Food Inc Essay America’s way of eating and growing food has evolved more in the past 50 years than the previous 10,000 years. Which is shocking to me, upon learning how this happened and the consequences of this happening, needless to say I w as really upset.
The whole industrial food industry started to take off right along with the fast food industry “boom” in the early 1930’s; being McDonalds their bigger customer. But with McDonalds’s continuous growing need for ground beef, potatoes and vegetables only a few companies were able to supply.
Back in the early 1970’s the top four meat distributers,(Tyson,Swift,Cargill and National Beef) controlled only a 30% of the market, now with the American demand for meat and help from the government they control more than 80%, which means billions of dollars in revenue, money that is used to come up with genetically ways to grow more chicken and cattle twice as fast and to quiet the voice of anybody who has something to say about it, with a legion of lawyers.
A good example is Tyson; a company that has virtually and genetically changed the chicken as we knew it. Tyson can raise, kill and process a chicken in 49 days, that’s half the time it took before and the chickens weight twice as much. Chickens in these “Chicken Houses” never see the light of day; they walk around ankle deep in feces and put on so much weight and so fast that they are not able to take more than three steps before falling down. This is not only highly unsanitary, is inhuman and cruel.

Another example is Beef Productions Inc (B.P.I), this is a company that sends thousands of empty buses to Mexico, to bring illegal immigrants that will work for really low wagers but most importantly that won’t complain. And all these companies have to do when it’s time to cut some labor, it’s pick up the phone call immigrations. This way they won’t have to worry about paying for insurance, 401K or any sort of benefits.
Corn plays a huge and important role in how meat companies have become so profitable. 100 years ago a farmer was able to grow between 15 and 20 bushels of corn, now that figure has skyrocketed to 200,000 bushels on average. The reason why so many farmers grow corn is really easy; it’s subsidized by the government, which means the government will pay, for most if not everything, that the farmer needs as long as he produces corn. With corn being so cheap, meat companies can afford to feed corn instead of grass, to make bigger cows faster, so they can be slaughtered in half the time, with no inspections from the F.D.A. (Food and Drug Administration).
According to the film “Food Inc”, back in the 1970’s more than 50,000 inspections were conducted by the F.D.A. now that number has dropped down to an alarming 9,164. In 1998 the U.S. government included testing for the E-coli virus during the inspections to the slaughter houses, and if the slaughter house kept on testing positive, the US government gave U.S.D.A. (United States Department of Agriculture) the authority to shut down the slaughter house. However, the meat companies took the U.S.D.A to court, even thought a hamburger’s contains meat from a thousand different cows and it would not be a problem for the E-coli virus to find a way into our food, the court rule in favor of the meat companies.

But is not all lost, we have a voice, every customer has a vote. Every time you go grocery shopping make sure you buy from a company that is fair to animals, employees and the environment. Buy products from local farmers, not items that had been shipped from thousands of miles away and have gone through countless chemical process to appear right in front of you at your local supermarket. It is time to help our government make an apple cheaper than a bag of chips and it is up to us the consumers to take the first step.