The World and it's Food

The United States is one of the few countries that has developed such a complex food system. Many parts of the process of how food begins growing and then ends up in our mouths are dependent on large companies and few farmers. However with the urban farm movement there has been a shift to producing ones own food. The film The Garden helps to illustrate how the traits of growing are not lost, how families still strive to pass on knowledge of how to farm for one's own food.


How the American food system came to be is explained well by Micheal Pollen in his article for the New York Times called The American Food System. World War II had a large affect on our food today. During the war, America had built many facilities around the country to produce bombs. And bombs are largely produced from nitrogen. So when the war was over these facilities needed a purpose. Many became used to create synthetic fertilizers. Because it was discovered that plants need nitrogen to grow. Another consequence of the war was food rationing. Throughout the war families were only allowed to buy sugar, butter and many other food products on certain days or only certain quantities. My great aunt worked at a delicatessen in West Seattle during this time and was in charge of giving customers butter. She was very strict in whom she allowed to purchase butter. As Americans adopted this type of life style they became accustom to it. After the war some communities in American volunteered to continued to live this way to help relieve many countries in Europe that were still recovering from the depression the war caused as well as the scarcity of resources such as food. However, most of the cities in the United States began to realized that they could now consume without restrictions. As as the depression continued it became important to find large quantities of food to feed the large families that were occurring during the baby boom period. My father is one of 8 children in his family and their meals consisted of non spiced cheap food that could feed all the hungry mouths my grandma had to provide for.


In conclusion the reasoning behind our complex food system that is based around comercializing that grew from economic and social periods within Americas history.


-Siera