Not your Grandfather's Farm

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Austin Boling

Instructor Will Dawkins

English 2323-5903

30 November 2009

Not Your Grandfather’s Farm

Imagine a world where the food you ate was secretly replace with a factory created artificial replica. In this world the imitation food looks, smells and tastes like the original, sometimes even better. Most of this fake food including the meat was made up of only a few plant-based materials and a gang of chemicals. Also, imagine it would slowly kill you trough a range of horrible dieses. We currently live in this bizarre world. America’s food industry is one of its deepest, darkest, best-kept secrets. When we think of a farm we picture scenes from Charlotte's Web. Not warehouses with ten thousand chickens, or dairy cows ankle-deep in ordure, huddled together under tin sheds in blistering heat. We picture the cows grazing on grass. Not eating formulas made of poultry waste and orange peels. The way food is produced is so over looked that it takes an outbreak of some sort to focus our eyes on problems beyond the grocery store shelves.

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        Naturally, capitalism produces a natural pressure toward efficiency. In the meat industry this has led to the factory farm. Every effort is bent toward maximizing the output of meat and minimizing the cost. As a result, “The U.S. agricultural industry can now produce un- limited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices” (32). The food that factory farms produced is cheap in terms of monetary value.  However, it comes at a high cost. The mass production of farm animals effects the environment, economy, and human health.

Inevitably, intensive animal agriculture depletes valuable natural resources. Instead of being eaten ...

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