A lot of us, when we were younger, experienced the taste of a Happy Meal from McDonald's at least once or twice. Whether you like it or not, the Golden Arches of the McDonald's' franchise has become an iconic symbol, not just here in America, but all over the world. Thousands of people every day line up to buy its products, the most notable being the cheeseburger. If you notice, the cheeseburger from McDonalds is the same regardless of the region. How? The key to the answer are the factories of America.
In the documentary Food Inc., viewers were shown the steps behind the creation of the different meat based foods in America, including the McDonalds Happy Meal. The beef go through many different phases in its life. From its birth to your plate, the most farm animals have been affected by humans in one way or another.
The reason McDonalds has been successful is because of the way they do things in the kitchen. They hire people to do different things; one person cooks the patty, another puts the ketchup, and another person puts the cheese. They even have a person to put the burger together! Using this operation, they can hire a small number of people in a restaurant and pay them the lowest amount of money possible because they only have one thing to do. That way McDonalds can make the most money. Even the beef used in the burgers can help them make money. You would think that the beef would be expensive because McDonalds needs a lot of it. But that isn't true, because here in America if you order a burger, there is an 8/10 chance that the burger has been made by one of the four companies responsible for cows. The companies control most of the beef so they can charge whatever they want. The companies make the beef in factories, which brings us to my next point.
When you think about a cow, where do you see them living? A farm? The majority of farms may have grown cows back fifty years ago, but today it is different. Cows are grown in places that look and feel exactly like factories. Some companies are different and give their cows a little bit more room to move around. This allows them to put the label "all natural," just because of the room. It's the same things for chickens. Chickens nowadays have a lot of chemicals put into them even before they are born. That makes them at least three times bigger than a chicken for the 1950's. A lot of chicken companies don't want us to see that because it makes them look bad, which is why a lot of farmers don't want to show everyone what goes on in a chicken coop because they might get fired by the company that owns them.
There are a lot of farms here in America that are responsible for growing corn. This is because corn can be made into a lot of different things. But I will get to that later. The reason that we grow corn is because the government passes bills, which are laws, that allow corn growers to grow mainly corn. This corn is then paid for by taxpayers, which are those who give money to the government. The reason corn is grown, instead of something else like pickles, is because corn can be changed into many different forms. High fructose corn syrup is an alternative to sugar and is cheaper then having to actually use sugar. Most sugary sweets that you eat are made out of high fructose corn syrup. There are a lot of other things you wouldn't expect to be made out of corn, such as ketchup, cheese, peanut butter, fast food, and even batteries! With this cheap corn, it also lets us feed cows corn, even though they don't eat corn in nature; they eat grass. There are some bad sides to this though, some believe that feeding these cows corn creates E. Coli O157: H7, which is a fancy name for a sickness that can get people sick. This specific type of sickness has even been known to cause death.
In 2001, a boy named Kevin Kowalcyk died because he ate beef contaminated with the sickness. He was only four years old. Some think that the U.S government was responsible because they sent inspectors to check the beef factory where the beef was made. They found that it was really dirty and not good enough to make meat, but the factory still stayed opened. When the news about Kevin came out, they waited half a month before sending inspectors again, and then took action by trying to pass bills to fix the time it takes for factories to be inspected, and they also raised the standards for how clean beef should be. There are factories here in America that use ammonia to clean there beef, but there's a problem with that. Ammonia is a chemical used to kill bacteria, but it is also found in cleaning products like bleach and laundry detergent. Some people feel uncomfortable eating meat cleaned with ammonia.
There is a connection between the cheapness of food, and obesity. Fast food is cheap because it is mostly made out of corn. Fast food is cheaper compared to veggies such as broccoli and spinach, which are foods that make you very healthy. If people don't have a lot of money and need to eat, then they usually buy fast food. The fast food, if eaten almost every day, can make you fat. Since these people cannot afford healthier foods they keep getting fatter. If you get fatter, there is a chance you can get diabetes, a disease that affects the way the blood in your body uses sugars.
If fast food is not your type of food, and you like making your food at home, there is a way you can get all natural meats and dairy products. Joe Salatin is a farmer who grows his animals organically, which is means that the animals are raised naturally and they are healthy. The USDA, which stands for United States Department of Agriculture, is an organization funded by the government took a look at Joes farm. They then said it was unsanitary, which meant it was dirty. The reason why is because the farm and the animals are out in the open, rather than indoors. He believes that keeping the animals indoors is cruel, and he'd rather have them out in ther open, where they should be. Meat packing plants, however are the opposite. When NAFTA, or North American Free Trade Agreement, was passed by Canada, The United States, and Mexico, it introduced cheap corn to Mexico. This put a lot of people, mainly farmers, out of business. Meat packing companies saw this as a chance to get cheap workers, and offered the out-of-work farmers jobs.
It may seem like all this talk of food probably makes you hungry. Food nowadays is cheap and you can get a filling meal for a small price. But there are some hidden costs to all this. There are environmental costs, which are costs to our environment. Our natural environment, which includes the oceans, the land, the mountains and all the animals pay for this. The Earth gets polluted making it harder for future humans to live. There are societal costs also, which are costs to everyone around us. We don't know what happens behind the scenes of food packing plants. Some think this is scary because we don't know where our food comes from which makes us ignorant, which means we don't know a lot. Lastly, there are health costs. This food makes us unhealthy, and the more we eat it, the higher the chance that we can get sicknesses.
