America's Broken Food System

In “A Food Manifesto for the Future,” Mark Bittman addresses multiple issues revolving around how America’s food system is broken. He addresses deceptive labeling on food packaging, ending government subsidies to processed food, taxing the market of unhealthy foods, reducing waste, encouraging recycling, and multiple others. One of his recommendations which stood out to me the most in the article was the idea of outlawing concentrated animal feeding operations and further developing sustainable animal husbandry (Bittman). Bittman states “the concentrated system degrades the environment, directly and indirectly, while torturing animals and producing tainted meat, poultry, eggs, and more recently, fish” (Bittman). He was fairly vague in his article about these concentrated animal feeding operations, but after reading chapter six of the article by Horowitz entitled “Putting Meat on The American Table,” I was able to better understand the harmful effects of them. Horowitz talks extensively about how after World War II the meat industry began to evolve. This evolution called for changes on the farm which created more “convenient meat” that is able to overcome the processes of decay and reshape into easier-to-use forms (Horowitz 130). The activities of cows, chickens, and pigs on farms all over the country began being regulated to create standardized meat that was more consistent and better for the processing systems. Everything from when the animals ate, how much they ate, where they ate, etc. was managed carefully. They stopped being seen as farm animals and began being treated like investments. They were being moved indoors to where light, temperature, and food could be carefully monitored. Along with these controlled variables, what was being put into the food started changing, as well. After testing on chickens, the FDA approved the use of antibiotics in the feed to increase weight gain by ten percent. This process began being used with pigs and cattle also; because...