Reading Reviews #2

Food Industrialization and Its Problems

Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma gives a lot of thoughts to the very simple question “what do you want for dinner”. The answer to this question evolved along with the history of human species. Back in the hunter-gatherer eras, people ate what they could kill and pick. The amount of food they could produce each day might only be able to support a tribe of people, yet most people had to work on getting food. Today, we have the concept of “agriculture” and “industry”, so only a small portion of people produce food, while most others just eat. If you are among “most others”, do you really know what are you eating?

“No, you don’t,” answers Pollan. As human race powers up, more people are needed on other fields such as science and technology. Almost every culture ends up in industrialization because this requires the minimum number of food producers. As Pollan found out in Iowa, a corn grower like George Naylor could grow 470 hectares of corns which could feed 129 Americans. At present, it is unrealistic for each person to go back and produce their own food. Then here’s the problem: how can people from outside of food industry decide what they eat?

“You can’t. Everything is made of corn,” says Pollan. Why? There are intrinsic problems lying in the industrialization of food production as the industry is mostly operated by the market, whose only purpose is profits, not public health. In other situations, governments take part in it, too. Even if Naylor couldn’t sell all his corns, he could receive corn subsidies from the government so that he didn’t need to reduce his yield. If you have watched the film The World According to Monsanto, you’d know the dark history of GMOs. In the beginning, scientists found that the use of GMOs could generate much larger yields with lower costs while causing no harms on human body in the short-run. Although little was known about the long-term effects of GMOs on human body, the government still took a shot and approved GMOs to the market. Worst part is that GMOs were not required to label themselves at that time so people had no idea they were risking their future health.  

Bad, isn’t it? But what other choices do we have? I would have to say that this may be the best solution for the current situation of large population and limited resources.