The Big Paper -- Industrialized Foods

Large companies and corporations will go to any length to maximize their profits:

Around 630 pm is when people start getting hungry for dinner, it can take a few silly arguments over where to order in from
or what to make for dinner, but the end result is what everyone looks forward to. Whether or not you sit at a formal dinning room table with your whole family or slouch over the couch watching the local news or sports. what's on every ones mind is where there dinner is! Everyone wants to enjoy what they eat, the smell, the appearance and the overall taste is what attracts people to their food, but do they really know where what they are eating comes from? what did they use to make is taste so good? but most importantly how healthy is actually is for your body? Taking trips to grocery stores is a weekly trip most people make, before hand; they raid there pantry's and empty refrigerators and begin making there lists. The average American household shops based on the price not the quality, everyone is looking for the best deal and the majority of the time its the concentrated foods that are sold for cheap because they are made in enormous quantities produced my major corporations. Every since i was young i have been an animal lover, my dream job was to become a vet. When i was eight i stopped eating mean for a little less than a year, but was told i needed some sort of protein so i slowly began to eat chicken and fish. I choose not to eat most meat cause i thought the animals where too cute to eat, but now i choose not to eat most meat because of the way they are raised and treated on the farms (if u can call it that). We have been brainwashed and blinded by the ways of corporate food industries, they put millions of dollars into teams who's only job is to promote the image of their brand to make it seem as if the product they are selling is the best quality of its kind. While reading Micheal Pollan's book called The Omnivores Dilemma, he brought up a very interesting point that the average American has too many choices of food. To support that thought on a trip we took in class to a local supermarket we were asked to count the amount of a certain product, the numbers were really surprising, walking down the cereal isle i counted 76 different brands and types, the same thing happened when i counted the different types of pickles (37). Walking into a supermarket it is very hard to come across any fresh produce at an affordable price, people see the expensive price tags and walk the other way. They end up shopping for packaged foods that come in bulk or is sold for a considerably cheaper price. Organic food seem to be harder to find, i think most people find the labels on the products comforting cause they think they know where its coming from when the reality is that its mostly lies.

Americans fall too easily into this trap, they believe what they are being told is the truth. They see the commercials for things like orange juice and see the happy mother stick her hand into a shelf and on the other side it is a sunny farm with middle aged white men picking the oranges and handing her a carton of the "freshly squeezed juice." in reality the oranges are grown in a over sized greenhouse where mechanical devices are run on tracks run by poorly treated emigrants striving to make ends meet on less than minimum wage, trying to support their families. The machines run back and forth spraying the plants with pesticides. This is done in order to speed up the process to meet up with the over whelming demand. They spend so much money on trying to give there company and product a good name. They will go as far as not to be honest and lie to maximize there profit and make as much money possible.

When people are younger they have much less control on what they put into their bodies, they eat what there parents throw on their dinner plate and don't have much of a say. When i was little everything seemed to be tasty and i was not afraid to try anything. Like most Americans i ate to survive but not necessarily the healthiest possible way for my body. I remember seeing this clip on Peta.com about the abuse animals went through to produce a rich heartless person with a warm fur coat for the winter, the clip continued and showed how the animals raised for food were treated exactly the same if not worse. I could not help but look away and felt sick to my stomach, if that was the chicken i was eating, i did not want to eat that anymore. Most of the meat we eat started off as baby cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys who quickly discovered the fate of the lives they would forcefully be living. Thousands of chickens and turkeys are crammed into tiny cages, while the cows and pigs live in similarly horrible conditions, they are fed antibiotics to speed up there developmental process and "help" them to stay strong despite the conditions they are put through. When it is time to kill them they are put into machines where they roll out dead or knocked out. They are slaughtered by being slashed in the throat or cut in half while they are still alive. These animals never see the sunlight or get to run around and smell the fresh air. A movie we watched in class called Our Daily Bread is a perfect example of how the food we eat is treated, keep in mind that movie was made in Europe so conditions in the United States is way worse.

Not only are the animals we eat treated horribly, but the fruit and vegetables are grown un-naturally. Going off first hand experience when i was about 10 i was visiting my grandmother in Florida, we decided to go to a strawberry patch to hand pick the strawberries. At first i was amazed to see the mile long rows of ripe and tasty looking strawberries, which to my eyes looked like they were being grown the natural way. Little did i know they were anything but, 10 minutes into picking the berries i was cover in itchy red hives from my hands past my elbows. Thinking about it now, if just touching the fruit gave me such a bag reaction what would have happened if they were in my body. Not only are they bad for your body they can cause serious illnesses for little kids. Referring back to the movie Our Daily Bread the workers are exploited, the director does a very effective job at portraying their emotions though sounds, they looked extremely bored and over worked, there was a scene where the weather conditions were horrible but they were still working just as hard. It almost felt like a prison type scenario because the worker were being over looked by "the boss man" and his binoculars to make sure the workers were not slacking. There was always that sense that the workers were on a very low level compared to the man who was in charge, the director used a obvious technique by always filming from above, another example was when the workers had to get on their knees to receive their paychecks. Many of the friendly run farms are being put out of business because of the larger corporate companies. Another movie we watched in class was called Vrroooomm!!!! Farming for Kids, although they were trying to come across as a friendly farm to little kids it was easy to tell that the produce was being mass produced giant tractors, with huge wheels picked up thousand of cabbages and potatoes by the minute.