Streaming music services are killing the music industry. It may be more slowly than what file sharing services like Napster were doing 15 years ago, but just ask the artists; while they might be getting paid, it’s a pittance compared to real record sales.

It’s no secret that the music industry has changed a great deal since the early days of AM radio and Edison cylinders, but the last two decades have brought about some of the largest changes in the way that music is distributed and consumed as compared to any other. Most importantly, physical media sales have taken a nosedive, with CDs making up about 30% of the market that the format used to dominate.

Thanks to file-sharing, peer-to-peer services, like Napster, that came about in the early 2000s, consumers have come to expect cheaper (read: free) ways of acquiring the music they so desperately desire.

We can’t blame it all on Napster. The iPod, MP3 players, and growing hard drives all begged to be filled with files, and the internet has been happy to oblige.

Peer-to-peer software like Napster, Kazaa, Limewire and perhaps a dozen others all made one thing clear: people believed music was no longer worth paying for.

At a time when a compact disc was upwards of $15.99, file sharing allowed listeners to pick and choose what they downloaded at a reduced cost.

Now the world’s largest music marketplace, iTunes also pushed this new paradigm, virtually ending the era of buying albums when it pushed record distributors to allow users to download individual tracks, instead of the whole record.

This fundamental change cannot be understated: by breaking the album down piecemeal into individual songs, artists and labels were guaranteed a much smaller revenue than if the whole album had to be purchased.

Because of antiquated laws that could really only be enforced on terrestrial AM/FM radio stations and in physical stores, Apple and others were able to guarantee only a small portion of revenue to labels and artists.

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Downloading Music on the Internet back in July of 2011, Lars Ulrich, founding drummer of metal band Metallica, said, “With Napster, every song by every artist is available for download at no cost. And, of course, with no payment to the artist, the songwriter, or the copyright-holder. If you are not fortunate enough to own a computer, there is only one way to assemble a music collection the equivalent of a Napster user, theft.”

A stinging review of the service for certain, and it brought plenty of backlash from fans and non-fans of the classic thrash metal act. Many fans professed their love for the artists that they downloaded on Napster, but said that when it came down to it, they felt they had spent enough on prior ticket, CD, and merch sales to warrant the free downloads.

Piracy will probably never truly die, but as various piracy software’s and services came and went, other changes in music distribution occurred after Napster ultimately ceased in 2001.

Technology is constantly advancing, and as flip phones gave way to smartphones and Wi-Fi spread into public spaces, it was only a matter of time before a new way of accessing music came about.

Enter streaming music services. In 2011, streaming radio service Pandora began offering users a personalized, customizable way of hearing some of their favorite music, on-demand, all for free.  You can choose an artist, song, or genre and Pandora will use your preferences to create a streaming playlist, but unlike making one yourself in iTunes, you can’t control what songs comes next. You simply hit a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ button and Pandora’s software determines what to play next.

Free is definitely the biggest part of Pandora’s appeal. Users that do not pay for a subscription must endure a short ad every few songs, or they can pay about $5 a month to remove the ads. This is what is considered a “freemium” model: users can access the service at no cost, but with ads that generate revenue for Pandora, or they can upgrade to the ‘premium’ service that guarantees no ads.

Writing in The Independent, a national newspaper based in London, music industry and business journalist Hazel Sheffield said, “Music has always been a portfolio business. Digital downloaded music, played on iPods and phones, was thought to be the next big thing, but it is already in decline. In 37 global markets, including South Korea, Sweden and Mexico, streaming now generates more revenue than downloads.

As Sheffield points out, streaming has overtaken downloads in popularity. The juggernaut responsible for such a hostile takeover?

Spotify.

While Spotify had been around in Sweden and the rest of Europe since 2008, it took them several years and a lot of negotiating, along with several million dollars, to get American record labels on board so that they could launch their service in the US to any guaranteed success.

But succeed is just what Spotify did. According to their own website www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained, they are generating upwards of $3 billion dollars in royalties for the music industry, from a combined 75 million users in 58 markets worldwide.

Much like Pandora, Spotify is a freemium service. You can select an artist, their discography, or their album,  hit play and listen to entire albums or catalogs on shuffle, with an ad after every third or fourth song.

For $9.99 a month you get access to Spotify Premium, which removes ads, removes skip restrictions, and even allows users to save songs or albums for listening when they go offline.

One might think that $3,000,000,000 is a lot of money, and while it certainly is, it’s not like that money goes straight from Spotify right into the hands of the artists.

The chart lays it out in only relatively obscure terms: Spotify earns a monthly revenue, which is  then multiplied by the fraction of an artists streams over Spotify’s total monthly streams. Then this amount is further divided, with 70% going to the copyright holders. Finally, each artist has negotiated a royalty rate.

Current estimates place the average revenue per stream at 0.7¢. NYU songwriting professor Mike Errico clarifies in an article in The Independent that, “Spotify, the clear leader in the streaming space, pays after 30 seconds.” That means if your song is either under 30 seconds, or a user skips it before they hit the 30-second mark, the artist doesn’t get paid.

Artists have spoken out against the unfair pay scheme that Spotify employs, and other services mimic, in different ways. Worldwide pop superstar Taylor Swift famously placed an open letter to Spotify in the Wall Street Journal back in 2014 when she refused to allow her most recent album 1989 to be available to stream.

In the letter, Swift poignantly wrote “There are many (many) people who predict the downfall of music sales and the irrelevancy of the album as an economic entity. I am not one of them. In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace. Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently.”

Since then, she has embraced Apple Music and can even be seen in TV commercials for the streaming service.

Or take, for example, Adele. The singer-songwriter released 25 in November of last year and by years end had sold upwards of 8 million copies. The album was not and still is not available to stream.

Things get even trickier when you consider who must get paid before the artist gets their share. As Lars Ulrich had mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of people that make a recording possible, and now they’re relying on a cut of seven-tenths of a penny per 30-second or longer stream.

Kate Swanson, a grad student at Indiana University, summarized it nicely in an article in the Music & Entertainment Industry Educators Association Journal. “For sound recordings, artists receive a percentage of the wholesale price. Superstars can get 20 percent, but most get 12 percent to 14 percent. On a $10 CD, a musician or band could make $1.20 to $1.40. Divided evenly between four bandmates, that amounts to a grim 30 cents each. On a 99-cent download, a typical artist may earn 7 to 10 cents after deductions for the retailer, the record company, and the songwriter.”

The 70% that is shown going to master and publishing owners in the above chart is divvied up between performing rights organizations (PROs) and publishers. Each holds and protects a separate copyright: one for the recorded sound, and the other for the musical work (think of that as the actual notes and words on sheet music).

These laws have remained relatively unchanged since the 1980’s, long before even the CD was popular. Because of this, there is no set law on how much money a streaming service must pay out to a label or artist.

So the problem is clear: the legal arena hasn’t caught up with the cultural one. But the solution much murkier. Lawmakers, musicians, and industry pros are going to have to band together if they want to create the radical changes needed in music industry law to guarantee a fair royalty scheme for artists. Otherwise, artists will follow in the footsteps of Adele, Taylor Swift, and many others and attempt to get their fans to buy music once again.

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1. My title, “Streaming Music: How Revenue Streams Are Trickling Out” is just about as thought provoking as I could come up and still keep things short. I believe it is informative enough without revealing the entire point of my article. The lede is short and to the point: streaming music is killing the music industry, albeit more slowly than piracy had been doing. It may not be the most clever lede, but it is very direct and leads the reader into my article.

2. I believe the introduction helps lead the reader through a modern history of why the music industry has been in decline. While I don’t get too much into streaming in the first few paragraphs, it places my controversy in a historical and temporal context, telling the reader how we got to where we are.

3. By placing my controversy in a temporal context, I provide plenty of support and a timely evolution of this problem. By providing the reader with a number of experts and external sources, and also tying the current problem of streaming music revenues with the same problems as discussed around the advent of piracy software, I show how things have really not changed and that the problem basically remains the same. Based on feedback to my unit 2 presentation, it would seem most of my classmates were not aware of this issue, so I feel like I’ve uncovered yet more that the average music fan would not be aware of.

4. By discussing the issue in a historical manner (from past to present) I believe I’ve kept my point clear. The presentation is unique that instead of tackling only the problem as it is today (low revenues from music streaming), I bring in some of what has lead up to the advent of music streaming. Most of the sources I used did not take into account the actions of Napster and others 15 years ago.

5. I feel that, by historicizing my topic, I have given the reader a straightforward, yet thought provoking piece. I am challenging the average music listener that may know little or nothing about the way that they procure music, and offering a younger generation background that they probably have only a surface level understanding of. I have kept everything in a temporal order that also helps outline the development of my main claim.

6. I’ve found a variety of sources from many different sorts of authors with different backgrounds that helps to illustrate how people across many fields are thinking about my topic of controversy. I bring their points together to form a cohesive argument that shows how important it is that the legal field catch up with modern technology so that the music industry might thrive once again.

7. I have several visual sources, primary research that delves into just what those graphs mean, and 6 secondary sources with 1 of them being a scholarly journal article.

8. The quotes I chose illustrate many points in ways that I could not say in any more certain terms. Lars Ulrich’s quote in front of the Senate committee is contextualized and conversed about in the piece, as are all of the other quotes I chose. No mic drops.

9. By taking quotes from those that people might not necessarily think of as sources of authority (Lars Ulrich, a drummer; and Taylor Swift, a singer), I provide insight into the controversy that shows that artists are fearful about more than just filling their own bank accounts. By showing that these musicians are also concerned about everyone else in the industry, from people at their level all the way down to engineers at studios, I feel that I can persuade many readers to dig deeper into the topic themselves and learn more about how the whole industry works.

10. The visuals I’ve chosen show very effectively how streaming and the digital age have effected the industry. By discussing them in the text directly, I use them in a meaningful way, and without them the reader would be left searching for said visual in the pages of the magazine.

11. My final draft was almost entirely different from the second draft, as by the second draft I had not yet decided how to incorporate many of my sources. Earlier drafts were more like the TED Talk… lots of background info but no incorporation of third parties that I allowed to speak for themselves.

12. I used a hyperlink for each new source I brought in, linking back to the original article or source. I believe the way I wrapped them around a sentence or section of a sentence and not just a sources name makes them stand out and gives the reader a better idea of what they are about to be linked to.

13. I edited on my own to the best of my ability. I found no major flaws in my writing, and always try to write as succinctly as possible. I kept most sentences short to avoid any run-on confusion. I believe my writing style to be appropriate for an NYT Magazine readership.

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.

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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.

America has a growing problem and a problem with growing. What’s growing? Food. The problem? How it’s being grown, who’s in charge of growing it, and how’s it’s getting into our stomachs. 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 standing 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 onto 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 it’s 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 current minimum wages, 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 us while we work 40 hours a week. One can see how this adds up to a further unsafe and unhealthy food industry.