Food - Derek Miller 4th Post

During class on Tuesday, a popular opinion among my colleagues was that the food industry should not have more regulations. While more regulations could lead to a shortage of food, I think it is imperative for the government to have more control over big agricultural businesses, ensuring a more sustainable future.

 Allowing capitalism to play its course in the food industry demonstrates a major flaw in a capitalistic government: classism. People with less wages cannot afford or have time to purchase or make higher quality of foods. As mentioned briefly in class, cheap quality food has allowed corporations to pay their workers less, since they can obviously buy the cheaper quality food. With that in mind, I am not saying everything is the corporations’ fault; their number one goal is to make a profit. However, since we have established this in our government, we need to include more regulations, ensuring safer environments for animals, pesticide-free food, and a lack of antibiotics in our meat.

At the same time, to believe that the switch to environmentally sound foods will be easy is completely wrong. With the input of all kinds of chemicals in our food and plants, farmers are able to feed more people. Our population number is on a J-curve at the moment, which to put that in perspective, no animal species has every fully recovered from a j-curve population explosion. If we switched everyone’s diets to all natural, the cost of meat would be astronomical and other foods wouldn’t be too far behind, due to the high demand for food.

So in other words, there is no easy way to fix the food crisis. Sure, you could follow the text’s example, allowing the middle-class and wealthy to eat healthy diets, while the poor are still stuck with cheap, processed food, but I think the government can start taking steps to change certain aspects about the treatment of animals and food processing.