As my final term of blogging begins, I
feel a slight need to comment on the material we are currently
covering in class. At present, we are looking at various works
covering our food industry. Most of them can easily be summarized as,
“the food industry is completely controlled by industrial systems
and the health conditions of their factories are horrendous, both of
which are very, very bad things”. And while I do agree that we
require better standards of health, and some way to enforce those
standards, I have yet to see any evidence that supports the first
part of this claim.
Why is it a bad thing to have an
industrialized system? Where exactly is the inherent problem here?
Many people who cry out against this concept are supporting an ideal.
They want the farm fresh food of their forefathers. However, as nice
as it sounds to get our food from homegrown, mom and pop farms, this
kind of system is not without flaws. First and foremost, there is a
large problem with production. A family owned farm does not provide
the kind of volume that we require today as consumers. There is a
reason that all of those slaughterhouses and factories are so big,
they need to be to keep up with demand. A farmer can only raise so
many cattle at a time on the fat of the land, especially if he needs
to prevent them from over grazing it. In the past, meat was far more
expensive because of this problem. The reason it is so cheap today is
because of mass production. Another bonus with industry is, if
handled correctly, it is far safer than something homegrown. If
proper safety precautions are in place, then we can eliminate many of
the viruses and diseases that naturally occur in our food products.
Food poisoning is not a new phenomenon brought on by corrupt and
unsanitary industry. It has been around for decades. People simply
did not have the tools to effectively treat meat and produce. Today,
we do have that technology. An average farmer will find it much
harder to afford the manpower and equipment needed to have that kind of
safety than a factory. Also, industry does not require decades of
experimentation to discover a healthier or more diverse crop. They
are able to engineer a crop that contains more protein, or nutrients.
Farmers in the past relied on intuition and cross pollination, not to
mention time, as opposed to controlled calculated science. There are
definite advantages to a more industrial system.
Now there are advantages to the
pastoral farming system as well. Currently, it does not have the kind
of health code problems that larger factories do. Also, this system
is more economically friendly. It does not produce the same kind of
gas or consume the same volume of fuel as an industrial one does.
They also have a far more appealing and family friendly image to
them, that I readily admit is more ascetically and fundamentally
pleasing than a stockyard. There are pros and cons to both methods.
My argument is not that one system is better or flawless. My argument
is that neither system is inherently wrong, or for that matter right.
The industrial and the pastoral systems both have good and bad points
about them. They each have their own moral, environmental, and
economic questions. When discussing this kind of issue, it is
important not to simply discount one side or the other. Both have
equally valid points that need to be addressed, and both have major
problems that need to be dealt with. It is easy to say that
industrial methods are killing the earth both morally and literally.
It is easy to say that man is corrupting the earth and everything
would be better if he just went back to his roots. But the answer
here is not that simple. The lines are not black and white, and both
sides are going to have very real consequences regardless of what you
choose. The important thing is to address them.
-BlackFox
(683)
No comments:
Post a Comment