Out Of Our Hands But Onto Our Plates

We live in a country that was founded on the freedom of choice and people’s say in government. Is it not ironic then that we have so little say on what we are actually eating? The most fundamental element of our very human existence is out of our hands and into the hands of those who have the power to control it.

It’s not just about choosing what we consume, it is also choosing our safety in consuming it. In a country whose food industry is based off of profits and efficiency, it is no wonder that regulations put in place to protect our safety, actually might not be as safe as we would like to think. Even more troublesome though, is the power the food industry has. With the government backing their every move, they have little to no reason to actually care if their regulations are not acting as they should.

“These companies have legions of attorneys.  And they may sue even if they know they can’t win, just to send a message.”

According to Eric Schlosser, in the documentary Food Inc., the food industry in our country has an insane amount of power.

The documentary Food Inc. aims to show the food industry as it really is. In other words, it shows the food industry from the side that consumers do not usually see. For example, consumers do not see how powerful the food industry really is until they are the ones fighting it.

An example that the documentary used was the battle between Monsanto and a farmer who they were sewing for saving soybeans.

Monsanto is a company that essentially has control over all soybean production because of their patent on the bioengineered soybean. Monsanto has the money and the resources to fight average farmers even if they only have suspicion that the farmer is using their patented soybeans against their patent agreements.

There are some farmers who support big companies such as Monsanto, only adding to the argument of the food industry’s actual power. For example, Blake Hurst, a farmer backs up Monsanto and conventional ways of farming. Although a farmer himself, his alliance with big companies just shows his position in the conversation.

Monsanto is one company that shows power that the food industry has over producers. Those who produce our food our essentially puppets controlled by the food industry. Therefore, issues of food safety are widespread and out of reach not only by the consumer, but also by the producer.

To show the extent of how important food safety is and how it is neglected by the food industry, Food Inc. highlighted the story of Kevin. Kevin was two years old when he contracted E. coli 0517h7 from food and ended up hospitalized where he then died from the infection.

Even Hurst’s controversial article positions E. coli as an important factor when looking at the food industry. The argument the article makes is that the Stanford study found that E. coli is more prevalent in organic food. While this argument is one from Hurst in support of conventional farming, it still acknowledges how food safety is less important than the profits of the industry itself. In Kevin’s situation, his mom has been in a legal battle ever since the E. coli infection.

Unfortunately, the food industry, highly backed by the government, is not easily budged and it has been a long and hard battle. “Food safety (or the illusion of safety) is being positioned to secure capital rather than public welfare.” States Laura B. Delind and Philip H. Howard in Safe at any scale? Food scares, food regulation, and scaled alternatives.

 Adding to the E.coli conversation, this article discusses an E. coli outbreak in contaminated spinach that sickened people in 26 states, over the course of six to eight weeks, and caused at least three deaths. It took about a week to find the distributor (Dole) and the article said that it would have taken even longer to find the contamination source insinuating that that was never discovered.

Steps were only taken to secure the contaminated food but not to actually find the contamination to prevent it. It is no wonder Kevin’s mom is having a hard time working with the government in response to regulations that do not work.

While the food industry claims that there are many safety regulations put in place to monitor the safety of food, evidence has surely proven otherwise. The article You Are What They Eat provides various reasons to be concerned with the meat we are eating in the United States of America in regard to animal feed.

The director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, Carol Tucker-Foreman, is quoted in this article saying “Rules protecting the feed supply aren’t as strong as they should be, and the FDA enforcement has been more wishful thinking than reality. Contaminated animal feed can result in contaminated food, putting the public health at risk.”

Meanwhile, Fred Angulo, who is the chief of the CDC’s foodborne and diarrheal branch, is also quoted saying that “connecting human illness to contaminated feed is difficult.”

While it is hard to pinpoint human illnesses to animal feed, the article also notes that there have cases of salmonella linked to animal feed and the most recent case occurred in 2003. With that being said, it is obvious where the concern lies and that is with consumers.

The fact that human illnesses are hard to trace already puts the food industry at an advantage. Safe at any scale? Food scares, food regulation, and scaled alternatives already put that into perspective by describing how they never found the source of contamination even in such a widespread illness outbreak that resulted in deaths.

Want to know how tracing food illnesses can be difficult? Nestle highlighted an instance where health officials traced one hamburger back to slaughterhouses in six different states and around 443 cattle. How could one possibly find the source of contamination of a hamburger induced foodborne illness? The fact that the food industry operates in such a way leaves them and the government off the hook.

In response to that, saying that they are hard to trace does not mean that they are not a concern because even the CEO of the American Feed Industry Association in You Are What They Eat said that feed can become contaminated because “people make mistakes.” Thus putting the consumer on the end of the mistakes that may result with them getting a foodborne illness while the food industry can blame it on an accident, if in fact, they are even caught.

Another way the government and food industry are off the hook when it comes to food safety is because many illnesses go unreported according to Nestle.

Nestle states that even with 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths yearly in the United States of America “most episodes are never reported to health authorities and their cause is unknown.”

Nestle not only highlights the severity of foodborne illnesses, but also how the use of antibiotics in animals can make foodborne illnesses even more severe.

Using antibiotics creates a resistance to bacteria and therefore “If antibiotic-resistant bacteria infect people and cause a disease, the disease will be untreatable.” However, this article goes on to state how the drug industry does not agree with any attempt to hinder the use of drugs in animals for food even with the alarming evidence of how dangerous it can be to humans. In this scenario, the drug industry, as well as the food industry uses their power to maintain control over production even when the health of their consumers are at stake.

Does the food industry and government’s monopoly over the food in this country really leave consumers in jeopardy? Should consumers be concerned when buying a package of meat because what the meat previously ate is not listed in the ingredients? Food that sustains their lives nowadays can end it just as easily. The fact is that regulations are put in place, but that does not mean that their health standards prevent food from contamination. Nor do these regulations protect the average consumer in the face food foodborne illnesses. Put in the position such as Kevin’s mom, whose son died from contaminated food, what more could possibly be at stake? The fact is that no one wants that to be their loved one but that is also what is at stake when it comes to the food industry and the government’s jurisdiction over it.

 

Reflection Questions

Unit I / 10%

Using the homework, in-class workshops, revision workshops, etc.

 

 

 

• Describe your understanding of the “writer’s project”? How were you able to identify the texts’ “project”? Discuss your own “project” as it pertains to this particular blog article.

 

The writer’s project is what an author intends to get across to their readers. It is what the author wants the reader to take away from their piece. To identify a texts project, one must thoroughly read through the entire text and take note of keywords, arguments, and phrases. Then one must think, what did the author intend to help me understand and intend to show me? For example, my project for the Huffington Post Blog article is to add to the conversation about the power of the food industry and how it effects the safety and health of consumers. I aim to show how the food industry is more concerned with their own power than with the safety of their consumers and how their negligence when it comes to food safety is able to happen because of their said power.

 

• Describe your completion of the “Sorting it Out” workshop? What sections were most beneficial to the development of your ideas—and why? Discuss how this workshop assisted in development of draft and/or assignment organization?

 

The Sorting It Out Workshop was an all-around helpful worksheet to complete. Actually writing out the writer’s project for each source was very helpful because I was then able to see in a few short sentences what the author’s purpose of the text was. Then that really helped at the end of the worksheet when I was pulling out quotes to connect and synthesize the texts. Since I was already able to see the purpose of the articles, it made it easier to find quotes that could relate to each other. It gave me a good starting point to find out their similarities. For example, while all of the articles had to do with safety in the food industry, I was able to find that they all talked about food borne illnesses. By knowing that Consumer Reports talked mainly about animal feed, I then looked for a health issue with animal feed and one that was very prevalent was food borne illnesses. Knowing this, I was then able to go back into the texts and pick out quotes that had to do with food borne illnesses from each source.

 

• Describe your understanding of synthesis. What is its importance? How did it manifest within your drafts and/or final blog article? Provide examples.

 

Synthesis is the ability to connect different texts in a manner that creates a cohesive argument. It is not just summarizing the different texts and explaining similarities between them, but it is looking for patterns between the texts on certain topics and being able to use information from each text to build upon each other in a cohesive manner. This is very important because in doing this, a writer is able to pull important information from each text and use it in a way that makes sense and shows the important information, all while creating one’s own piece of writing. For my blog article, I used synthesis throughout my entire piece. For example, after identifying the writer’s projects for each text and looking for patterns within them in the Sorting It Out Workshop, I was able to see that they all talked about the problem of foodborne illnesses in the food industry. For example, I used Nestle’s example of how one hamburger was traced back to slaughterhouses in six different states and around 443 cows to show how contaminated food is hard to trace back to its origin, to add on to the point in Delind and Howard’s article when they mentioned how an E. coli outbreak was never traced back to the original origin of contamination.

 

• Describe your own accomplishment (ofsomething) during this unit.

 

During this unit, I learned about the importance of hyperlinks to online articles. Although it might not seem like much, this was a big accomplishment for me. My background in writing comes from my Sociology and Women and Gender Studies majors where writing research papers and reading responses make up a good portion of my course load. With that being said, it has been engrained into me to cite cite cite and cite! Even if I am unsure if information is just common knowledge still be safe and cite! I am used to professors telling me that there is no such thing as too many citations. This was a difficulty when writing this online blog because I was writing it in terms of citing it back to the different sources I used rather than using the sources to make a cohesive argument for an interesting article. When I learned of the hyperlinks however, that made me feel one hundred times more comfortable with writing the article. The hyperlinks became my way of citing information and it thus made me more comfortable. It also showed how this writing technique is a lot different than what I am used to, but helped me become more comfortable with it

 

• Discuss the evolution of the main idea. Where did you begin (include the example) and show its progress (again, include example) throughout the drafting/revision process. To what do you attribute its evolution?

 

My main idea started with the Sorting It Out Workshop. When I was looking for quotes that I could use to connect each text I started with the Consumer Reports article because of how specific it was to animal feed. I realized that a main concern of this article was foodborne illnesses and realized that every other source also had something mentioned throughout it about foodborne illnesses. So then I searched through the other sources to find what the aid about foodborne illnesses and found that they all had one thing in common: foodborne illnesses are a problem that should not be overlooked. That is how I got the main idea. What is at stake? Foodborne illnesses. Who does it put at stake? The consumers. Then I looked for specific examples within each text to show how foodborne illnesses put the safety of consumers in jeopardy because of their danger and the food industry and government’s help in fighting them and putting in place regulations that are effective. That is how I came to create my final draft, by using the examples I found within each text and synthesizing them to fit my argument.

 

• Discuss what organizational strategies you implemented in order to structure this blog article. Provide examples from a section(s) of an earlier draft and other excerpts in later drafts to support your response.

 

In my first draft, I just organized my article by the different sources I used. I did them one by one and described their position on how they add to my article by using specific examples from the text. Then when working on my next draft, I reorganized the article by seeing what examples fit where and what texts could I put together tomake the article flow better and synthesize the texts and their arguments. So then working on my final draft, I had my article organized by the different examples I found within each additional text and by how what I wrote about with each article fit together with the others.

 

• Provide an example of the final draft where you successfully synthesize 3 texts in a concise and direct manner. Discuss how this evolved throughout the drafting process for you.

 

“To show the extent of how important food safety is and how it is neglected by the food industry, Food Inc. highlighted the story of Kevin. Kevin was two years old when he contracted E. coli 0517h7 from food and ended up hospitalized where he then died from the infection. Even Hurst’s controversial article positions E. coli as an important factor when looking at the food industry. The argument the article makes is that the Stanford study found that E. coli is more prevalent in organic food. While this argument is one from Hurst in support of conventional farming, it still acknowledges how food safety is less important than the profits of the industry itself. In Kevin’s situation, his mom has been in a legal battle ever since the E. coli infection.

Unfortunately, the food industry, highly backed by the government, is not easily budged and it has been a long and hard battle. “Food safety (or the illusion of safety) is being positioned to secure capital rather than public welfare.” States Laura B. Delind and Philip H. Howard in Safe at any scale? Food scares, food regulation, and scaled alternatives.”

 

This is a section from my paper where I show three sources to shape my initial argument. I show how food safety in regard to foodborne illnesses is a problem within our food system by describing Kevin’s story of how he died from contaminated food with E. coli 0517h7 present in it and then showed how even though Hurst is controversial when discussing food politics, he was even able to agree that E. coli is a problem within our food system. Then to tie the problem of foodborne illnesses back to the initial question of whose at stake, I used a quote from Delind and Howard to show how the government makes us believe we are safe when we really can see that we are not.

 

• Discuss the evolution of the ‘lede’ in earlier drafts and its final version (provide examples of each): where did you begin, what feedback did you receive, and how did it end up in final blog article?

 

In earlier drafts, I just used something that I thought would be interesting and pull readers in to read. Then, after completing the body of my first draft I was able to use a lede that still meets the requirements of interesting enough to pull readers in, while at the same time making it specific to my particular discussion. At first my lede was very long and wordy, and advice I received was to separate my lede from my introduction. In doing that, my lede for my final draft was able to be more consise, relevant to my article, and still maintain its specific purpose of grabbing the reader’s attention.

 

• Name a specific writing/researching/revision goal you’d like to work on during the next Unit projects.

 

During my next unit projects, I would like to work more on the ability to adapt my writing style for the specific purpose of writing. As stated earlier, I had some trouble creating an article that did not read like a research paper. Although I feel comfortable with my ability to write an article now, I would like to work more on my writing adaptability so that when I sit down to write anything, I am better equipped to write in a style for a specific purpose and feel comfortable writing whatever I am given to write.