Paper on Food Ethics

Through the unit on food, I learned many valuable lessons. Or should I should say I learned many facts since my food ways haven't changed. Food around the world is definitely not an easy subject to study when it comes to moral understanding. When we watch videos of less fortunate, third-world countries that suffer from starvation it is hard not to ponder ways that we can help. The same goes for animal cruelty. When I watched the videos that explained where our meat comes from it's unsettling to the stomach. It's hard to watch them without flinching or feeling squeamish. Agriculture has also troubled our American Way of Life. It has changed the way we live entirely but not without consequences. The food unit has opened up all our innocent minds to the reality of the food industry and how much it affects people around the world.

The United States is a prosperous country with a selfish government but even as we are slowly heading towards our collapse, we are still able to feed Americans for the time being. When the homeless are hungry, soup kitchens and shelters are opened to them with welcoming arms. Though our food may not be as great as the sterilized plants of Japan in the article "Industrial Food in Japan in 2.0", it is good enough to keep us all alive and going as was explained in the movie "Crude Impact".

We are a fast growing population and we have an abundance of this crappy food. But since our government is so selfish, all this surplus food is kept in warehouses for possible emergencies. Sure we can pass out food to Americans but we should be smart enough to store our own food. Instead of keeping it all we should provide third-world countries with supplies and food that we do not need. They definitely need it more than us.

Animals are the main source of the food in the United States but rarely do people wonder where all the meat comes from. Through our unit, we had to explore the dark evils of the meat industry.

Meat came to be in a very peculiar way, rather disgusting as a matter of fact. Animals, specifically chickens, pigs and cows are treated as if they were already dead and not living things. In a way those animals are considered already dead assuming the road that they are on but I like to think of them as living things that breathe and eat like humans do.

From the videos that we were shown of animal cruelty, meat came to be from animals who were not taken well care of. The animals, three species alike, were confined to small spaces with little to no space to move with the exception of bulls. The animals are given hormonal shots that made them gain excessive weight that their legs could not support. They are then fed grain instead of natural grass and hay feed because the consumption of grain would lead to meatier animals. The old, sick, dying or just the ones with weak legs are killed because they do not meet the standards of the meat industry. It’s surprising that they would have standards at all because the conditions that the animals live in are worse than the conditions of a homeless human. Needless to say, our meat came from tortured animals.

Jared Diamond stated that agriculture is the worst mistake of human history. I agree. Agriculture has indeed made our lives easier but it has not improved our living environments and styles. It has made us all band together in large groups that grow exponentially. Our large groups soon instigated the evolvement of new bacteria and viruses that lead to incurable diseases such as cancer or HIV. Diamond stated that if a modern man of today were given the choice of living as a nomad of an ape like our ancestors, he would surely say no. This answer is due to the fact that agriculture has made humans lazy. Instead of getting our food and energy from sweat and hard work, we get it from fuel burning machinery. Agriculture has made us lazy because we are so reliant on this machinery that if we were to run out of natural resources that fueled our laziness, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. The nomads and apes, the ancestors who we refuse to demote our social stability to, will be the ones to survive because they know how to hunt and gather food from the wild.

In the end, humans are lazy and the technology that has brought us so much leisure will lead to our eventual downfall.