United States farm subsidies and how they are ruining our quality of Essay

United States farm subsidies and how they are ruining our quality of food - Essay Example United States farm subsidies and how they are ruining our quality of food A lot of processing is involved in the transformation of a corn bushel into foods that look different and taste different despite being fundamentally derived from corn. The processing considerably lowers the nutritional significance of our diet. Fats food is one such corn-based food that is highly processed. People that make fast food a regular part of their diet not only become overweight but also experience malnourishment. They are deprived of the essential nutrients and micronutrients placed by nature in fresh fruits and vegetables. Every year, doctors encounter hundreds of cases of overweight children with rickets. Massive consumption of corn requires massive production of corn. Cultivation of corn causes a lot of harm to the environment. Farmers consider corn a greedy crop that needs much more nitrogen fertilizer than what is required by any other kind of crop. It is the very nitrogen fed to the corn fields that has run off with water and flown into the Gulf of Mexico to develop a dead zone therein which has now become as big as New Jersey. Corn plant also needs increased supply of pesticides which are also dangerous for the environment. Apart from the obvious demerits of feeding the livestock corn, a potential unethical issue is that the animals are forced to feed on corn, without I being their real diet. Many animals thus need to be given antibiotics whose effects can be noticed in form of the changed quality of the milk produced by them as well as a change in the taste of their flesh when they are slaughtered. Explaining the reason of writing the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan said that as he traveled across US, he was astonished to learn about the eating habits of people of US as well as their curiosity to know how to change their eating habits for the better. This led Pollan to indulge in a comprehensive research regarding food and health. While conducting the literature review and collecting the primary and secondary data, Pollan found th at scientists in US did not have much to teach about healthful eating, thus making the science of food a fairly primitive science in US. †¦there is a much more reliable source of wisdom on the subject. That wisdom is in the form of traditional foods, cuisines, and food cultures, which are the product of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of trial and error figuring out how to keep people healthy using whatever grows in a specific place. Culture has more to teach us about how to eat well than science. (Pollan cited in Penguin Group USA). His research led Pollan to developing the view that America is suffering from a national eating disorder. In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan has expressed that the start of this national eating disorder can be traced back to the early 1990s. That was the time when people were attracted in crowds by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg towards the sanitarium constructed at Battle Creek in the US state of Michigan. Inmates of the sanitarium su fficiently endured all-grade foods which raised the number of competitors for Kellogg. Owing to the immense subsidization of corn by the US government, corn has become the fundamental ingredient of the people of US and animals alike. 75 per cent on average carbon consumed by Americans in the present age is derived from corn. The primary reason why corn became the king of the US food industry was the fact that it could always be grown as rapidly as desired with the use of