Essay On Food Inc

Most people do not recognize the real cost behind the food they are ordering for lunch, or the quick breakfast they grab before heading to work. They fail to see past the veil covering the modern food industry, which has transformed drastically within a short amount of time. With the growth of technology came a demand for more food to feed a growing population in a small amount of time. The 20th-century industrialization of agriculture stems from government policies pushing the production of commodity crops such as corn which has a variety of different uses, as well as shifting the farm from solar energy to fossil fuel energy. These policies that subsidized crops paved the way for factory farms to use concentrated animal feeding operations

As the farm factory system became prevalent, the policies that once allowed strict regulation of the system deteriorated, which allowed the corporations to have more freedom in bending the rules of the food market. Also, there has been a significant increase of people within the government itself that have previously worked for the food corporations, therefore allowing this corruption to spread. Sonny Bunch conveniently ignores this fact in his response to Food Inc, making his argument seem biased. Bunch even goes on to state that it is not the corporations fault for the corruption and contamination of the nation’s food system. However, this position is illogical since the government that is supposed to be regulating these companies contains people from those same companies, thus government policies ultimately favor the food industry. In Food Inc Robert Kenner proves this point by stating “In the 1970s, there were literally thousands of slaughterhouses in the United States. Today we have 13 slaughterhouses that process the majority of beef that is sold in the United States. The hamburger of today has pieces of thousands of different cattle” (Food Inc.). By including this fact, Kenner succeeds in convincing his audience that Bunch’s argument does not coincide with the fact that government policies have allowed this corruption by failing to regulate factory farms. Jeff Tietz, a supporter of Kenner’s ideology explains how the government policies are so intertwined in the food industry that if the system was reformed, it would directly affect not only the consumer, but also the people living near these farm factories. These people witness the fraud of the food industry firsthand because factory farms have to import “a majority of their food, which contains large