Food Inc Essay

Food Inc.
Since the industrial era businesses have been able to cut production costs and provide mass quantities of products at lower prices. Typical families are now capable of putting meat on the table, not only once a week, or even once a day, but every single meal. The reduction of meat prices is due to the industrialization of the farming industry, or commonly called factory farming. Although factory farming has produced large quantities of food at low-cost, factory farming causes problems for the environment because biodiversity is lost in the development of pastures, farms produce too much animal waste, resulting in polluted waterways, and the overuse of antibiotics has resulted in the development of superbugs. The documentary Food Inc. touches on many of these topics and unveils just how little consumers know about what they eat and where it comes from.
As pointed out in the film, most people are under the illusion that their food is grown on the cute little farms often depicted on the packaging of the products by themselves. In all actuality, few of these farms exist, as most of them have been replaced with large factory farms. The factory farms have over-crowding of livestock causing problems for the environment due to a loss of biodiversity. When acres of land are cleared for pastures, it limits the vegetation in that area to a monoculture, leading to an eco system cannot support many of the native species that once thrived there. Not only does mass land clearing for pastures disrupt the balance in the local eco-systems, the deforestation cuts down our planets ability to deal with the green house gasses attributed to climate change. Carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases that are absorbed by plants that in turn give off oxygen as a byproduct. Additionally, the over-crowding of livestock in factory farming creates large amounts of animal waste, leading to the degradation of the soil. In traditional small family farming, less animal waste is...