Food industry: out of sight out of mind

With the world being increasingly industrialized and factory produced, it is really hard to know where everything comes from that we eat, wear, and use in our daily lives. I would bet that everyone who reads this blog has had, if any at all, less than 5 meals where they saw where everything they ate came from. Of those who have had more meals than that, I would assume that most of those meals were enjoyed in other countries, particularly ones that are not ‘developed’ nations.

After reading these articles, I compared the idea of animals having “constitutional rights” granted throughout Europe to my experiences with animals in countries I have spent time in, like Kenya and Benin Africa. One would think that when human life is more of a struggle animals would be the ones that are forced to bite the bullet. But on the contrary, Michael Pollan’s introduction to Tamatoland suggests that our luxurious lifestyle leads to much more cruelty than a life of scraping by ever would.

In these countries animals are viewed much differently than our food industry suggests we view them. In America animals that we eat in mass, referred to as “industrial animals, are not seen as aspects of our identity or daily routines. When I spent time on a Kenyan farm, feeding the cows, sheep, and chickens was part of a routine in which the farmers saw these animals as more of a real living thing versus a pre-fabricated meal that makes noise and a mess making their industrial consumption more annoying to work through. When it was time to celebrate, there was no hesitation in killing a few chickens to feed guests or mark an achievement. Killing a chicken for every meal was out of the question because of the time it would take and cost of up keeping that many chickens in a household.

That is the key string of thought that I want to emphasize. American culture is one that is heavily influenced by the idea of things being out of mind when they were out of sight. It’s like Pollan says with our meat industry, “were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to do it this way” (Pollan 12). When problems are clear in sight, we are good at justifying what is going on in our minds, or doing our best to ignore what is going on around us.

In my Urban Sociology class this quarter I am doing a research paper on public opinion and treatment of the homeless. With homelessness in plain sight in most areas of downtown Denver, it is impossible to keep them out of mind entirely. However very few people change their daily routines and lifestyles to try to make a positive dent in the issue of homelessness and I feel that this ‘creature of habit’ issue where we don’t enjoy going too far out of our way to make changes is also true with our food industry. A lot of educated people, like Pollan, would argue that educating the masses on this more or less social issue is what is most needed to act more righteously in how we treat animals as well as where we buy our food. However there is a deeper rooted issue here than just that, involving a change in level of empathy for other people in the case of homelessness and animals when about our food industry. I am not done with my research yet, however through it I am hoping to come to more of a conclusion on being able to more accurately diagnose the rooted issues in why social issues are not solved or take so long to make progress in. If I could make a conclusion now that I lack the evidence to prove, I would say it is a change of how we socialize our society, not how we educate them.