United States farm subsidies and how they are ruining our quality of food - Essay Example

? 11 September United s farm subsidies and how they are ruining our quality of food Making one species the fundamental ingredient of the whole diet has many implications. First of all, we as human beings are omnivores. This means that we have been naturally designed in a way that we need a good supply of a whole range of nutrients and micronutrients on daily basis. Our biological system requires diverse diet. When we base our diet totally upon corn, there is a vast majority of nutrients and micronutrients that we need but are not consuming. A lot of processing is involved in the transformation of a corn bushel into foods that look different and taste different despite being fundamentally derived from corn. The processing considerably lowers the nutritional significance of our diet. Fats food is one such corn-based food that is highly processed. People that make fast food a regular part of their diet not only become overweight but also experience malnourishment. They are deprived of the essential nutrients and micronutrients placed by nature in fresh fruits and vegetables. Every year, doctors encounter hundreds of cases of overweight children with rickets. Massive consumption of corn requires massive production of corn. Cultivation of corn causes a lot of harm to the environment. Farmers consider corn a greedy crop that needs much more nitrogen fertilizer than what is required by any other kind of crop. It is the very nitrogen fed to the corn fields that has run off with water and flown into the Gulf of Mexico to develop a dead zone therein which has now become as big as New Jersey. Corn plant also needs increased supply of pesticides which are also dangerous for the environment. Apart from the obvious demerits of feeding the livestock corn, a potential unethical issue is that the animals are forced to feed on corn, without I being their real diet. Many animals thus need to be given antibiotics whose effects can be noticed in form of the changed quality of the milk produced by them as well as a change in the taste of their flesh when they are slaughtered. Explaining the reason of writing the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan said that as he traveled across US, he was astonished to learn about the eating habits of people of US as well as their curiosity to know how to change their eating habits for the better. This led Pollan to indulge in a comprehensive research regarding food and health. While conducting the literature review and collecting the primary and secondary data, Pollan found that scientists in US did not have much to teach about healthful eating, thus making the science of food a fairly primitive science in US. …there is a much more reliable source of wisdom on the subject. That wisdom is in the form of traditional foods, cuisines, and food cultures, which are the product of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of trial and error figuring out how to keep people healthy using whatever grows in a specific place. Culture has more to teach us about how to eat well than science. (Pollan cited in Penguin Group USA). His research led Pollan to developing the view that America is suffering from a national eating disorder. In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan has expressed that the start of this national eating disorder can be traced back to the early 1990s. That was the time when people were attracted in crowds by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg towards the sanitarium constructed at Battle Creek in the US state of Michigan. Inmates of the sanitarium sufficiently endured all-grade foods which raised the number of competitors for Kellogg. Owing to the immense subsidization of corn by the US government, corn has become the fundamental ingredient of the people of US and animals alike. 75 per cent on average carbon consumed by Americans in the present age is derived from corn. The primary reason why corn became the king of the US food industry was the fact that it could always be grown as rapidly as desired with the use of fertilizers in large amounts. Large machines are employed in harvesting corn and it is possible to process and convert the corn into a whole range of marketable foods that are quite different from one another in terms of taste, texture, aroma and look. Crops grown from the purchased seeds for the first generation of corn are somewhat economically productive, but the yield of the second generation corn that is grown from the used seeds is so poor that their plantation is not quite profitable. There is a lot of diversity in American foods ranging from Ring Dings, Gatorade, biscuits and hamburgers. The kernels of large factories are transformed into a vast array of compounds. Emphasizing upon the extent to which corn is used in the daily meals, Pollan cites the example of chicken nuggets. The little bits of chicken are covered in several coats of corn, and are deep fried in the corn oil. The only non-corn thing is the chicken itself that has also fed upon corn throughout its life in the poultry farm, thus the chicken itself, is to much an extent, corn. Same holds true for literally all types of food in America. Pollen basis his notion of calling the chicken corn upon the theory that organisms become what they consume. He proposes a chemical test to remove all doubts about the corn’s ubiquity. The peculiar carbon structure that is a characteristic feature of corn is identified in organisms that consume it. A chemical test when performed upon a hair of an American and that of a Mexican that eats tortillas shows that the former has much larger extent of corn-type carbon as compared to the latter. A researcher who performed one such chemical test said, “We North Americans look like corn chips with legs” (Flannery). Industrial and natural farmers contrast with each other just like the development methods of proprietary software and the open source software do. According to the industrial farmer, with adequate use of technology, it is possible to control the nature of crops in order to make their yield quite discretionary and predictable. Industrial farmers of the Midwest America are able to cause a forced growth of the corn crops from the same land for many consecutive seasons by making use of up to 10 million metric tons of the fertilizer on a yearly basis in a soil that is already classified as one of the most fertile lands across the globe. Despite the use of fertilizer in such large amount that is a potential burden on the American economy, the product finally yielded is neither directly consumable by animals nor by human beings until it is technically processed further. For making it a suitable diet for the animals, corn should be mixed with numerous medicines and antibiotics in order to ensure that the cows that have been conventionally fed with grass do not become sick after experiencing this drastic change in their diet. Humans also need the processing of corn into more palatable things like corn syrup. The processing incurs America cost worth billions of dollars every year. The external costs including topsoil depletion, depletion of water table, and other unfavorable consequences for health are in addition to that. Thus, industrialists that are of the view that they have exploited corn and processed into a variety of food products have actually been exploited by corn, only that there is little realization of the aforementioned costs by the industrialists. The situation is a lot worse than most of us dare imagine, for Americans are some of the most specialized eaters on earth. At the base of the national food chain is a single species of grass–corn–and its growth, processing, and sale constitute a titanic industry which is focused on increasing profits rather than health and well-being. (Flannery). Having realized the chief role of corn in making the agriculture of US industrialized and in an attempt to propose the solution of this problem, Pollan suggested the use of industrialization of the process of software production like what was suggested in The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks. This book by Brooks promotes the theory that scientific means should not be adopted to accelerate the cultivation of crops because they are like children that take nine months to fully form in the mother’s womb irrespective of the number of women that may be assigned the task of producing the child. A practical example that supports this theory is that of the addition of smart people to the OS/360 project which only served to delay the project rather than finishing it earlier. In the very first entry, the industrial logic had failed software and the trend has not altered ever since. The sustainable farmer orchestrates the process of nature and avoids producing crops artificially at arbitrary times and in unsuitable circumstances. Despite that, they manage to grow the crops in sufficient amount and the ones that are edible without additional processing. Works Cited: Flannery, Tim. “We’re Living on Corn!” The New York Review of Books. 28 June 2007. Web. 12 September 2011. . Penguin Group USA. “Reading Guides.” 2011. Web. 12 September 2011. . Read More