Industrial Food Complex

Extracted Attributes

• Criticism

  Accused of corporate capture of regulatory agencies.

• Definition

  A global, interconnected system of food production, processing, and distribution.

• Health Impact

  Profits from making people sick with addictive, processed foods; contributes to chronic disease epidemic.

• Vulnerability

  Homogenization makes it vulnerable to disruption by crop/animal diseases and pests due to lack of diversity.

• Related Concept

  Animal-industrial complex, adapted from the Military-industrial complex.

• Energy Consumption

  Accounts for approximately 19% of the United States' fossil energy use.

• Historical Context

  Emerged as an increasingly industrialized paradigm after World War II.

• Key Characteristics

  Market concentration, specialization in monocropping, focus on bulk products for industrial processing, homogenization of global food.

• Environmental Impact

  Significant greenhouse gas emissions, drives climate change.

Timeline

• U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower outlines the 'Military-industrial complex,' a concept from which the 'Animal-industrial complex' (a related term) was adapted. (Source: wikipedia)

  1961-01-17

• Following the end of World War II, an increasingly industrialized, interconnected, and globalized paradigm for food production emerged. (Source: web_search_results)

  1945-09-02

• During the 20th century, the genetic diversity of crops plummeted due to the industrialization of the food system. (Source: web_search_results)

  1900-01-01

Animal–industrial complex

Animal–industrial complex (AIC) is a concept used by activists and scholars to describe what they contend is the systematic and institutionalized exploitation of animals. The term was adapted from the "Military-industrial complex" outlined by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961. Proponents of the term claim that activities described by the term differ from individual acts of animal cruelty in that they constitute institutionalized animal exploitation. AIC is argued to include every economic activity involving animals, such as the food industry (e.g., meat, dairy, poultry, apiculture), animal testing (e.g., academic, industrial, animals in space), medicine (e.g., bile and other animal products), clothing (e.g., leather, silk, wool, fur), labor and transport (e.g., working animals, animals in war, remote control animals), tourism and entertainment (e.g., circus, zoos, blood sports, trophy hunting, animals held in captivity), selective breeding (e.g., pet industry, artificial insemination), and so forth.

Web Search Results

• Today's Food System: How Healthy Is It? - PMC

  Like other resources, the American industrial food system consumes fossil fuels intensively, accounting for about 19% of the nation's fossil energy use.45 Of this, around 7% is consumed by agricultural production, with greenhouse gas emissions (2001) of 474.9 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (the rest is for food processing and packaging, distribution, and food preparation by consumers).46 Pimental estimates that per capita energy use in the United States for the food system alone is [...] Industrialization of the food system, it is important to note, has been happening globally. Further, industrialization has occurred all along the food supply chain, as processors acquired the capacity to preserve, store, and distribute huge volumes of food. Over recent decades, these food processors grew both horizontally (by buying competitors) and vertically (by buying their own suppliers and distributors), leading to market concentration. Eventually, this growth gave rise to increasingly [...] As crop farms industrialized and became more specialized in monocropping, the entire support infrastructure for agriculture at the regional level (research, extension, suppliers, storage, transport, distribution, etc) has followed suit, by focusing services on the continued industrial production, processing, and use of the same few crops.8 A 2002 National Research Council report signals concern that publicly funded agricultural research is biased toward further industrialization.61 Most public

• OVERVIEW OF THE GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEM: CHANGES OVER ...

  Complex food systems each involve interconnected subsystems that, taken together, exhibit properties that are not predictable by the properties of the individual subsystems or their parts. Food systems can be called complex adaptive systems. These have no boundaries; individual actions affect the food systems by what individuals produce and what they purchase. Complex adaptive systems have a memory. While food systems change over time, present behavior is affected by prior behavior. Food [...] _Science and technology_ represent another major driver, changing the way that food is grown, processed, preserved, and transported. The Industrial Age brought a transition from manual labor and draft animal–based economies to machines. Further increases in agricultural productivity brought about by technology such as the seed drill, the iron plow, and the threshing machine freed up labor for the factories in the 1700s. The Industrial Revolution also created per-capita income growth. The [...] Incremental progress on complex food safety problems may also require a _new model of partnership_ that engages producers and the food industry along with government. We do not have an ideal model for partnership or shared leadership, but several initiatives in fisheries and foods are trying to find or build models, and so are others outside of the food sector. A new partnership model would include a _value proposition to engage industry_ (examples are beginning to emerge around agriculture and

• The crises inherent in the success of the global food system

  Food production focuses on a narrow selection of key species, with emphasis on bulk products as feedstocks in industrial food processing (e.g., maize, oil crops, soy, fish meal). This homogenization links diverse food industries intimately together and has facilitated the growth of key corporate actors with expanding control over resources (Nyström et al. 2019, Béné et al. 2019, Clapp 2023). During the 20th century, genetic diversity of crops has plummeted, and now merely three crops (rice, [...] effect was primarily on livelihoods (access to food) and transport systems rather than production, the effects reverberated across the whole network, affecting vulnerable parts of the population even in the wealthy countries of the center. The tightly interconnected structure of the network creates potential for a general crisis (Puma et al. 2015). [...] The prevalent forms of food production and trade have deep historical roots, reaching to the eras of colonization and early industrialization (Clapp 2023). However, after the Second World War an increasingly industrialized, interconnected, and globalized paradigm emerged. It is often called “productionism,” and in the literature certain key characteristics are named: emphasis on production volumes, standardized production, dominance of transnational corporations, focus on a few key species and

• Our homogenised global food system puts people and planet at risk

  Industrial farming is a major culprit for the homogenisation of global food, as it continuously adapts to meet high demand by producing higher yields of fewer staples and growing them in more intensive ways. [...] A global food system that relies on and produces only a few types of food is vulnerable to disruption by killer crop and animal diseases and pests. Climate change is creating conditions in which these pests and diseases are more likely to thrive. The banana is an example of a crop that was intensively selected to favour the industrial food production system and has been made vulnerable by its lack of diversity. [...] These industrial food systems which are driving climate change are also consolidated by it. The more difficult conditions become, the more industrial farming intensifies, worsening its impact on the climate and our health. How does homogenised food affect human health? ---------------------------------------------- Image 5: A man wearing a hat tends to some crops growing in a garden.

• The Global Food System: Trends, impacts, and solutions - Metabolic.nl

  The food system is both enormous and complex. The trend of globalization has intensified the level of interdependency between its actors and processes over the last half century, leading to an increasingly “global” system in the true sense of the word. The full scope of the food system stretches to include the vast majority of the human population (as either producers, traders, or consumers), the majority of all economic activities, and a large proportion of many categories of resource use.A [...] The food we eat daily is the final product of the world’s largest production line: the global agri-food complex. In this section we provide a snapshot of the volume of food produced annually using the planet’s land and water resources (for the reference year 2011). As shown in Figure 2, about 1.5 billion hectares of land are used for crop production (arable land), while an additional 3.4 billion hectares of non-arable land are used to pasture animals (FAO, 2015b). The total area of agricultural [...] Besides fibres, tobacco, and rubber, which are inedible and grown for industrial uses, a significant fraction of food crops is used for purposes other than human or animal consumption, occupying 12% of arable land globally. The majority of these are crops used for the production of biofuels. Other uses of these crops include the production of materials, like bioplastics, chemical substances with industrial uses, and medicines.