rough draft, industrialization paper

Slaves to Capitalism … is it really what we have become? Imagine us falling onto a net and not being able to get out. Us being completely glued to the strings and tied down, but is it really us being caught in the web? Or is it just that we have become so comfortable and situated on it that we no longer feel the motivation to climb out. Capitalism is the net. Capitalism can be a system either privately or corporately owned. An economic system in which there is production and distribution to gain profits in marketing. To be specific…our country, the United States of America is a capitalist country. Is this good or bad, it depends on who you ask that question to. Capitalism belongs to the same family as Industrialization, a conversion from small-scale production to mass production through the use of machinery. Together these two play a huge role in our society. In our society, where machines have taken over the role of people but as well in our society where the demands for labor is high. The industrial food system (IFS) is the vast and complex process that turns animal, fruit and vegetable into cheap and easy food.

The days of fruits and vegetables being naturally grown from grass, and animals roaming farms “freely” are over. We are now seeing an epic of fruits and vegetables grown in artificial grass, in a big glass tank-like house being sprayed with pesticide throughout the days. Animals are being crushed together in small areas where they are stepping in their own maneveur that stands feet high. These cattle, eventually become the Big Mac’s that Americans devour every day. The Industrial Food system has truly become a world of its own. It’s robotic and monotonous in many aspects that nationally the workers, corporation leaders and even us, the eaters have mentally lost all emotional connection to the souls we eat and tangled processed food. I say “tangled” because it’s what I think defines the words “processed food”, best. It’s tangled in the sense that we no longer know what we are truly eating. Like said in the Matrix by character Mouse to Neo; “Because you have to wonder: how do the machines know what Tasty Wheat tasted like? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like actually tasted like oatmeal, or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken, for example: maybe they couldn't figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything!” The tasty wheat symbolizes the illusion that processed food gives off to us, the consumers. For example, because something is flavored raspberry, it was made from raspberries or because the soda bottle says ‘lime flavored’, then it obviously had to be made from lime. But the truth in the industrial food system is that all the sweetened and artificial flavoring that makes a taste a taste, is derived from chemicals, petroleum, and as Pollan calls it “freshly fractionated biomass.” It would be easy to think solely of factories when the word industrialization is heard however, industrialization begins the simplest form of labor work; farming. From small corn fields in Iowa, to the transportation of kernels in grain elevators, and finally to factories, where corn is taken apart to the core of the kernel. This procedure derives corn syrup, frequently used in most of what we eat and drink. The same corn, picked by those same farmers is then fed to our cattle (an unnatural process; cattles are supposed to be GRASS-fed), and used to fatten up the animals for the best selling of meat. The picking of fruits and vegetables from farms just miles away from the corn acres, is sent to the industrial factories where the workers are paid under minimum wage, where there are almost no bathroom breaks or any breaks in that case, and injuries are extremely common. This is the harsh world of the industrial system. In those same factories, the cattle, chicken or any other farm animal that was once fed those kernels from Iowa, are waited in rows and rows on silver, “sterile”, metal slates. The mechanically operated slates send these animals to death. One soul, or many souls are thrown away just like any human soul.

“Our Daily Bread”, a silent film by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, shows an industrial food factory in Europe and only uses the natural sounds of the factories such as the machines and animal squeals. Walking in this world of industrial food production along with the cameras, it almost feels like a world of its own. Everything is very sterile and white (probably different from the factories in the US) and the machines are massive and “complicated”, they seem to come to life. Geyrhalter makes it so the film captures how the machines work and how the people have become so monotonous and enslaved from working this kind of job that they show no emotion while doing some of the countries most gruesome work. If you see it from their point of view however, the reasoning for their lack of emotion comes from the environment they’re put in to work and the pressure they are under to feed a nation. Really, what these workers are doing is feeding a nation compiled of over 300 million people. The machines are designed and built to withstand hours of work without shutting down but more importantly speed. The people are workers, but is it them working more than the machinery? Throughout the film, I noticed that the people themselves have become machines. The machines cut through some body parts of the animals (such as a big claw that snipes away the pig feet) however it is the workers that almost, “aid” the machines. It is the strong claw that cuts through the layers of skin on the animal, but it is the worker controlling the claw and the worker pressing the button on off for a machine to get started. The work that machines deal with, is one industrial product after another, and each of these products are similar to the one that comes before it. It is fair to say that in our industrial system, in our industrial food product factories, our workers have become machine-like. They show no emotion to what they are doing (killing) and they also show no emotion before, after, or when they are eating processed food HOWEVER, we are doing the exact same thing.

I can say from experience, that all my life I’ve eaten processed food. I guess its been on rare occasions that I’ve actually eaten food not coming from factories or any plant in that case. However, that “real food” I’ve eaten has always been out of this country. We have easily fallen in capitalism, I’m using the word capitalism not only because it sounds nice but also because what the Industrial Food System is, is capitalism. Living in a nation of over 300 million people, most of what we are going to eat, doesn’t matter if we are a healthy eater or not, is processed food. The food we buy in deli’s, fast food restaurants and super markets come from industries and are all products of capitalism. In fact, I guess you can really say that we’re eating capitalism, and we enjoy every bite of it. Subconciously, I’ve become like those workers we saw in “Our Daily Bread”, machine-like and very oblivious to what I’ve been eating. It is hard when your living in a country like the United States, to avoid industrialization but it has become a very comfortable aspect of our lives. Everywhere we look, we see industrialization and now, not even in food but in clothing, materials etc. Industrialization is what we are surrounded by.