What is food service industry?

Answer 1

Industrial Food Saima Shah October 2, 2006 Tags: environment , green , food , security , globalization Industrial Food is not just about Food production, but also about globalization. Multinational corporations affect food production all over the world. Food has been contaminated all over the world with synthetic chemicals. First, a little history and perspective on this square world

Industrialization was characterized by the human exodus to urban centers but food production had to stay on the farm. As the extended family started disintegrating into the nuclear family, the burden of housework increased on the wife and husband, who had to find ways to lessen the burden of daily life. Privatization and ownership of social goods has led to terms like social services-essentially, the grandparents replace by the nanny, the nanny displaced by the daycare and the aging parents to a special 'home.' Quite quickly people converted to being consumers over anyone else.

The conversion of people into consumers may not have been possible at this scale without preservatives and petrochemicals. To keep perishable food fresh, it was necessary to treat it. It had to be sprayed with chemicals and any microbial activity prevented to keep it fresh on the way from the farm to the store and then to the consumer.

The less industrialized countries were out of this beneficial circle and remained populous, with extended families and illiterate populations. All that would change and they too would enjoy the benefits of industrial wealth because after some decades of operating in industrialized nations, corporations hit a brick wall. The market had to grow faster for people to make more money sooner. And so, to protect shareholder wealth, who must at all costs see a certain percentage of growth in their pension/retirement funds so that they can buy social services and lots of industrial products, the Corporation had to move the burden of work from the industrialized to the less industrialized. With regards to the catch word of 'food security', the idea of the Green Revolution, its supporting bodies like CGIAR and FAO, UNDP were created ostensibly to protect against the threat of famine in the Third World. Interestingly the Rockfeller foundation and Ford foundation were the biggest donors to CGIAR. (1). The idea that American style capitalism could feed the entire world took over the imagination of governments, especially since America (through various agencies) would finance the purchase of industrial farming equipment. Third world governments donated their species of grain, which were then tweaked to yield more grain. CGIAR still holds the entire database of these grains, and any cross breeding is patented by them. This is called the Food Reserve Bank.

The green revolution never came. Instead today global corporations engage in battle over who owns food and water. This an on-going struggle in the South. For example, seed activists in India fight against the proliferation and sale of grains that do not produce seed. Third world countries like Africa repeatedly suffer from famine and drought even though the world in totality produces excess grain. In today's wealthier world, there is an on-going fight for the ownership and privatization of water of the poorer world. Every now and then a campaign is launched by UN to put water distribution in the hand of private companies because they are so 'efficient.'

Ironically, the richest countries have the most food, even though the green revolution was about eliminating 'world' hunger just because their currencies can buy much more of the world. The 'world' that concerned the UN, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Ford Foundation is the world that lets corporate interests get even richer as they 'donate' and 'give'. Their vision of the world is where people earn and pay corporations for everything that they use. If it were up to these guys, we'd pay them for the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the thoughts we think. Never mind that the food we eat is not grown in laboratories, and that the air we breathe is a unique gift of the Earth and that the water we drink is purified by the action of countless organisms on this planet and that the world has multiple cultures with myriad traditions that actually work. (See, 'The Corporation'). The CGIAR, the UN, the UNDP, The World Bank and the FAO would have us believe that The Third World cannot feed itself or do anything without their generous assistance.

Industrial Food in the Industrial World

We know that industrial food came about in response to urbanization and capitalized on the women's social movements. Since the industrial centers of the city had to be fed quickly, the food industry was born and developed a food supply chain that involved many links. From the farmer to the consumer was too simple a food chain. To add more 'value' and 'convenience' food had to be processed and given a name. Food got identity. Unique to the industrial era, everything we consume is anthropomorphized. Things get names and identity but people become consumers.

This humanization of food meant that peas from Joes are better than peas from Campbell, though in actual fact both may be the brands of the same Company. Good old competition, we said, must be working because supermarkets emerged full of food. What was really happening? Was this real wealth? And why will one out of two people develop cancer in North America?

The truth is that people are being weaned on a diet of Chemicals, Additives, Genetically modified grains (GMOs), Flavours. Sugar, High-Fructose, Preservatives and Calories. Food is no longer food. The wealth was fool's gold. And the reason why so many will develop cancer is because we prefer to live in the utopian dream of industrial wealth and media images.

In the bright lights and overstocked aisles of your neighborhood Safeway, in that brightly labeled box with a cute picture of a kid, poison is freely sold. The vegetables are huge and shiny as though they will never die. The meat is big, juicy and red. The food looks clean and is set to last for 1-2 yrs. Nothing smells, there are no flies or insects.

Surely not poison, you will say?

Industrial food is often called processed food, never called poison because it is politically incorrect and 'leftist' to do so. 'Processed' as a word is less political and more palatable than 'industrial'. After all, we all hate the truth. Processed suggests cooked food, though in reality it may mean any process, reconstitution, chemical and/or heat.

One vaguely hears of preservatives, and some unintelligible labels list them on every box. A food regulation agency is supposed to ensure that we don't eat poison. Yet the real game is played using gimmicky words, pseudo studies and pseudo science.

For the people who must have background facts:

Processed food is a health problem for many reasons:

1. It uses refined foods such as white flour, white sugar, often refining means adding chemicals. Refined also eliminates parts of the food such as fibre and vitamins that are important. Most media outlets carry filler type articles with this idea because it isn't as political as the other ideas.

2. Additives and preservatives are used to keep it looking fresh, firm, crisp, bacteria free or dry e.g., yogurt is treated with stabilizers and thickeners like Gelatin, guar gum etc to make it appear more firm. Every sauce, condiment, bread and canned food is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, making our taste buds addicted to sugar. This is a rarely talked about piece of information. Suzanne Sommers, the diet queen capitalized on this fact.

3. Processed food is the majority food intake of the middle to lower income families in the West. It is the cheapest type of food. And Costco sells it in large and quantities to families. This fact lays buried in studies that relate high income to good food-whereas the truth isn't about college degree income but about moral values. Some of the lowest income immigrants in North America eat better than the professional salary earners because of cultural mores and habits.

4. A few food corporations own the food industry who follow every trend in the health and diet media and capitalize on it. In the wake of every dieting craze from the low fat to low carbohydrate, new chemicals are introduced in food. During the low fat era, extra sugar was added to every low fat food item. In the low carbohydrate fad, transfats and other dangerous fats or synthetic sweeteners are added to low carbohydrate items. The person aka the consumer who consumes these foods perpetually flits from one diet to another, gaining extra pounds after every failed diet.

5. Synthetic pesticides and chemicals are perceived as necessary evils. All forms of raw food carry pesticides that consumers barely know about. Herbivore animals such as chickens, cows and others are fed protein through animal remains (even though after Mad Cow they banned certain types of animal protein, blood was not banned). You may notice that eggs from protein fed chickens have a weird taste. In addition to animal protein, animals also consume synthetic hormones and antibiotics. The continuous ingestion of antibiotics make our immune systems weaker, while some hormones like RBGH and RBST given to cows affect the animal terribly and also contaminate it. Vegetables and grains are treated with pesticides and fertilizer-many of which when ingested into humans are never fully eliminated

6. Inexplicable diseases-such as Allergies and immune system diseases are linked with synthetic chemicals in the environment. High rates of cancer often relate to the high levels of harmful and persistent chemicals in the environment (mattresses, carpets, Teflon, personal products. North America has very lax standards regarding synthetic chemicals as compared to Europe. Many people suffer from allergies, flu, asthma and colds. According the author of Organic Housekeeping, often allergies are poison reactions to environmentally persistent chemicals. Children are 4 times more vulnerable.

7. Since the chemicals in the environment effect endocrine glands, effects like low fertility, cancers of the reproductive organs are becoming more common.

8. The media does not educate, reflect or inform. It plays to our fragmented attention span. It blames our own food choices and lack of will power. It avoids difficult questions and instead it exemplifies the plastic life. It provides lists, brands and recipes to cater to our busy lifestyles. It uses a fake problem solving tone because time and again it dismisses the problem before discussing it. If asked, it claims it doesn't want to depress people. It is disinformation at its best because it squarely lays the blame on us rather than on those who sell to us.

9. Every now and then the shelves in your stores react with low carbohydrate, organic, no msg, no transfats labels. It seems that the market is listening to the scientists and the experts, who seem to be confusing us to hell. And the greatest con job is that industry never takes responsibility, because it isn't set up to care about consequences. As a result the market at best plays to our fears never to our needs.

An example of the complex problems we are up against: In industrialized countries teenagers have bellies that rival the middle aged. The verdict is not clear whether bellies are purely because of extra calories-the calorie myth is doubtful because most people actually consume less food than they did back in the 1950s, yet average weights are soaring. The facts are that the average calories that women consume here are dramatically less than in the 1950s, yet average weight is much higher. One could guess that the interaction of estrogen mimicking chemicals, continuous stress because of alienation, and high-fructose processed food is a more likely explanation for today's obesity issue.

This lifestyle doesn't work.

But how did we get here, and how do we change things?

Rudimentary markets were the happy beginning of the modern market, a great way to allocate and distribute. This happy beginning has evolved into a nightmare of complex distribution systems that depend on synthetic chemicals and treatment of food to function. The mantra of economies of scale to keep growing the market have worsened the problem. 10-20 brands are often owned by the same board of directors. The cheap price of oil means that food can be trucked from one part of North America to another in huge quantities to be processed, while still maintaining a low per item cost. This massive movement has several un-quantified consequences: Higher carbon emissions, ever widening highways, higher amount of preservatives to control microbial activity and huge supermarkets. Quite often the price of the actual food is a fraction of the total cost which includes marketing, distribution and retailing.

Food is a critical health need for people, but even capitalist society has not accorded high value to the job of growing food, cooking, cleaning and serving. It takes hours to cook a single wholesome meal, a typical job for the mother figure of a family for centuries. Pre-industrial society functioned with a set of moral mores that complemented the central task: Basic Survival. In post-industrial societies, manual work is not the work of choice. It still earns less than white collar jobs. So far, industrial society has relied on immigrant labor to do manual work and has continued to find more creative work for the intelligentsia. Miraculously the Indians, the Mexicans, the Peurto Ricans have obliged. However, this pool is not endless. The difference between wages for white collar jobs and manual jobs keeps on closing. If it closes, average discretionary income in North America will reduce, eliminating the middle class. And if the middle class goes, there isn't much charm left to the current model of industrialization in the next few decades. So far, to keep the means of production cheap, the Corporation just keeps moving to less industrialized. For this system to survive it is necessary to keep the means of production less expensive so that the middle class continues to stay motivated.

The effort to change, organic farming as we know it today started in the 1960s, after some of the North American left opted for a different life. But organic did not make it to the Supermarket because of inconsistent supply and distribution bottlenecks. The organic movement was very elite and exclusive, until more recently when it is becoming a critical profit center for food corporations. (3)

After 30 years organic products are big. In fact many small organic farms have been bought by the large food corporations. Therefore, 'industrial organic' is stocking shelves across North America. Industrial organic does not mean pesticide free. However it means reduced chemicals, less refined food and milder preservatives. It is still a far better health choice than regular supermarket food, because it retains some of the ideas in the organic movement.

If fundamental change means better food for all, we still don't know if all food in North America will someday be organic. Efficiency is an often stated goal-and if so then organic is just too good for us. Ironically, the truth is that organic food is actually cheaper to produce because of the lack of chemicals (as the Third World knows), but harder to mass market because crop yields are lower. If we add the high distribution costs of the food industry to a higher per unit cost of production, organic comes out 20-50% more expensive than the regular brands-but only in the Western model of food distribution which has many middle-men and food is trucked from one end to another. The Third World has been growing, eating and distributing locally grown organic always. Guess they don't worry about efficiency, economies of scale and mass markets.

The corporations are fighting tooth and nail for a softening of the term organic to include more chemicals than have been acceptable so far. Quite obviously food corporations would like to put that label on everything since anything organic is flying off the shelves (3).

So, let's ask the moral questions. Is it good that some of the masses are getting somewhat chemical free food after decades? Or bad, that despite evidence about the negative impact of the first phase of industrialization, industrialized societies are change resistant? Can we say that the strength of the market economy is that revolutionary anti-industrial counter movements make money for the very organizations that they fight? (3) Is it bad, that individuals like us, alienated and isolated from each other, ultimately accept our truth as tax annuities for the national government and consumers for the corporation while we are entertained by garish distortions of reality?

The upper middle class embraces organic food in wild abandon, traveling distances to hunt for organic or eat at organic restaurants. Women have lost hundreds of pounds by switching to organic food. People rave about the taste and intensity of flavor that is so much more satisfying. However, others see organic restaurants with over priced meals as ultimate consumerism--a bubble in a long line of fad bubbles, sooner or later to burst. But what escapes them is that this is unique consumerism. Unlike the designer era where people want others names on their bodies, in this phase of consumerism, the consumer wants 'his/her own' identity and individuality.

Can the market deliver? Or will it make a mockery of the desire?

It is truly appalling that despite the continued interrelationship between cancer and synthetic chemicals, instead of banning more chemicals, industry and government groups in North America are stressing on earlier cancer screenings, more drugs and more bio tech. Just when will we reckon with reality?

(1) The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) was created by the World Bank on May 19, 1971, with the FAO, IFAD and UNDP as co-sponsors.

At the time there was widespread concern that developing countries would succumb to famine; the successes of the Green Revolution had started in Asia and the Pearson Commission on International Development had urged that the international community undertake "intensive international effort" to support "research specializing in food supplies and tropical agriculture". CGIAR was formed for the coodination of international agricultural research with the goals of poverty reduction and achieving food security in developing countries through agricultural research.

( 2) Organic Housekeeping: In Which the Non-Toxic Avenger Shows You How to Improve Your Health and That of Your Family, While You Save Time, Money, and, Perhaps, Your Sanity, Ellen Sandbeck

The book is an eye-opening resource for how to reduce toxins in your environment. It has great home organization tips and ways to beat the system.

Answer 2

The food service industry is any job that has to do with serving people food. Food service workers are also other people that work in a restaurant.