From Farm to Factory to Lab to Table? : The Industrialization of Today's Agriculture and the Ongoing Debates

  As an environmental scientist, when it comes to challenges we face issues that many times look like doomed prophecies. Climate change, global water scarcity, energy crises, all of these time stressed issues have consequences affecting the entire human race, and everything that surrounds it. For environmentalists like myself whose viewpoint lines up with the Gaia Hypothesis, which likens the earth one system functioning with interconnected parts, the seriousness of these issues is even more apparent. This is because, when any part of the system begins to "faulter", it could lead to the "breaking point" for the earth's entire system. This is not a dooms-day movie type of warning per-se, but more like, "man is selfishly depleting resources and making changes to the environment at an unsustainable rate and without knowledge of the consequences" way. One major issue that has taken center stage in the field of environmental health from the 1950's up to modern day, is that of food production. This blog will cover food production from start to finish, addressing what our food is packaged in, what gmo's and chemicals are put in our foods, and how the food production was industrialized in order to produce enough to feed the growing population. It will also go over the implications this system has for the health of our environment, as well as for ourselves.

To best illustrate these changes that have been enacted within the last century, let us dissect your average grocery store item.

            Common grocery store items range from completely processed candy and desserts to less processed items like natural cereals or canned beans to organic or conventionally grown produce. This post will address the chemicals and biological processes involved in the production of your commonly found food items from the inside out. From farm to table. Starting with the packaging. We find that all this products have one material in common, plastic.

The Packaging
As someone particulary interested in and who has previously wrote about them, I feel the need to make a quick addressment. Plasticizers are chemicals found in polycarbonate plastics and a huge source of xenobiotic chemicals. Xenobiotic chemicals are man-made chemicals foreign to the body and ecological systems, and have been blamed for increases in multiple health conditions.   They are found in our food and its packaging, and are usually referred to by acronyms such as the infamous BPA (Bisphenol A) and others such as BPS (Bisphenol S), ADA (azodicarbonamide), and DEHP (di ethylhexyl phthalate). The plastic chemical BPA has been detected in human urine, skin, amniotic fluid, saliva, serum and milk in addition to the human body. BPA has also taken up residence in air, soil, water, and landfill leachate according to Birnbaum (2012). The most common route into our bodies though, is our diet (Betts, 2011).

      Research was conducted on these ever-present chemicals in the 1980s and 90s and many were found to be EDC’s, Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals.  This means that their chemical structure allows them to fit into the estrogen receptor binding pocket and work as an “environmental estrogen” similar to the hormone associated with the female sex. This action was associated with health issues such as infertility, behavioral changes, early on-set puberty, diabetes, weight gain, cancers, and cardiovascular defects. Due to the substantial evidence in support of these findings, and the great amount of non-biodegradable waste caused by plastics which has entered our landfills and our oceans, regardless of their convenience and elasticity I am a strong opponent of the use of these in food and drink packaging. 


Genetically Modified Crops

Moving on from that note on general packaging, I think it is most important to address the use of genetic modification on our crops in order to produce higher yields, and how it has led to more than 80% of our foods containing Genetically Modified Organisms, commonly known as GMOs. GMOs are not considered xenobiotic because they do not contain anything foreign to the body or ecological systems. Rather, they come from altering an organism's genes in order to make a plant or animal stronger, larger, able to withstand certain climates or lack of water, etc. There is debate within the field over the safety of GMOs that continue to this day as many claim they were not tested enough before allowed onto the public marketplace. These opponents cite studies in rats that found GMOs to cause cancer and a number of other negative health effects. The proponents of GMOs point to the green revolution and how the invention of GMOs allowed scientists to "feed the world" and save millions from dying of starvation in the last century. 

Fertilizers and Pesticides
With GMO seeds, came the general bumping up and modernization of the process get major crop yields from them. From the fertilizer and pesticide treatment of the many crops, to the processing that goes along in factories before the food reaches us (including the meat industry) traditional methods are no longer used. Once the GMO seeds are produced, acres of one crop type is planted, most likely soy, corn, or one of the other top 8 staple GMO crops. The planting technique with massive amounts of land area covered in the same few crops, leaves the entire crop more susceptible to mass disease or extinction by other processes. These few mass produced crops also do not hold all of our daily nutrition needs. Still, there is the use of pesticides in modern agriculture along with nutrient rich fertilizer to worry about. Pesticides are being sprayed in increasingly larger amounts and there toxins are bioaccumulating in insects like bees and have been known to negatively affect human health as well. Nutrient rich fertilizer, while not posing a direct risk to human health, also has consequences such as leaching into our waterways and causing monstrous blooms of algae which feed off the nitrogen and phosphorous contained in the fertilizer. 


Factory Processing
After all this, most crops are shipped to a factory in order to be processed into one of the family brand name items we see on the supermarket shelf with the addition of preservatives and additives. Others are simply just shipped in order to be cleaned and/or packaged. Finally, the items are wrapped in plastic or whatever material is used, and put on the shelf to compete for the consumer's dollar. This is the way food production works in developing countries such as the United States. Whether it is truly the only way to fight hunger, or all the doing of corporations in order to make production cheaper, easier, and leave addicted consumers coming back for more, we will explore together. 

Other Webpage Links:  

http://www.who.int/ceh/risks/cehemerging2/en/

http://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/endocrine/

Peer-Reviewed Journal Links:

Betts, K. (2011). Plastics and Food Sources: Dietary Intervention to Reduce BPA and DEHP.

Environmental Health Perspectives, 119, A306.

http://www.jstor.org.mutex.gmu.edu/action/showPublication?journalCode=envihealpers

Birnbaum, L.S., Bucher,J.R., Collman, G.W., Zeldin, D.C., Johnson, A.F., Schug, T.T. and                 Heindel, J.J. (2012). Consortium-Based Science: The NIEHS's Multipronged, Collaborative                 Approach to Assessing the Health Effects of Bisphenol A. Environmental Health                                 Perspectives,120,1640-1644.
 http://www.jstor.org.mutex.gmu.edu/action/showPublication?journalCode=envihealpers