Nature vs Human Progress- The Downside to Agriculture

Food in our society is built up in part by industrialism and consumers. Things are mechanized and made to be quick and efficient to fit in with our fast paced world. And this, is what we call progress. The system is effective in making mass amounts of food with little labor while using up many of earth’s precious resources. It has become so that it only takes one person to grow food to feed hundreds from the huge amount of manpower was required in the past. But are the costs of agriculture worth the benefits, one being growing a cornucopia amount of crops with relatively little manpower?

By this system, nature is reduced down to an equation, x amount of pesticides and fertilizers to yield x amount of crops. This introduced genetically modified crops that are engineered to be resistant to bugs, corn for example is modified to take up many crops in one acre of land, allowing a dense area of the crop. Although food is a lucrative industry it is not for the people growing it--the farmers. According to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma many farmers are broke, and barely breaking even. Pollan argues that the agricultural system has made us dependent of a few crops, namely soy and corn. Farmers who grow corn, the most common crop available in almost every food we have today, are barely able to support themselves. Since the Nixon area, Zea Mays, corn, has come front and center as the main crop in America. The goal, to grow as much corn as possible, was subsidized with government money who are helping the big corporations not the farmers themselves. Forced to grow a vast amount of corn for very little the farmers make little to no profit. Cheap and inexpensive corn has come to the forefront as a cheap industrial raw material, finding itself from everything like the ethanol for the gas tank to hydrogenated oil in margarine, to the permeating sweetener known as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

But industrial agricultural effects have not stopped at plants, it premates into the treatment of livestock; animals raised to be food. In industrial food, the animals are treated much like the corn, they are packed into as little space as possible and for the sake of quantity, injected with hormones and antibiotics to buffer them against their cramped living conditions. Watching the Meatrix, we find out out about the use of machines to milk the cows and crowded conditions to maximize the amount of animals that could be stuffed in a small area. Instead of the idyll farm scene that many Americans have been brought up, those have been replaced by Factory farms. There were many other apalling things that I didn't know before like calves that were separated from their mothers at a young age were fed cows milk replacement made with blood from dead cows, which seemed a bit twisted to me. It made sense because in the industrialization of the dairy farms, since feeding calves milk meant less milk for humans, so industry farms take the milk that would have gone to the calves to us. But because of the way that things industry they are more profit orientated and less worried about human treatment for the animals. At the end of the Meatrix the video keeps relaying the message that power to stop this is in the consumers hands, and its true, since it'll send the message that consumers don't want the product like this, its unprofitable to do it. Otherwise, the incentive to stop doing something like that is not enough to cause actual change. From a purely profit perspective if it doesn't hurt your profits there is no reason to stop doing it, never mind the risk of antibiotic overuse, the dangerous crowded conditions, or the higher risk of spreading disease. The people aren't informed enough, or they don't care so it's okay to continue doing this, that's what the people who run the Industrialized Farms are thinking when consumers continue buying their products because it shows people are not supporting the cause for sustainable food and their profit margins are safe. The Cows with Guns video follows the lives of cows and sums up what it means to be a cow in the industry. "They eat to grow, and grow to die/die to be at the hamburger fry" shows that their point in life is basically to be big enough to be killed for fodder. But it goes on to show us with the Guru cow that change is possible and tries to allay that message to us. It is similar to the Meatrix in trying to show us what is happening and that something can be done.

Watching the Farm to Fridge video and seeing the treatment of the chickens, pigs, and cows, it seems undeniably cruel and cold, how they are beaten and abused and are helpless against this treatment. The chickens are genetically modified to grow large and the that chickens can't bear the heavy weight induced by the hormones and are beaten with metal rods, which is considered "standard practice". The way they die and are killed is the same, being conscious and having their throats slit alive and scalded with hot water. It makes me think of the pig slaughter video we saw in class and how just a few moments before sliding down they were kicking and alive and they come out dead and still, because I think that's what happened with them, they were scalded alive. I can't help thinking that if they were human something like this would be considered "inhumane", but because people don't bear the lives of animals with the same weight that they do of humans. Watching the video I felt a range of emotions, I was appalled, disgusted, saddened, and angry at the way people treated the animals, to the point where they are spent. The squeal of the piglets screaming was very eerie to hear because you see them struggling as well.

After finding out about this, I had a conversation with my advisor at my internship; I talked to her about the animal cruelty and the industrial food system and she said that this is just the way things are and its how we get our food. (She's a really nice person though, I mean it). This was the T.I.N.A. perspective, that "there is no alternative" and its pretty easy to believe and get caught up in it. But there is always an alternative. Even though the alternative isn't always the easiest route to go. The alternatives in diet are very varied, ranging from buying organic vegetables and free ranged organic meat, to kosher, to growing your own fruits and vegetables. Knowing that it is possible and there is an alternative out there, we should do what we think is morally right, not just what is morally easy. We should treat animals more humanely because they are living creatures too. And this system of looking out for only profit and the bottom-line does not do that. We as consumers and everyday people can make a step towards change by showing our support to companies who treat animals in a humane way like those in kosher or letting cows eat on a pasture and limiting the amount of products we buy from those that don't or boycotting it altogether.