Final Exam Questions

Final Exam Question # 1
Describe the past and present of food. Predict the future of food.

Food has it’s own culture that is douched in history. Even if no one knows this. This history involves sharecropping, manual labor, small care community etc. Food’s past is a clear and clean one. We know that framers would take time in growing and picking their products. This involves a lot of man labor and a lot of care. Food didn’t have as much chemicals and pesticides. This might have lead to a more natural taste of food. For example is when we travel to different places and taste other cultures food. We can taste the difference in food that is common around the world like rice, pasta, etc.
Today people aren’t to concern with were their food comes from. They assume that their food comes from proper growing and care just like in the past. Food today involves less care because machines take care of our food. Our framing is left in the hands of the industrial food chains. Our food is douched in pesticides and other chemicals that grow our food faster and that protect our food from insects. This process is use to produce the maximum amount of food to produce the maximum amount of profit that they can achieve. The big food companies are the only one that only benefit from this. The public is denied the age of good and healthy food that is beneficially to our health and maybe our survival. I say our survival because if we look at America today we can see that the obesity rate is increasing and the next several generations the rate of obesity will increase dramatically.
A future result of this would lead to a larger amount of food production with even more profit for the food company. The taste of food might be completely lost. I don’t want to live in that future. The future will also hold an even larger obesity rate. In the future, if you were to walk down the street you wouldn’t see an average weight person for a while. This is the drastic long-term effect that the industrial food industrial will have on society.

Final Exam Question # 2

“Food in our culture is one aspect of a larger nightmare.”
Write an essay that opposes, supports and/or qualifies this thesis.

I believe that this thesis is correct, simply because food effects different aspects of peoples lives. For example the oil that is needed in order to transport and to process our food, the immigrant workers who are hired at less pay than the non-immigrant worker, and how the food industry takes care of its animals. In Fast Food Nation: The Movie it shows the viewer how immigrant workers are treated in this environment. It shows how the workers were treated as second-class citizens. For example when a worker was injured he wasn’t given to much sympathy when it came to taking care of their workers, but they really don’t have to because these workers are here illegally so the company doesn’t feel that they really don’t have to care. This makes them more profit while their workers are getting paid less. In class we were watching a film Our Daily Bread that shows how the animals are treated in these industrial farms. In the movie the animals are encaged with several other thousands other animals that only have a small amount of space to walk around. This causes the animals to trample each other and kill each other. Others die because of the manure that is left around. They are forced to live in this unnatural environment this can cause diseases that can effect us. Something that I noticed in the film was that the machines killed the animals. The people simply handled the rest of the of the body parts. Also, a large amount of animals were killed daily in these industrial farms. In class we were analyzing what makes the industrial food system different from other types of food production and that’s oil and profit. We analyzed how food and oil are connected. We concluded that oil was involved with oil in the development of food and the transportation of food. When the seeds have to be planted the machines break up the ground and they plant the seeds. Then they apply the pesticides to protect their plants, using planes, which needs oil. Then the plants are picked and shipped out in thousands of trucks. The animals are induced with chemicals to help them grow and to produce even more animals. Then like the plants, they are sent out.
So we can see how food is one aspect of a larger nightmare because of the things that are involved with the whole production of food. We can see the ethics with immigrant treatment as well as animal’s treatment as well as the usage of oil. Though the biggest concern for most would be the oil consumption. If this continues peak oil will come and the prices will increase dramatically.