and the sometimes subtle ways they support each other, or how I can use them to support each other and myself.” The core of my project is a synthesis of how each text makes subtle or not so subtle reference to the various forms of exploitation that
The core of my project is a synthesis of how each text makes subtle or not so subtle reference to the various forms of exploitation that are a part of the US food system.
4- The most difficult aspect of this project that I was able to accomplish is figuring out how to write in a blog style, given that the last 7 years of my schooling has been primarily writing in purely academic styles.
5- I knew from the start that I wanted to focus on inequality or injustices in the food system, having seen Food Inc. prior to this course. When we got into the other texts, I started to realize that there was something that was common to them all, but it was hard to figure out exactly what it was. It wasn’t until nearly the middle or close to the end of my first draft that I realized that my main idea was ‘exploitation.’ It evolved rapidly into my final draft as I reflected on my own experiences and the things I’ve seen while working in the foodservice industry (everything from fast food to franchise chains to local, small business and the kitchen at a Whole Foods).
6- My first and later draft were not well organized, and I didn’t get to the human exploitation element of my argument until the very end. I decided to use Food Inc. as my starting point, since it really brings up each topic I wanted to touch on. My earlier draft says “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 is due to food borne illness or other persistent dietary problems like diabetes or malnutrition.” I realized I needed to either back this up, or change how I approached it, and so I focused the discussion of human exploitation as those texts discuss it on foodborne illness, rather than critiquing them for not talking about it in other ways.
7- I synthesize what’s seen in Food Inc, and what both Consumer Reports and Marion Nestle have to say about foodborne illness concisely where I wrote –
“Back on the farm, we’re feeding the cows corn. The corn is causing the cows to produce the harmful strains of E. coli in their stomachs. That doesn’t even get to the fact that those cows are sometimes too fat and weak to stand, and where they’re sitting, laying, or standing is often ankle deep in cow feces and urine.
The next link in the chain, and final stop for the sickly cows, is the slaughterhouse. No longer looking like the slaughterhouses of 1800’s America, these monstrous factories are contending with E. coli and other bacteria in interesting ways, such as dipping slaughtered animal parts, meat products now, into tanks of ammonia.
E. coli, as mentioned before, has grown acid-resistant, and also antibiotic resistant. According to Marion Nestle, “nearly 25 million pounds of antibiotics are used in animal agriculture, whereas just 3 million are used for human infections.” In the end, if contaminated meat does get through this process, just one slaughtered cow can contaminate up to eight tons of ground beef, according to Consumer Reports.”
Only when I sat down to finish the final draft did I realize the way those three texts complimented each other and how that worked for my own argument.
8- My first lede was awful, convoluted, and too long.
“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.”
I knew I needed to shorten things up and leave the reader wanting more.Next time you’re in line at your favorite fast food place, read between the lines on the Dollar Menu. It takes some doing, but when you finally see it, it’s pretty obvious that the biggest seller on the menu is
“Next time you’re in line at your favorite fast food place, read between the lines on the Dollar Menu. It takes some doing, but when you finally see it, it’s pretty obvious that the biggest seller on the menu is exploitation.”
I think I give the reader something to think about and wonder where I’m going while challenging them to want to learn what I really mean. Honestly, the feedback I received of the first draft was positive, but I knew when reading it that it just dragged on too long.
9- I want to work on my lede more as well as the blog format with more of my own voice and opinions in it.