Real Life Junior Theme

The other day I was on my lacrosse bus with the team driving to Notre Dame to watch a college lacrosse game and I passed some vast farm lands. I was aimlessly looking out the window when all of the sudden I spotted it, the very thing I have been studying for the past month now, a real life factory farm. It was everything I had ever read about, with the unwelcoming long metal building and the mud soaked ground with no green grass in sight. However the most shocking part was the feces reservoir which looked like a small swimming pool, yet it was full to the brim with disgusting black sewage. I knew from the many sources I had poured over that these reservoirs, aside from overflowing and causing considerable harm to the water supply, had a tendency to have a terrible odor so I braced myself. Sure enough, I only smelt it for a short minute before we put enough miles between it, yet it was putrid.

I have read so many places about the terrible affects of these factory farms on the townspeople nearby and the environment but it never became real to me that this was a problem effecting America and even effecting places only an hour from me until that moment. Suddenly all those first hand accounts about the stench that I had read in Andrew Kirby's, "Animal Factory," became so much more credible because I had experienced it first hand.

It was especially interesting to me to see the type of town that has these factory farms. There is a reason that in these lower-class rural communities they would put a foul smelling contamination like a factory farm, but in the Northshore suburbs they wouldn't dream of it. This class divide was hinted at in Michael Pollans novel, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," and Kirby's. It was all the more real to me to see it in person.

Red Wood to Stainless Steel

As I have been exploring my Junior Theme on factory farming and the truth about where our food comes from in America I have begun to pay attention to more brand names and labels on the food products I consume. I was sitting at the dinner table and drinking a tall glass of milk, something I have had every single night since I can't remember, but I never thought to examine what really lies behind that nice looking label. The label portrays a green field with the bluest sky with just the right amount of cloudsI have ever seen, and the sun is shining so bright it's blinding. All of this makes the product seem natural and from the earth, as it portrays the ideal fresh green field of grass. However, the harsh reality of the food system in America is that the cow from which this milk came from will never actually see the light of day, let alone graze in the fresh green grass.

Dairy milk in our modern day food industry comes from what is called a factory farm, where the cow will spend an accelerated lifespan of just six short months. By the time the cow has finished that time though they might as well wish they were dead, because the entire time they have been standing knee high in their own feces in a pen so small they cannot move around, and constantly fed engineered corn products all hours of the day that make them sick because it is not their natural diet. There is no green grass to be seen, and no sunlight whatsoever entering through the tinted windows in the harsh metal factory.

Lehigh's marketing picture on their cartons of milk could not be farther from the truth, it is simply a tool to appeal to the customers because certainly painting the real picture of the origins of their milk product would not be pretty. In fact the way most American's see their food being made is the way they want to see it, so it is not entirely the companies fault. They want to think that their food is made in a place like this valley of lush green grass and sunlight. They don't want to know or believe that they are endorsing these cruel factories with every daily grocery purchase. The company markets to the consumer's interest, so we as American consumers need to change our standards of food production in order to make any changes to the entire system.