May 15, · Intensive farming also requires high degrees of mechanization, from temperature controls in factory barns, to enormous harvesting tractors – these machines replace what was once done by human labor. Waste lagoons on animal farms and high levels of irrigation in intensive crop cultivation are other characteristics of intensive farming Sep 05, · Your job in this essay is to: Know Your Audience: You can vary the way you write this topic depending on who your audience is. For instance, you can write an essay on “how to shoot a free throw” both for someone who’s never played basketball before and for an experienced player who wants to fine tune her technique Cheap essay writing sercice. If you need professional help with completing any kind of homework, blogger.com is the right place to get it. Whether you are looking for essay, coursework, research, or term paper help, or with any other assignments, it is no problem for us
The Three Farm Bills | The India Forum
Wendell Berry describes the importance of understanding the connection between eating and the land in order to extract pleasure from our food. Many times, after I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, "What can city people do?
Of course, I have tried to explain what I mean by that, but afterwards I have invariably felt there was more to be said than I had been able to say. Now I would like to attempt a better explanation.
I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth.
Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture.
They think of themselves as "consumers. They buy what they want — or what they have been persuaded to want — within the limits of what they can get. They pay, mostly without protest, factory farming essay, what they are charged. And they mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it?
How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? How far was it transported, and what did transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add to the cost?
When the food product has been manufactured or "processed" or "precooked," how has that affected its quality or price or nutritional value? Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what factory farming essay, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge of skills are involved in farming.
They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, factory farming essay, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea — something they do not know or imagine — until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.
The specialization of production induces specialization of consumption. Patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers. This is certainly true also of patrons of the food industry, who have tended more and more to be mere consumers — passive, uncritical, and dependent, factory farming essay.
Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the factory farming essay goals of industrial production. The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and just like your mother beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, factory farming essay, into our mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.
We may rest assured that they would be glad to find such a way. The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach, factory farming essay.
Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much. The industrial eater is, in fact, factory farming essay, factory farming essay who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical factory farming essay in short, a victim. When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous.
The current version of the "dream home" of the future involves "effortless" shopping from a list of available goods on a television monitor and heating precooked food by remote control. Of course, this implies and depends on, a perfect ignorance of the history of the food that is consumed. It requires that the citizenry should give up their hereditary and sensible aversion to buying a pig in a poke. It wishes to make the selling of pigs in pokes an honorable and glamorous activity.
The dreams in this dream home will perforce know nothing about the kind or quality of this food, factory farming essay, or where it came from, or how it was produced and prepared, or what ingredients, additives, and residues factory farming essay contains — unless, that is, the dreamer undertakes a close and constant study of the food industry, in which case he or she might as well wake up and play an active an responsible part in the economy of food.
There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still sometimes remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition.
One reason to eat responsibly is to live free. But if there is a food politics, there are also a food esthetics and a food ethics, neither of which is dissociated from politics. Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing.
Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, factory farming essay our homes more and more resemble motels, factory farming essay. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, factory farming essay, through our recreation — for what?
To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hellbent on increasing the "quality" of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world. One will find this obliviousness represented in virgin purity in the advertisements of the food industry, in which food wears as much makeup as the actors. If one gained one's whole knowledge of food from these advertisements as some presumably doone would not know that the various edibles were ever living creatures, or that they all come from the soil, or that they were produced by work.
The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, factory farming essay, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any factory farming essay that ever lived.
The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten factory farming essay thus in exile from biological reality.
And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food. And this peculiar specialization of the act of eating is, factory farming essay, again, of obvious benefit to the food industry, which has good reasons to obscure the connection between food and farming.
It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around.
And, factory farming essay her sympathy for the slaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of mile-square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals — just as animals in close confinements are dependent on antibiotics and other drugs.
The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, in the food industry — as in any other industry — the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price.
For decades now the entire industrial food economy, from the large farms and feedlots to the chains of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants has been obsessed with volume.
It has relentlessly increased scale in order to increase volume in order probably to reduce costs. But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases. As capital replaces labor, it does so by substituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the soil. The food is produced by any means or any shortcuts that will increase profits.
And the business of the cosmeticians of advertising is to persuade the consumer that food so produced is good, tasty, factory farming essay, healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life. It is possible, then, to be liberated from the husbandry and wifery of the old household food economy.
But one can be thus liberated only by entering a trap unless factory farming essay sees ignorance and helplessness as the signs of privilege, as many people apparently do. The trap is the ideal of industrialism: a walled city surrounded by valves that let merchandise in but no consciousness out. How does one escape this trap?
Only voluntarily, the same way that one went in: by restoring one's consciousness of what is involved in eating; by reclaiming responsibility for one's own part in the food economy. One might begin with the illuminating principle of Sir Albert Howard'sthat we should understand "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as we can, this complex relationship.
What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive:. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have factory farming essay yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again.
You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life. Prepare factory farming essay own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household, factory farming essay. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of "quality control": you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat, factory farming essay.
Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, factory farming essay, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, freshest, and the easiest factory farming essay local consumers to know about and to influence. Whenever possible, factory farming essay, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist.
All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, factory farming essay, by such dealing you eliminate the whole factory farming essay of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers. Learn, in self-defense, as factory farming essay as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production.
What is added to the food that is not food, and what do you pay for those additions? Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species. The last suggestion seems particularly important to me. Many people are now as much estranged from the lives of domestic plants and animals except for flowers and dogs and cats as they are from the lives of the wild ones.
This is regrettable, for these domestic creatures are in diverse ways attractive; there is such pleasure in knowing them. And farming, animal husbandry, horticulture, and gardening, at their best, are complex and comely arts; there is much pleasure in knowing them, too.
It follows that there is great displeasure in knowing about a food economy that degrades and abuses those arts and those plants and animals and the soil from which they come. For anyone who does know something of the modern history of food, eating away from home can be a chore. My own inclination is to eat seafood instead of red meat or poultry when I am traveling.
What would animals in factory farms dream of?
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Cheap essay writing sercice. If you need professional help with completing any kind of homework, Success Essays is the right place to get it. Whether you are looking for essay, coursework, research, or term paper help, or with any other assignments, it is no problem for us And farming, animal husbandry, horticulture, and gardening, at their best, are complex and comely arts; there is much pleasure in knowing them, too. It follows that there is great displeasure in knowing about a food economy that degrades and abuses those arts and those plants and blogger.com is the one place where you find help for all types of assignments. We write high quality term papers, sample essays, research papers, dissertations, thesis papers, assignments, book reviews, speeches, book reports, custom web content and business papers
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