Food Security In America

Agriculture has existed The United States of America since our country was colonized by the British and learned the process from the Native Americans. American agriculture has shifted from this structure of small farms that used to exist. Rural communities and small town farms are now less frequent while industrial-style farms and factories are becoming the standard. “Early 20th century agriculture was labor intensive, and it took place on a large number of small, diversified farms in rural areas where more than half of the U.S. population lived” (Dimitri et al. 2). Now, the workforce is employed in larger companies that run the agriculture business. According to the movie Food, Inc., the top five beef packers controlled about twenty-five percent

Food security is all or most of the people in a given country that have daily access to enough nutritious food to live active and healthy lives (Miller 131). The opposite of food security is food insecurity, which would be not knowing where the next meal is coming from. Because of food insecurity one in six people in developing countries cannot grow or buy enough food to meet their basic energy needs (Miller 131). About eighty percent of the world’s food supply is produced by industrialized agriculture (Miller 131). The issue with this process that the twenty percent of those that are being fed are those in the undeveloped countries who do not have the resources to use commercial farming, therefore they do not receive as much food to feed their country. Another issue is that large amounts of fossil fuel energy, water, commercial fertilizers, and pesticides are used to produce the monocultures that go into industrialized farming. According to G. Miller, nineteen percent all commercial energy is used in the United States for food production, food processing, and food distribution (138). If it is broken down more specifically, it would take two thousand five hundred gallons of water to create one pound of beef, livestock byproducts are responsible for thirty-two million tons of carbon

“Like most of the other leading processors, Tyson supplies its growers with one-day-old chicks where they spend their entire lives on the grower’s property belonging to Tyson” (FFN, 141). These growers are exposed to harmful chemicals and strict guidelines in order to get their paychecks. In the movie Food, Inc. a Tyson farmer shows us how the chickens are raised in a seven week period and how many die from the growth hormones. Most of the chickens were unable to carry their own weight from their breasts being too big for their own bodies and their bones growing too fast too soon. Both organic farming and the Tyson feedlots do the same thing: provide food by the growing and then slaughtering of animals. The deciding of which process of better is merely the decision of whether or not animals have rights to healthy conditions, and then whether those workers caring for the animals deserve to be properly compensated for overseeing and tending to the process. The organic farming cows can spread their own manure in a large pasture which then helps fertilize the grass, therefore the pasture is a feasible environment for them to live and graze in. According to Food, Inc., the organic farmer that participated in showing his ranch explained that the slaughtering process and how since he openly slaughters his animals outdoors, with his own two hands, while they’re still living, his