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[ZombiePlatypus]

Maybe I've just been watching too many documentaries like Fed Up, Food Inc, Veducated, and Ted Talks about and regarding food. But it really seems like shit has seriously gone amuck. In terms of the way food is produced, nutritional content, sanitary issues, and how the animals are treated it all seems like a mess.

You got corn is in things like ketchup, fruit juice, chicken nuggets, mayo, twinkies, coke, peanut butter, french fries, yogurt, etc. Same with sugar: white bread, plain milk, salad dressing, spaghetti sauce, etc. Seriously google this shit. These two things are literally in everything and seem like ingredients almost impossible to avoid.

You got politicians/lobbyists arguing that daily intake of coke could actually be healthy for you, or that pizza should count as a serving of a vegetable, while kids have diabetes now.

Chickens are genetically modified and frankensteined to grow in like half the speed they'd normally grow in, with unnaturally large breasts. The feed they eat has all sorts of antibiotics that passes through. They're shoved in dark, box-like cages with no room to move (assuming their feet can support their unnaturally large bodies), sitting in their own feces. Cows are also apparently just covered with shit, and pumped for milk year round while hopped on other shit. And soil and land is apparently depleted rather than maintained...

It goes on and on.

I'm by no means a vegan, vegetarian, or some animal rights activist, but the conditions shown were appalling. Even if I set moral issues aside, I dunno if I wanna consume a product that's so severely tainted and artificially engineered.

Yeah, we have the USDA and FDA now, but apparently a lot of their chairmen/leaders are the same people in charge the big food companies. So they just have a 2 way revolving door that shuffles things around, and they just get to police themselves.

I understand that many parts of the world (and even country here) don't have the luxury of eating only local, sustainable, super organic, etc, etc, type food. But maybe, we've gone too far off into the other side? Surely there has to be a healthier way to produce our food.

As it stands now, it feels like almost all packaged food that's prepared or processed in some way on a store shelf should probably be avoided if you actually wanna eat clean.

 

[Dio]

I would argue that The Jungle informed people in a rather shocking and unprecedented way, and impacted culture in a way that could only happen at that time period. People hadn't really thought about the conditions their food were made in, in general, since it wasn't being reported on.

Today, everyone already knows that their food is made in shitty ways - if they wanted to know more, they could watch 200 different documentaries about it. Apathy has taken over.

 

[Al-ibn Kermit]

I don't know if you're being hyperbolic but people and rodents aren't mixed into your food, and the weird stuff that does get in there is FDA approved and nutrition facts tell you what you're doing to your metabolism.

There is a ton of paranoia about gmos but that hasn't shown to be a risk to human health.

 

[BertramCooper]

No.

 

[Fuchsdh]

Not really, I'd say that our standards have just improved. Our new food safety concerns are less about rats in our beef (though there's always the occasional horse!) and more about antibiotics, or GMOs. Regulation hasn't really caught up to the issues of organic foods and supplements.

Remember that Upton Sinclair didn't care about conditions you kept livestock in, or the cages poultry were in, he didn't particularly care that much about the crap that ended up in the food we ate either—he was trying to show the inhumanity of the current industrial work and the people who did it. What actually happened is people paid far more attention to his descriptions of rats and pieces of people ending up in the sausage than they did to his cries for socialism.

So from Sinclair's POV, the novel was a failure—socialism has never had any heyday in the United States. We did get a lot of food safety reform though.

While I think it's safe to say these sorts of things are cyclical—witness the kids dying of preventable diseases because we got so good at preventing those diseases people weren't scared of them anymore—the simple question is to ask yourself whether you'd rather be eating cheap food today or cheap food in 1900, and I think you'll find your answer.

 

[LegendofLex]

When you have to produce food at a scale that satisfies modern-day America, the ethical challenges get sidelined in favor of improved efficiency. Same goes for virtually any other consumer good - there's very little you interface with on a daily basis that isn't in some way produced under unethical conditions. It's the price that achieves the necessary economy of scale, and it'd take a sea change in how we regulate production to change this.

Not that it can't happen, but the economic forces at work don't lend themselves to more ethical production practices. Sure, the most profitable companies (I'm looking at you, Apple) could definitely afford to shed some margins to ensure better working conditions for their production line. But that's not a given for every company that relies on unethical practices to get their product out at a decent price.

 

[entremet]

Not at all.

 

[Hopfrog]

If you are talking about The Jungle that is about the conditions of the working class in an industrial capitalist nation, then yes it failed, for the most part. If you are talking The Jungle as the book that shocked people with its depictions of meat processing, then I would say that it was a rousing success in that it accomplished something that Sinclair never really intended it to do in the first place. Conditions are better than they were, but maybe not as good as they should be.

 

[Porcile]

The food manufacturing aspect of The Jungle wasn't really Upton Sinclair's prerogative. He was much much more concerned with workers conditions, and the Chicago meat industry was just an easy vehicle for his socialist message due to the high proportion of low wage immigrant workers and clear hierarchies. He exaggerated many aspects of the meat industry to get his somewhat clumsy socialist message across. It was all about socialism. Any reforms caused by The Jungle in regards to food safety and hygiene were entirely a by-product.

 

[BamfMeat]

You got corn is in things like ketchup, fruit juice, chicken nuggets, mayo, twinkies, coke, peanut butter, french fries, yogurt, etc. Same with sugar: white bread, plain milk, salad dressing, spaghetti sauce, etc. Seriously google this shit. These two things are literally in everything and seem like ingredients almost impossible to avoid.

Chicken "nuggets" (AKA fried chicken) have always had corn in my family (corn starch before the egg, which is before the flour). French fries have corn? If you fry it in corn oil, sure. Twinkies, coke are "fake" foods to begin with. The others, I'll give you. (especially mayo. Mayo is 3 ingredients. eggs, vinegar and oil. There shouldn't be anything else in there.)

And 3 of the 4 foods you mentioned with sugar have always had sugar. You put sugar in white bread for the yeast to eat to make the dough rise. You put sugar in salad dressing to take away some of the bitter from vinegar and you use sugar in spaghetti sauce to help the flavor, same as salt.

No one said pizza is a vegetable - that one always makes me laugh. Although the coke being healthy is a new one. I'll have to check that one out.

 

[manhack]

I have worked in Food Manufacturing, specializing in Food Safety and Sanitation, for almost 10 years.

While there will always be individual cases of food adulteration or unsafe conditions, the food industry, as a whole, is safer that it is has ever been.

I would argue processed food is safer, from a food safety standpoint, then anything made outside the confines of regulated food processing facilities.

 

[SuperOrez]

Isn't the jungle supposed to be more about workers rights than the food industry?

 

[BreezyLimbo]

Isn't the jungle supposed to be more about workers rights than the food industry?

I think the intent was supposed to be for workers rights, but people instead got disgusted at the description of how the food was prepared.

...

Yup.

Upton Sinclair intended to expose "the inferno of exploitation [of the typical American factory worker at the turn of the 20th Century]",[10] but the reading public fixed on food safety as the novel's most pressing issue. Sinclair admitted his celebrity arose "not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef".

 

[The Albatross]

The Jungle adequately highlighted the unsanitary conditions of the food production industry, specifically meat production, but it was never supposed to be about food safety -- it was a novel about class warfare, not sanitation. Today, foods are safer to consume than they ever have been before, and so no, I don't think that any of the shock of The Jungle was undone by today's over-processing of foods.

Whether the food industry is necessarily sustainable, though, is a different question. That corn is in almost everything is something that can be alarming but it doesn't necessarily have to be. The alarm is often conflated with dietary issues. My fiancee developed a bizarre corn allergy several years ago, and because she reads a lot of all natural sources, attributed this to an over-saturation of corn that her body was just rejecting all corn because there was too much of it. There is no scientific backing for this and in the three years since the allergy developed, she's does not suffer the same affects as she used to, and so it's more likely that the allergy was caused by something else... Arguably, some mixes in medication, a on-again-off-again diet, and other changes in her life (we got a dog at about the same time).

We rely on a lot of hypotheses when determining that corn being in something is bad for your body... There isn't a lot of scientific evidence behind that. Now, obviously, a diet high in high fructose corn syrup is not good for you, but you can still eat a corn-rich diet and eat healthily with no adverse effects.

There have been other dietary changes in just the last 10 years that are arguably better. For instance, 10 years ago, any time you had fast food or most processed fatty foods, you were consuming trans fats. The major reaction against trans fats over that short period of time drove trans fats out of the marketplace, so fatty foods are still being produced, but they're not being produced with as many trans fats. This was considered a big win 5 years ago.

Back to sustainability, though, it's clear that the food industry is much less sustainable than it was 80 and 100 years ago, but it also serves much more people and at much greater efficiency than it ever did. "Population bombs" didn't happen because of advances in technology that affected the food industry. Now, compared to 20 years ago, food is arguably much safer for your body than it was in the 1980s and 1990s, and there are far more choices as well. It's a cliche to talk about salad at McDonalds because almost nothing is "healthy" at McDonalds, but today there is more choice in food for all people than there ever has been. Locally grown produce is available in more places for more people than it was 20 and 30 years ago, and that's only growing. Now, major retailers like Target and WalMart are stocking food stuffs that are better for you. People may not be choosing those (and instead buying Stouffers Family Style Mac & Cheese), but the options are there and they are more affordable for the average person than they ever have been. Beyond that as well locally grown produce is more available for people in lower income urban areas than at any time since the interstate highway (in the US).

Finally, there is more knowledge being disseminated about food than there ever has been and the internet has provided a great democratization of that knowledge. Now, obviously, that also introduces a lot of rumor and suspicious (like my fiancee's corn allergy), but information about food is more widely disseminated than it ever has been.

So... Are things better? In many ways, yes, but sustainability is a major concern. 20 years ago things were similarly not sustainable but we were ignorant to the affects of it, today, at least, we have some grasp of the concern.

 

[Leunam]

You got corn is in things like ketchup, fruit juice, chicken nuggets, mayo, twinkies, coke, peanut butter, french fries, yogurt, etc. Same with sugar: white bread, plain milk, salad dressing, spaghetti sauce, etc. Seriously google this shit. These two things are literally in everything and seem like ingredients almost impossible to avoid.

This just reads like an argument from Food Babe.

 

[Dongs Macabre]

Maybe you should stop believing the organic foods industry's propaganda, OP.

 

[Somnid]

I'll echo the sentiment that the OP's food view is like decades late to the party. We're already in a much different sort of battle over "naturalness." Not that everything was solved but in many ways we've swung to a different extreme.

 

[KHarvey16]

Maybe I've just been watching too many documentaries like Fed Up, Food Inc, Veducated, and Ted Talks about and regarding food. But it really seems like shit has seriously gone amuck. In terms of the way food is produced, nutritional content, sanitary issues, and how the animals are treated it all seems like a mess.

You got corn is in things like ketchup, fruit juice, chicken nuggets, mayo, twinkies, coke, peanut butter, french fries, yogurt, etc. Same with sugar: white bread, plain milk, salad dressing, spaghetti sauce, etc. Seriously google this shit. These two things are literally in everything and seem like ingredients almost impossible to avoid.

You got politicians/lobbyists arguing that daily intake of coke could actually be healthy for you, or that pizza should count as a serving of a vegetable, while kids have diabetes now.

Chickens are genetically modified and frankensteined to grow in like half the speed they'd normally grow in, with unnaturally large breasts. The feed they eat has all sorts of antibiotics that passes through. They're shoved in dark, box-like cages with no room to move (assuming their feet can support their unnaturally large bodies), sitting in their own feces. Cows are also apparently just covered with shit, and pumped for milk year round while hopped on other shit. And soil and land is apparently depleted rather than maintained...

It goes on and on.

I'm by no means a vegan, vegetarian, or some animal rights activist, but the conditions shown were appalling. Even if I set moral issues aside, I dunno if I wanna consume a product that's so severely tainted and artificially engineered.

Yeah, we have the USDA and FDA now, but apparently a lot of their chairmen/leaders are the same people in charge the big food companies. So they just have a 2 way revolving door that shuffles things around, and they just get to police themselves.

I understand that many parts of the world (and even country here) don't have the luxury of eating only local, sustainable, super organic, etc, etc, type food. But maybe, we've gone too far off into the other side? Surely there has to be a healthier way to produce our food.

As it stands now, it feels like almost all packaged food that's prepared or processed in some way on a store shelf should probably be avoided if you actually wanna eat clean.

In all your searching, did you look to see if any of the food we have now is give-you-a-disease-and-kill-you dangerous? Or is it just "oh no, chemicals!" nonsense?

 

[HTupolev]

And 3 of the 4 foods you mentioned with sugar have always had sugar. You put sugar in white bread for the yeast to eat to make the dough rise. You put sugar in salad dressing to take away some of the bitter from vinegar and you use sugar in spaghetti sauce to help the flavor, same as salt.

Make it 4 of the 4. I'm not sure if it's common to add sugar to milk, but milk straight out of a cow obviously contains quite a bit of lactose. Which, although not very sweet, and although difficult for some people to metabolize, is still a sugar.