You Are What You Eat - Essay Example

You are what you eat Every person who eats should be alarmed by this paper whether you area mother or father, a student or teacher. This issue raised is not only about what we are eating and not eating but about the truth. The truth that has been kept from us for the past few decades and there is a reason for it. With knowledge come responsibility and an authority to act without it we are helpless and can do nothing. The life of an average American is dominated by eating what they think is healthy food simply because they get it from grocery stores and the food products are labeled, but this is simply an illusion of the truth and it leads to more harm than good. The food industry has changed more in the past 50 years than it had in the 10,000 years before that. The modern supermarket these days has an average of 47,000 products and upward, though only a handful of companies are distributing all of them. This is a change that has taken place globally and not in America alone. American agriculture has been transformed so as to be almost unrecognizable. It is no longer dominated by small, carefully-run family farms producing some wheat, corn, dairy and perhaps eggs and poultry fed and being raised in a free-running farm area., but rather, it is dominated and run by huge multinational food processing companies whose aim is to make more profit and compete for a global position in terms of the best companies. These companies forget that they are dealing with nourishment products for the health of millions of Americans and therefore be more cautious and humane in the food they produce and even how they produce and package it. In their greediness to expand their business, these food companies engage in lying behaviors and techniques since they are aware that majority of the people are ignorant when buying food from supermarkets and others have no clue of the nutritional content and simply trust the company or the product in the supermarket. The lies are therefore numerous and they often start here during production and even transportation and preservation. If you look at a tomato, you may think of a green ripened vegetable that is going to nourish your body and you may feel pretty optimistic purchasing this item to eat or sharing it with your family. In actuality, that is more like a concept of a tomato. By this I mean this tomato may have been picked days earlier in another country by migrant farmers- before it was ripe. Then ripped by ethylene gas, shipped off in a semi-truck soaked with more toxic chemicals and now sits under fluorescent lights with only a fraction left of nutritional value. The other way to mask the truth behind the product we buy is by labeling. In order to maximize their profits, these food processing companies target their labeling of the products to attract more people who do not care much or even have no much knowledge of nutrition content as long as the packaging is attractive and seems to portray a healthy food product. These super companies know we want to be eating real chicken, not a byproduct of chicken or chicken parts. So they have created a way to make you think you are getting what you want when in fact what you are buying only closely resembles say a chicken. On the label you will see sunny skies and friendly farms. You will see animals grazing and pictures of farmers and their families sitting down at the dinner table at the end of the day. The harsh reality is that two companies Tyson and Perdue dominate the chicken industry and whether you are buying from McDonalds or your local grocery store you are buying their product. What is this and why is it dangerous? Basically the entire chicken population in the US comes from genetically altered chicks. Manufactured in vent less and window less chicken “jails”. These chicks are usually blind and often die from their rough surrounding. These jails across America have led to huge waste, pollution problems and spread of diseases including the bird flu. Tyson Foods alone process 155 million pounds of chicken a week; leading them to a profit of over $26 billion a year. Most Americans have no idea of the above information and hence keep on purchasing chicken because they think of it as white and healthy meat and have no clue that they may be ingesting toxins in their bodies and harming their bodies more than they are helping it to be healthy. Another huge problem which seems to be the most horrible is the company of Monsanto. They are the leading producers of 90 percent of the world’s genetically modified seeds. At first only a chemical company for pesticides such as Round Up, this corporate giant now owns the right to patent life. You may have heard of Monsanto through their work of Agent Orange: “In the 1960s and 1970s, Monsanto became one of 10-36 producers of Agent Orange for US Military operations in Vietnam.” The reason Monsanto is so dangerous reaches far and wide and affects us all. They own 75% of all tomato seeds, 100% of all the cotton seeds worldwide, 95% of all soybean plants and seeds and 85% the same of corn. The impact of this is shocking. Genetically modifying a seed means that you are altering its DNA and implanting it with other chemicals that make it grow quicker and even larger in size than the origin seed of that plant. A normal seed who’s DNA has not been altered has a naturally occurring chemical and bacteria that fights cancer and which therefore lacks in the genetically modified seeds. The cancer fighting, disease resisting natural nature of the seed is now being implanted with a bacteria strand and a chemical which makes the seeds resist pollutants such as Round Up and bring in a higher yield. Additionally and equally as dangerous is introduction of the Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) that Monsanto began with cows and pigs specifically to increase production in the animal and with the cow, her milk. IGF-1 is a hormone stimulated by rBGH in the cows blood stream, which is directly responsible for the increase in milk production. The negative effects of the hormone to the animal and us as human consumers vary. Prolonged exposure to the rBGH shows correlation with breast cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer and colon cancer. For the animals, inordinate amount of these hormone injections results in mastitis, a painful infection of breast tissue that ultimately results in sores and pus. This is widespread that the actually accepted amount of pus that is now deemed acceptable. Also because of this infection, the farmers have had to administer more antibiotics, which is one of the leading suspicions as to why we are becoming too resistant to antibiotics. In addition to mastitis the bovine are developing hoof infections that have resulted in crippled and amputated herds. One farmer commented he had to replace 75% of his herd the first year he was told he had to start administering the bovine growth hormone. There ultimately can be sixteen complications that result from this hormone to our livestock and this information comes from Monsanto itself. They have comprised a packet when they employ a farmer and this warns of “potential side effects” to come. The frauds being committed here are huge and whose impact may end in our physical demise or even death. Although we have been able to see some of the “enemies”, we don’t have the solutions to stop the problem. One of the issues is that Monsanto people have infiltrated the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Washington. Michael R. Taylor, the FDAs deputy commissioner for policy wrote the FDAs rBGH labeling guidelines. Margaret Miller, deputy director of the FDAs Office of New Animal Drugs was a former Monsanto research scientist who had worked on Monsantos rBGH safety studies up until 1989. There are so many things the consumer of these food products does not know and even when they do they have no control of because the food processing and supplying industries are few and hence no much alternative to the consumers. Many people also have no capabilities of growing their own food and hence still heavily rely on these companies to do that for them. What we can control however is what we eat, buy and grow within our abilities. The consumer needs to be educated on the ignorance of just buying food products without checking their contents. Some of the instructions necessary to follow when going to purchase food products include but are not limited to: when you see something has the added rBGH, don’t buy it, read labels of the food you buying and when you do, do not purchase products that say they are genetically modified in anyway (GM), support your local farmers and farmer markets and buy local whenever you can and most importantly educate yourself as much as you can and become smart with your food. Read More