Food #8: Industrial food

Looking at the article "Myth three: Industrial food is cheap" the title alone contradicts itself. How could this be true? Food products being made faster by machines and technology just sounds as if it cost more money. "This myth of cheap food is routinely used by agribusiness as a kind of economic blackmail against any who point out the devastating impacts of modern food production. Get rid of the industrial system, we are told, and you won't be able to afford food. " The first thing that comes to my mind when reading this is, if we cant "afford" food to eat or survive than theres something wrong with our society. The next best move is to grow our own foods, vegetables, spices, things that we can eat and that are healthy. Growing your own products or even going to pick natural grown plants and vegetables have to be money consuming. Natural grown plants and vegetables allow you to avoid pesticides and other chemicals and poisons that are usually placed on store bought products. Also decreasing the environments pollution rates on our water, soil, and air. Vehicles moving food around the world burn massive amounts of fossil fuels, exacerbating air and water pollution problems. This is going to make the society suffer in the long run leading to costs of problems of global warming and ozone depletion. To me it seems that industrial food isn't cheap because the environment, society, and our health is being damaged also making us lose money.

People are affected daily by food illness due to consuming industrial foods, including the contribution of pesticides, hormones, and other chemical inputs. "Industrial food's health price tag should reflect the expense, pain, and suffering of the tens of millions who are victims of such diseases as obesity and heart disease caused by industrial fast-food diets." Meaning the real cost of these fast food products should resemble the price of someones life. The cost of medical health costs are clearly in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. "According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farming is among the most accident-prone industries in the United States. Whereas the occupational fatality rate for all private sector industries is 4.3 per 100,000 full-time employees, the rate for agriculture, forestry, and fishing occupations was 24 per 100,000 -- or nearly six times the national average."The population of farmers for over 70 years ago has decreased from 7 million to 2 million, although or population has doubled from that time. The United States has lost an average of 32,500 farms per year, about 80 percent of which were family-run. A mere 50,000 farming operations now account for 75 percent of U.S. food production.

Connecting this back to my own food ways and the dominant corporate food messages, I see that the things the society and culture advertises are truely bias. The dominant corporate media sends contradicting messages to brainwash our social class, and target our pop culture to capture our human minds