Food Industry In Oryx And Crake

Superior Essays
Food is one of the most important resources on Earth; everyone needs to eat to live. The worldwide need for nutrition creates a massively wealthy industry. Food production is a large scale business, and maximizing profits is the most important element of this industry. Margaret Atwood creates a parallel of this greed in her book Oryx and Crake. The food industry in Oryx and Crake is much more dramatically adulterated: meat and other food products have been mostly replaced with soy, and some foods seem to not exist anymore, like cheese. There have also been innovations to mass produce food products, as is shown with the ChickieNob and Happicuppa coffee. Atwood created this fictional food industry to compare it to the modern food industry. It …show more content…
New farming methods, equipment, fertilizers, and pesticides have revolutionized the way a farm works. They are no longer small fields owned by a family who grows an assortment of crops and raises an assortment of livestock. Modern crop farms are several times larger than those of the past and only grow one or two different crops. Farms no longer raise crops and livestock together either. Corn and soybeans are grown in massive monocultures, and chickens, cows, and pigs are fattened and slaughtered in concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. Over the past fifteen years, genetically modified crops and livestock have been introduced to the food industry. These products are genetically altered in a lab, rather than by selective breeding, to make them heartier, resistant to pesticides and herbicides, and to make them produce higher yields. The food industry in the United States works like an assembly line, producing food as fast as it can for as cheap as possible. In Atwood’s dystopia, the reader is not given much information on the delicate workings of the food industry, but she is introduced to the products the industry puts out. In the beginning of the book, a young Jimmy watches a pile of animals burn (15). The sheep, pigs, and cattle have been infected with a disease, and the only way to get rid of it was to kill the infected livestock and destroy the bodies. As time progresses, meat products become very hard to come by, due to disease or environmental degradation. Jimmy’s school advertises the “Monday Special Fish Fingers” as “20% Real Fish” (60). Instead of beef and dairy products, there were “SoyOBoyburgers” and “SoYummi Ice Cream” in flavors like “chocolate soy” (74, 173). Livestock can no longer be raised like it used to be, so crops that can handle the changing environmental conditions replace them. No matter how much genetic engineering is done to animals, there is still a certain

Related Documents

  • Superior Essays

    It influences every waking moment of our day, from breakfast to a midnight snack; food is life. The same dependence transfers into the food industry, who have the same power over us, if not more. Shortly after President Bush’s farm bill in 2002, the New York Times published Michael Pollan’s article, “When a Crop Becomes King” which depicts a harsh reality of how the food industry, specifically the corn production, has taken over American politics, health, and the environment. In Michael Pollan’s “When a Crop Becomes King”, Pollan effectively argues that corn production has managed to take control of American society with strong imagery, credible facts, and suitable personifications. In his initial paragraphs, Pollan sets the stage for his argument through the use of imagery.…

    • 831 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A red barn, with green pastures and cows roaming around happily; this is what enters most our minds when we think of farms, which is naïve. The truth is 90% of our food is industrially grown, where we feed cows through plastic tubes and give them antibiotics by the pint and corn is doused with chemicals. Michael Pollan, through “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” tries to open the eyes of the American people to understand this and to question what we are eating. Similarly, artist Nathan Meltz and the Reuters article “Monsanto replacing GMO canola seed in Canada” work to answer this all-important question by further analyzing our food production. Together, these various sources let the readers comprehend conventional agriculture through multiple lenses…

    • 576 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    "Hiding/Seeking," A Rhetorical Review Do you know how the food you eat is produced and where it comes from? Have you ever considered what you are eating may have an effect upon your health? Do you really care? These are the issues that author Jonathan Safran Foer brings to light in his literary piece called, “Hiding/Seeking," from his excerpt “Eating Animals”, a triad of three separate genres about the conditions inside the American commercial farm, or “Factory Farm”. Most people know factory farms as “Slaughterhouses”.…

    • 1309 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Hurst has become very annoyed with these judgements that he said,” I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930’s technology to raise food. Farming has always be messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is.” This leads readers to believe that there is more to farming than meets the eye. One of these overlooked subjects is that Industrial farming is more eco friendly.…

    • 1352 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    After introducing this question of what an omnivore faces, Pollan transitions into talking about the first food chain: industrial. In this section, the author points out that corn has been at the top of the industrial food chain, being the food for most cows, as well as being an ingredient for majority of food products. Because the price is cheap and demanded in the industrialized food industry, corn is utilized, regardless of the consequences that follow. In regards to this, the author discusses the process that goes behind mass production.…

    • 981 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the letter Farmer in Chief written by Michael Pollan in 2008, he states that we need a robust national dialogue on how we produce food in America. In his letter, Pollan argues that we cannot solve the three major crises of global warming, health care, and energy without first recognizing that our current food system has contributed to them and that in order to solve those issues we need to approach a new way of food production in America. Therefore, I strongly agree with Pollan's prescription regarding the American food, because although our current food system is cheap and affordable, the way Americans grow food takes up lots of energy, and some health issues, and environmental issues can be prevented by the type of food we consume.…

    • 578 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    His cartoon raises the point that low cost reflects the low quality of chemically altered food. The same principle can be applied to the growing meat industry, specifically speaking, CAFOs. These “factory farms (76)” force animals to eat a diet of “corn, protein, and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.(71)” Without antibiotics, animals living inside CAFOs would not be able to survive the living conditions and diet. Even though it is the cheaper food offered year-round, it is being unethically brought about.…

    • 515 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In “The Threats from Genetically Modified Foods”, Robin Mather effectively brings awareness to the American public of the harmful side effects of genetically modified (GM) foods. She shares that genetically modified foods are foods with an altered genetic make-up. This alteration has lead them to be banned in several countries. However, in the United States, GM foods are not strictly regulated and, therefore, not required to be labeled. Also, the pesticides used in genetically modified foods yield harmful side effects in animals and humans.…

    • 1894 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    developed their purpose of exposing the food industry to Americans in many ways throughout the movie. Right away in chapter one of the movie it’s told that the food industry isn’t about farmers working on farms anymore its factories that produce our food. There are only a few companies that control every aspect of the production of our food and they give no say to our farmers. In fact, today the top four beef packing companies control more than 80% of the market. This shows Americans how centralized the power of the food companies is and how deceiving our food is.…

    • 1436 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Omnivore's Dilemma

    • 816 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he writes about the journey that our food takes from the farm to our plates. The “omnivore’s dilemma” can be seen as humanity not thinking about everything that goes into making the foods that society enjoy, such as corn-based products. Our agriculture business produces tons of corn every year and corn is an important part of our society. His book is attempting to show the negative sides to the agriculture business that is in place today. Society has known for years that the current system is not a good system, yet it has not changed.…

    • 816 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    It is here that I will divulge all of the gruesome details of CAFO farming so as to not instill any false perceptions in my audience that CAFO farming is in any way pleasant. My goal is to educate and argue my opinion without distorting reality. However, I will discuss behind the scenes acts of vicious animal cruelty which also take place in grass-feeding farms which are often kept hidden from people and whose absence portrays that false idea of a plush farms with an air of happiness like that in those Nature Valley Ranch commercials with those children who seem over joyous with eating raw cauliflower and celery stalks. My intent in doing so is to not only highlight the similarly imperfect process that is grass-fed meat production but to also provide a basis on which I will build on another philosophic concept which will somewhat coincide with the former. I simply mean to discuss the reality that humanity is not perfect in its entirety and that is partially due to the complexities of the human condition.…

    • 1182 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Furthermore, learning about the corporate monopoly over farmers practically dissuaded me from ever buying from a big chain supermarket again. With my eyes uncovered to the ways of the food industry, I desired to gain more information about the modern food industry and what other food processing methods they are hiding from the public. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, proved to be a wonderful supplement to my…

    • 626 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    America has made a lot of changes in the past on becoming more inventive, resourceful, and as well as industrialized. Due to the variations in how our food industries operate, small family-owned farms have rapidly vanished leaving us with large, industrialized productions that mass produce for the benefit of the Large Corporations. Americans expect to be able to have large quantities of food available for purchase at anytime and at a low price. Unfortunately in order to get that food to us at low prices, we have to sacrifice aspects of animal rights, human rights, the environment, and health.…

    • 1272 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Human evolution took millions of years to develop our current species and to develop the technological sophistication we now have today. The possibilities of human advancement seem limitless and the only opposition we have is ourselves. Why should humanity limit itself over genetically modified organisms? Why do people think humans have gone to far on genetic engineering? Genetic modification is the process of altering the DNA in an organism’s genome.…

    • 2136 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Seeds Of Death Analysis

    • 1632 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Seeds of Death is an enjoyable documentary that admonishes its audience on a relevant topic. It evaluates a major societal issue, the use of genetically-modified foods, in such depth that it is almost impossible to perceive that it is not an issue. It uses vivid, factual details to form the basis of the argument that GMO’s have already been observed as detrimental to animal and human health. For almost centuries, corporations such as Monsanto and Du Pointe have been aware of these adverse effects. Not only this, they have paid government officials in order to prevent legislature that requires them to inform their consumers if their food was genetically-modified.…

    • 1632 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays