The Repercussions of the Industrial Food Chain

The Unintended Outputs of The Industrial Food Chain

We all have heard about the industrial food chain. It's the process of how from a single crop grown in  a large vast field is then transformed into foods you eat at restaurants and fast food outlets. This food chain may seem like an efficient, cost-saving, time effective technique to create the foods we want in desirable ways, benefiting both the supplier and consumer- but are there indirect consequences?

Many environmental and economic problems can derive from this food chain. When making corn, the industrial food chain is using up more energy than it is producing. And since making corn is in more ways expensive than actually buying it, farmers are suffering to receive decent incomes and the money they deserve. Not to forget, that the making of corn also produces nitrogen pollution. Farmers feed corn more nitrogen than what is actually needs to "play it safe" and not lose money they could have earned. The unnecessary nitrogen then can evaporate to the air which can create acid rain. Some of it can even turn into nitrous oxide, a gas that increases global warming.  When the nitrogen seeps into the ground, it is unsafe for humans to consume it- so farmers have to take extra precautions when going drinking water from underground resources. And not much is taken to address these issues because ironically big agribusiness corporations- the ones most benefited from this production- helped write the very laws that set farm policies.  Farm policies that farmers are fed up with, because it makes them poor, and leads way to the pollution that is killing us today. Awesome, isn't it? Seems like we're the armies supporting the spread of corn to dominate us all over the world. The naive ones- that is.