Food Industry Quotes

It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with new products.

A man who goes into a restaurant and blatantly disrespects the servers shows a strong discontent with his own being. Deep down he knows that restaurant service is the closest thing he will ever experience to being served like a king.

Big food companies make hot dogs with mechanically separated meat (msm) that, as described matter-of-factly by the [USDA], is "a paste-like and batter-like meat product produced by forcing bones with attached edible meat under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue.". I read that and wanted to unread it.

Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven’t the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away.

Though they won't say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America.

The parallel between these animals sick from surplus value and humans sick from industrial concentration is illuminating. (...) Against the industrial organization of death, animals have no other recourse, no other possible defiance, except suicide.

Jean Baudrillard

Greed and our food supply. It is greed that compels dairymen to skim every bit of goodness from milk to make other products and then to fill the swill left with chalk and sell it at profit. Greed tempts butchers to grind up the meat of sick cows with well ones and mix it into sausage along with offal and dung to extend the amount of 'meat' that they can sell. Greed motivates bakers to use flour devoid of the wheat germ and the nutritious outer husk and to add alum and chlorine to make bread look whiter and to cook faster. Americans are being poisoned, all in the name of profit, producing a weak-minded race of people who are given to lust and desire.

The management no longer depends upon the talents or skills of its workers---those things are built into the operating systems and machines. Jobs that have been "deskilled" can be filled cheaply. The need to retain any individual worker is greatly reduced by the ease with which he or she can be replaced.