The Industrial Food System (draft 1, 2, 3)

I remembered when I was a bit younger; I had walked into a supermarket on a hot summer day with my mother. It was always a delight to escape the dreadful by entering the nice air conditioned supermarket. As I walked down the long, tall aisle – both sides were fully packed with food. There were no empty spaces on the shelves – in search of a grocery item my mother sent me for, I started to wonder about the presence of all the food in the supermarket. I wondered why the supermarket never ran out of food given the large amount of people that come to shop here every day. I asked my self, how are “they” able to produce so much food so fast? But then, as fast the as the thought entered my head it disappeared, for back then I was oblivious of the back ground of my food as a fish is to the land that his home surrounds.
What allows our common supermarket to stay full at all times is the Industrial Food System (IFS), which the majority of us depend on. In general, the (IFS) is the production of lots of food (vegetables, fruits, meats, ect.), very fast, and at the low price as possible. Personally, I feel the key aspect of our IFS is that it has a negative affect on our world, how ever way one looks at it.
The IFS is highly dependent on fossil fuel. Take a cob of corn for instance. The machine that parts the dirt and plants the seed takes fuel, planes that fertilizes the corn takes fuel, the trucks that transports the corn to the corn to the plant where they are sorted takes fuel, the plant itself takes fuel, the machines that package the corn takes fuel, the truck that ships the corn to the supermarket takes fuel, the consumer themselves, drives a car or take a bus that takes fuel when they go buy the cob of corn. The IFS is unreliable because it is dependent on fossil fuel, and unfortunately there is only a limited supply of fossil fuel.
The reason this is so is because fossil fuel comes from the tissues of dead animals and plants, but the process that turns these organic tissues into fossil fuel takes a very long time (thousands of years), much slower then the rate that our IFS and other fuel consuming things are using it. 100 years ago there were 1.5 billion people on our planet, now there are 6.66 billion people on earth and population is increasing as every moment passes. The amount of energy needed to support us increased about 80 percent between then and now. Eventually, this source of energy will run out and the IFS as we know it now will come to an end (Shloser).
Many people are unaware of the fact that fossil fuel will eventually run out, in a similar way, many people are unaware of the things they are actually putting into their bodies when they take a bite of what ever their eating. This is a big problem for many people health wise. Take the McDonalds chicken McNugget for example. I remembered the first time I heard the truth about the McNugget, it was from one of my camp councilors in the eighth grade. He was one of those typical health conscious kind of guy. He told me a whole bunch of things about unhealthy foods and how certain foods affect the body in different ways, but one thing that stuck to me till this day was when he told me that chicken McNuggets were not really made from chicken at all, what he said broke my heart. He told me, “next time you buy some nuggets, rip one in half, you will not see any chicken strips” of course I did go and rip a McNugget in half. He was right, no strips!
All of our innocent minds (kids) thought the nugget was just made of white breasted meat. Instead, it is really made of thirty different ingredients, thirteen of which are derived from corn. It gets worse; a few of these ingredients are chemicals that come from a petroleum refinery or chemical plan. Some are antioxidants that prevent the organic material in the nugget from going bad when spending months in a freezer. Another one of these chemicals is considered an “anti-foaming agent” called dimethylpolysiloxene which is added to the frying oil to prevent the nugget from foaming when being fried (makes it easier to cook). What we don’t know is that the same chemical is toxic, and is known to cause mutation, tumors, reproduction problems and maybe even cancer (Michael Pollan 112,113).
The most surprising ingredient of all found in the chicken McNugget must be the antioxidant TBHQ (butylhydroquinone). This chemical comes from petroleum and is sprayed onto the nugget to preserve it. Unfortunately this chemical is a form of butane (lighter fluid) very toxic. If one gram of TBHQ is consumed, symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, ring in the ears, delirium, sense of suffocation, and collapse can occur but if one consumes five grams of it they are dead. In a sense, eating a McNugget is like taking a whiff of lighter fluid (Michael Pollan 113,114).
All of these health deteriorating ingredients are added to the child hood favored McNugget to do only one thing, save money. This is the fundamental concept of our IFS. They add these toxic chemicals to extend the shelf life (in the freezer) of the nugget so that more nuggets can be made with out having to worry about them going bad. Ultimately it prevents them from loosing money for rotting products. Another reason for their use of these harmful antioxidants is because it is most likely the cheapest form of preservative. The thirteen corn based ingredients basically act as fillers for the chicken, since corn is cheaper then chicken.