I’m sure we all know there is a food crisis in this country. Everyday we might think about how half the world is starving, and that is undisputable and something that more developed countries in the world can put a stop to with the right money and resources. We know that in places like France and Italy they eat fattening and sweet foods all the time without the paranoia about health that a small group of people have in this country, and generally Europeans exhibit lower incidence of heart disease and similar health disorders than Americans. The food crisis that we have to worry about is over consumption, even for the poor. According to Michael Polan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, in this country, three out of every five people are overweight, one in five is obese. The United Nations estimates that more people in the world are over-nourished rather than under-nourished (Pollan 102). This could be because of the way we grow, raise, process, and manufacture food (a few necessities of life) in this country. This is not surprising, given that some American name-brands are more recognizable than religious symbols, especially to children. Fast food’s dominance over the habits of so many people in the world (how they eat, anyway) needs to be amended if we want our society to thrive into the next centuries.

Not only is fast food one of the most popular ways people achieve sustenance, but also one of the unhealthiest ways of eating. Last year, Americans spent $142 billion on fast food. According to Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson, authors of Chew on This, a children’s book about the subject, says “That is more than we spend on music, movies, books, magazines, newspapers…college education, computers, and new cars,” (Schlosser 10). Why is this a bad thing? Fast food has done nothing but harm our society in the long term. From the business of growing potatoes to process into high fat, high sodium French fries, to the way cattle and chickens are raised to be slaughtered by the millions to feed this country’s insatiable appetite for cheap meat. Unfortunately, the fast food industry is not part of the equation for sustainable development. Not only are our grain and livestock supplies being used on a scale never before thought of by these restaurants, but also soda is highly responsible for America’s ridiculously high incidence of diabetes. Not to mention how popular Coca-Cola and Pepsi already are. Children born today in the U.S. have a thirty percent risk of developing diabetes (Pollan 102). All these cheap and unhealthy foods and beverages have corn as their common ingredient, the most lucrative crop, in the United States at least. In fact, of the roughly 45,000 items in the average modern American supermarket, over a quarter of them have a derivative of corn as an ingredient. This tendency to process various natural and synthetic ingredients into so many of the foods we eat every day is a hallmark and one of the more unsustainable practices of the industrial world.

Processing so many foods is not the best thing we could do with our natural resources because these factories run on fossil fuels and use derivatives of very toxic chemicals to make Twinkies, for instance, taste the way they do. Even in cheeseburgers at McDonald’s there are a handful of chemicals in trace amounts that can kill at higher doses, including carcinogens and butane (Pollan 113). So, this is mostly a health crisis, but I can’t see how anything we do on such a large scale could not have environmental consequences. One solution is to ignore all the advertising for fast food and processed food in the supermarket, and buy fresh ingredients to cook at home. Organic food is the best way to go if you want to eat healthier and support those farmers that are trying to protect their crops and livestock. Better yet, buy from small-scale farmers markets and butchers that are not part of the increasingly, industrializing, large-scale organic farm network.

Half the world is starving, and this country is growing ridiculously large amounts of grain, only to process a large percentage of it into corn syrup for soda and various other derivatives to “protect freshness” in our TV dinners, etc. If things continue as they have been, more and more people will be overweight in the world, and the farmland that is used to support fruits and vegetables will be scarcer and scarcer. These crops are already going up in price while meat is cheaper than it ever has been (unless you want to buy the meat that came from animals that were not injected with hormones and were fed a natural diet). The solutions can be simple…plus organic food tastes better.

For more information on where to get locally grown organic produce and/or meat visit this website: http://www.eatwild.com/products/index.html

SOURCES

Schlosser, Eric, and Charles Wilson. Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.