Hindering Society Is Our Industrial

Hindering Society

Is our industrial system of agriculture and food (product) production and distribution (the same system that designs fast food, forces slaughterhouse quotas up, and produces jobs that are industrial opposed to post-industrial) hindering society? In other words our current industrial food system moves us (society and its members) backwards. Prove your point in your argument.

For Michael Pollan in the omnivore's dilemma, the fast food 'extra value' meal embodies all that is wrong with America's consumption patterns regarding food. Such a meal is entirely standardized, according to corporate specifications. It looks perfect on the outside, and is familiar and comforting in its chemically orchestrated, aggressive tastes of sugar and salt. However, only the first bite tastes really good. Instead of coming from the land, and instead of teaching the next generation how food is produced from dirt, the fast food meal comes from a plastic box, and even comes with a plastic toy. It can be eaten on the run, and encourages families to make food a low priority. It subverts family togetherness at the dinner table in favor of false efficiency.

However, although it may look sanitary and sanitized, health code issues abound regarding how factory-raised meat is produced. Cows are fed unnaturally, fattened on corn and grain, and given antibiotics so their young and delicate systems will not reject this diet. The farm subsidy system encourages farmers' and cattlemen's dependence upon corn, and the system of agricultural subsidies, once began to help small farmers who had overproduced during the Great Depression, now supports industrialized agriculture. The small farm where cows roamed free, where chicken ate bugs and roamed amongst the cow manure, where various types of vegetables were grown, is a thing of the past. Now, we have a corn monoculture, and fields feed ethanol-guzzling vehicles and cows that live a brief and unhappy life before they are killed for McDonald's hamburgers.

Our new method of eating, in a car, from processed boxes of foods has made America fatter, less healthy, and generated a series of McJobs, as detailed in George Ritzer's essay "McJobs: McDonaldization and the workplace." In one supreme irony, as McDonald's makes Americans less healthy, McDonald's as a company is dependant on poorly-paid workers who receive few benefits, including healthcare. The workers are disposable as the food and the packaging they assemble for McDonald's patrons. It is in the company's interest not to keep them employed for long, so they remain part-time employees without real healthcare. They learn no skills and do not improve their promotional prospects. And often the only food they can afford, lacking adequate facilities or time to prepare a meal, is a McDonald's meal.

The slaughterhouses where the processed meats that go into McDonald's hamburgers are just as mechanized as McDonald's drive-through, only the cows that move through their doors do not exit intact. Yet the fate of the human executors of these cows is almost as terrible. Working conditions in slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants are dangerous. The workers are often illegal and afraid to go to the hospital and the conditions are miserable and unsanitary as Eric Schlosser points out in his essay "The slaughterhouse: The most dangerous job."