Factory Food

Food as Manufactured Goods

Factory food has been completely filled with unnecessary extra ingredients. Some of these ingredients are toxic to our health. To manufacture food takes more water than to grow it. Factory food pollutes our bodies as well as our water. In many cases, factory food costs less to buy than whole, fresh food. How come food that has more ingredients, has had more research and development, is trucked around the country, has hardly any real nutrition, pollutes our environment and our bodies costs less than whole, unprocessed foods coming from local farms?

Economy of scale. More is produced in faster ways whether we need it or not. Then, instead of rotting, it can be stored in a giant 60,000 square foot warehouse that has been turned into a freezer. A freezer the size of a city block.

Marketing. Got Milk? We don’t really need to drink so much milk. Do cows really need to be injected with hormones to produce more of what we don’t really need?

Consider the organic TV dinner your local co-op carries. The 4 oz frozen macaroni and cheese dinner has many ingredients in it from all over the world, shipped refrigerated from their sources, manufactured into the dinner, kept frozen while warehoused, shipped to the store in a card stock box which has been covered with ink, shrink wrapped, palleted, wrapped and trucked in a freezer truck.

All this takes an enormous amount of energy.

When the store receives the dinner, there must be a back stock freezer, floor freezers and power 24/7. You, as a customer, have to have a freezer which has to have been manufactured, shipped and powered 24/7 in your home to store this future meal. And, you bought that dinner for $3.29 on sale. Yet, if the exact same product was to be manufactured locally by an independent maker of 4 oz macaroni and cheese dinners, you can be rest assured the cost would be so high that no one would buy them. Even though that dinner would have come from within fifty miles, had less energy and materials used in its manufacture, had its ingredients sourced from farms in the area and been delivered fresher to the store. Why? Economy of scale. Marketing. And, the simple fact that people cannot afford the real cost of processed food. $3.29 is a cost that has much hidden, indeed.

If we eat a diet focused on whole food we eat less food because our bodies use more of the food. Processed food has less nutritional value causing our bodies to want more. Marketing causes our minds to think we want more. More, larger, bigger portions that we can’t easily finish. The Humongous Meal. If we as individuals and as a culture can consciously change the way we eat and think about food, then this will lead us as a population to much healthier lives.

Our food system is now a chemical laden, genetically altered, cloned, nano technology laden, mechanized and industrialized system which produces excess. There is usually more supply than demand, driving down the price. Instead of working on farms people are working in food factories. Raw, whole foods are processed down into things like frozen dinners and cheese poofs instead of being fed directly to people.

This will change when the cost of fuel goes up dramatically. Processed food will begin to cost more because the profit margins for share holders must stay the same. Anything that cuts the profits will be passed to the consumer. This will drive down the demand. Prices of processed foods will rise further until there is even less demand. This is an over-simplification of the systems involved in the retail pricing of processed foods, but the end result is that factory made food will cease to be a choice for the majority of people in this country.

Habits will then have to change.