Xiaorui Huang
WR 123 College Composition III - Academic and Research Writing
Short essay
Grade: A-
WR 123 College Composition III - Academic and Research Writing
Short essay
Grade: A-
Corporate Farming and Food Quality in America
No matter who you are, where you are from, or how old you are, you need food to survive. A sufficient food supply with reliable quality is, therefore, of the utmost importance. Since the late nineteenth century, along with the population growth and the second industrial revolution, new technologies and business models appeared in agriculture to increase food production and ensure supply. This trend gave birth to corporate farming that has been thriving in recent decades. Today, with mega food producers like Archer Daniel Midland and Tyson Foods ranking in the top 100 largest American corporations (Fortune 500), corporate farming has dominated the agribusinesses in America. However, in this highly productive model, food quality has been compromised to ensure supply. Corporate farming undermines food quality because it degrades food nutrition value, threatens food safety, inhibits constructive competition from independent farming, and hinders the transparency of food production.
Some may argue that corporate farming helps maintain a reliable food quality as incorporations usually apply standardized processes to food growth and production. Proponents of corporate farming explain that standardization eliminates the previous quality variations due to free, independent farming. Besides, with the means of production controlled by fewer hands, it becomes easier for government agencies and food producer guilds to establish unanimous product standards on a regional or even national scale. These standards, besides their regulatory function, also serve as guidelines for companies to formulate intra-corporate standardization, and for non-governmental organizations and even individual consumers to evaluate food quality. Those corporations whose products cannot conform to these standards will have to either make improvements or withdraw from the market. Consequently, food production as a whole can achieve an adequate quality.
The standardization of corporate farming has indeed encouraged the development of the food industry by setting a model of efficient food production, yet, it lowers nutrition value of food. Supporters of corporate farming base their arguments on the premise that if a specific food product meets standards that allow it enter markets, it is qualified and healthy. However, these standards, either established by government agencies or producer guilds, are problematic. In common practice, the quality check specified in product standards mainly focuses on appearance, weight, and other external properties, but neglects the real quality of food, its nutrition value. For instance, United States Standards for Grain, the authoritative product standards regulating thirteen major grains growing in America, have no coverage of nutrition value ("Grain Inspection, Packers & Stockyards Administration"). Without corresponding regulations, nutrition value has been sacrificed in corporate farming for maximizing profits. A typical example is the nutrition degradation of tomatoes. Food writer Barry Estabrook calls for attention to the shocking fact that nutrition contents of 100 gram tomatoes have shrunk by 62 percent on calcium, 30 percent on vitamin C and thiamin, and 19 percent on niacin since 1960s (x). As one of the crops whose growth and production are heavily encroached by corporate farming, the regression of tomato quality indicates that food corporations are largely responsible for nutritious degradation of food.
Not only making food less nutritious, corporate farming also threatens food safety by its highly industrialized processing along with the abuses of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Although from farmland to supermarket storage rack, a specific food product must experience several checks on chemical residues, contaminants, and allergens by multiple parties, potential health risks remain. Until February 16, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has already announced seven food recall alerts due to contaminations in this year. Also according to the research of the USDA, tomatoes that supply for supermarket contain more than thirty pesticides’ residue (qtd. in Estabrook xiii). These facts reveal a lowered food safety under corporate farming, which is caused by the truth that for certain products the uses of chemicals are so substantial that post-processing cannot lower the residue enough to pass the chemical residue check. In such cases, food corporations tend to take advantages of loopholes in imperfect regulations rather than to reduce the uses of chemicals during farming and processing. For example, in their study about the U.S. governmental regulation of industrial pesticide use, biologist Jennifer Sass and attorney Mae Wu point out that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rarely renew their legal standards for early-registered pesticides even if later studies suggest a stricter control on their residue. Consequently, the legally allowable residues of early-registered pesticide are usually higher than their newly-registered counterparts that are tested comprehensively through advance technology. Targeting at this loophole, food corporations prefer early-registered pesticide so that they can maintain a substantial use that will cause high residue. As a result, official regulation-conformed foods that are supposed to be safe can actually contain excessive poisonous chemical residues.
The reduced food nutrition and food safety of corporate farming is a result of imperfect standardization, which is almost inevitable because of the detachment of decision-making from farmland. In agribusiness companies, the internal standard of food growth and inspection are often decided by board members who barely have specialized knowledge about and direct contact with the production process and products themselves. These people focus on yield, efficiency, and ultimately profits. Therefore, the standards they make for their companies aim to exploit “profitable loopholes” in governmental regulations, maximize unit yield, facilitate transportation and warehousing, and promote marketing. What are neglected in corporate farming are those “invisible” factors, like nutrition values, chemical residues and health risks.
In addition to producing unsatisfactory food by themselves, food corporations also jeopardize the general quality of the food supply by suppressing their independent farming competitors who can produce nutritious food in a more natural way. Under the influence of corporations, food guilds usually set requirements on the external properties of food products that are too strict for independent farmers to meet without heavily chemicalized production. Take tomatoes as an example, as Barry Estabrook points out, tomatoes grown through traditional methods, though usually much more tasty and nutritious than corporate farming tomatoes, are treated as unqualified by Florida Tomato Committee due to their nonstandard shape and color (xii). As a Federal Market Order dictating export of tomatoes from South Florida, Florida Tomato Committee, with the support from food corporations, makes the sale of independent farming tomatoes illegal. Consequently, corporate farming puts independent farmers out of business and hinders the supply of healthy food.
Corporations’ controlling food committees is but the tip of the iceberg of the hindered transparency of food production. In the food industry, transparency is maintained by the collaboration of legislation’s policy making, execution’s supervising, and judiciary’s regulating. However, food corporations’ influence permeates all three parts of the national state. A typical example is agribusiness corporation Monsanto. It has several former employees taking senior positions in the FDA, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Supreme Court (Food, Inc.). According to the data given in Food, Inc., the number of food safety inspections conducted by the FDA in 2006 was less than one fifth of the number in 1972. The reduced inspection could have meant well-maintained food safety, yet, the frequently issued food recalls suggest otherwise. Therefore a more likely explanation for the reduced inspection is that the regulatory system has been impaired by food corporations, which results in a reduced transparency in food production.
Although corporate farming has brought us a more uniform food supply, its profit-oriented nature unavoidably lowers nutrition value of food, threatens food safety, harms constructive market competition and hinders the transparency of food production. Without effective regulating, corporate farming ultimately undermines food quality. To address this issue, firstly we need to overcome the powerful barriers set by food corporations in our state apparatus, which cannot be achieved without a well-informed public. Therefore, as the steppingstone of solving food quality and safety issues, efforts are called for to unveil the truth of corporate farming to public.
Works Cited
Estabrook, Barry. “Introduction: On the Tomato Trail.” Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. Kansas City, MO: McMeel, 2011. ix-xvii.
Food, Inc.. Dir. Kenner Robert. Magnolia Pictures, 2009. DVD.
"Fortune 500: Industry: Food Production." Fortune 500 (2011): Fortune 500 2011. Web. 8 Feb 2012. <http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2011/industries/197/index.html>.
Sass, Jennifer, and Mae Wu. "US Pesticide Regulation: Weaknesses, Loopholes, and Flaws Undermine Farmworker Health." Physicians for Social Responsibility. N.p., 27 AUG 2011. Web. 21 Feb 2012. <http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-health-policy-institute/responses/us-pesticide-regulation.html>.
United States. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service. Current Recalls & Alerts (Open Federal Recall Cases for FSIS). USDA FSIS, 17 Feb. 2012. Web. 19 Feb. 2012.
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