{"id":291,"date":"2019-07-03T23:52:22","date_gmt":"2019-07-04T03:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=291"},"modified":"2022-03-04T15:55:02","modified_gmt":"2022-03-04T19:55:02","slug":"industrial-food-chain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/industrial-food-chain\/","title":{"rendered":"Industrial Food Chain: What is it? Omnivore&#8217;s Dilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>What is the Industrial Food Chain? How does it produce food? How&#8217;s the industrial food chain different from organic farming? Learn the key facts from Omnivore&#8217;s Dilemma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Changing to Industrial Food Chains<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>We used to rely on a traditional food chain:<\/strong> It started with animals and crops raised locally on small farms and sold locally. We prepared it ourselves and very little processing was involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nowadays, the industrialization of the traditional food chain, to the point that food is now mass produced with the aid of chemicals and reshaped through processing, has changed how we eat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>The <strong>industrial food chain<\/strong> depends on energy from fossil fuels rather than relying totally on the sun. This has greatly increased the amount of food energy available to us, but has created many new problems, including pollution and health issues.<\/li><li>The industrial food chain is built on monocultures \u2014 huge farms growing or producing just one thing for maximum efficiency but to the detriment of the environment.&nbsp;<\/li><li><strong>Corn is the dominant species of the industrial food chain<\/strong>.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>For the rest of the country,<strong> corn is a key ingredient in much of we eat<\/strong>. <strong>Out of 45,000 items in a typical supermarket, a quarter are derived from corn<\/strong>. It\u2019s a component of beer, soda, coffee whitener, spreadable cheese, microwaveable dinners, cake mixes, condiments, and hot dogs. Most <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/why-is-food-processed\/\">processed foods<\/a> contain an array of hard-to-pronounce ingredients derived from corn.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Evolution of Industrial Farming<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Today most of our food comes from corn-based industrial farms. <\/strong>But in the early 1900s, most farms started out as diverse operations, with corn, fruits\/vegetables, oats, hay, chickens, and pigs. One in four Americans lived on a farm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Beginning in the fifties and sixties the availability and cheap price of corn made it more profitable to fatten livestock on feedlots, and chickens in giant factories. So chickens and cattle moved from farms to industrial areas, creating space for farmers to plant more corn, which made it even cheaper.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By the 1980s, diversified farms had basically disappeared in Iowa and a single crop or monoculture \u2014 corn \u2014&nbsp; dominated.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Growing just corn required much less labor than diversified farming<\/strong>, thanks to fertilizer, pesticides, mechanization, and other practices. Monoculture farms got bigger but required fewer people to operate.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here\u2019s how <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/what-is-industrial-farming\/\">industrial farming<\/a> works today. George Naylor is a typical farmer, raising corn and soybeans in Greene County, Iowa. Naylor rotates the two crops. (Soybeans have become the second crop supporting the industrial food system; like corn, they\u2019re fed to livestock and are a component of a majority of processed foods.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Naylor plants a hybrid corn variety developed by Monsanto, which yields 180 bushels per acre; in 1920 the average was about 120 bushels per acre. The higher yields stem from the fact that the hybrid corn can be planted close together. &nbsp;It has a stronger root system, stands up straight, and is amenable to mechanized harvesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Naylor and other midwestern farmers are going nearly broke because the price they get for corn doesn\u2019t cover their costs \u2014 and it keeps declining as they get more productive (we\u2019ll explain more about why later). Naylor\u2019s farm, which has been in his family for generations, no longer financially supports the four people who live on it; his wife works off the farm and he depends on a federal subsidy.<br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is the Industrial Food Chain? How does it produce food? How&#8217;s the industrial food chain different from organic farming? Learn the key facts from Omnivore&#8217;s Dilemma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-food","tag-omnivores-dilemma","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Industrial Food Chain: What is it? Omnivore&#039;s Dilemma - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What is the industrial food chain? What food is produced in the industrial food chain? Find out more from Omnivore&#039;s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/industrial-food-chain\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Industrial Food Chain: What is it? Omnivore&#039;s Dilemma\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What is the industrial food chain? What food is produced in the industrial food chain? 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