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Jose Torres

Judith McCann

English 1302.213

22 March 2023

Life Beyond the Grocery Isle

What you consume is not what you always think it is. Many companies commit acts that

is not widely known to the public. While you may believe that the products that you consume are

ethical, they might be a product of something much more cynical. Under the veil of

advertisement filled with bright sunshine there is a much more darker truth that is present within

the agricultural and animal farming industry. There is a world full of lies, cruelty, and unjust

actions. These industries spend millions on cutting corners and silencing the truth. These

companies should be transparent with their consumers and expose themselves by showing the

extent they go to cut corners, the mistreatment of animals, and the blatant disregard for workers

and farmers.

While you may not believe it, many companies prefer to cut corners in order to make

more profit. They will resort to any means necessary in order to produce the most appetizing

products for their consumers. This means a heavy amount of genetic modification. Genetic

modification is not anything new to the public eye and has been talked about for years. In recent

years the outrage on GMOs has dwindled drastically. Many companies have begun to add labels

such as “No GMOs” but that doesn’t get rid of the fact that GMO products are practically

everywhere. One of the big reasons why GMOs were so heavily criticized is because of the

amounts of pesticides that are present in these products. “Toxic, allergenic, or less nutritious…”,

is how certain experts describe GMOs. Plants are now and are still being sprayed with multiple
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pesticides in order to ensure its growth. Instead of planting crops that are native to certain

regions, they decide to bend a certain cash crops genetic structure in order to make it

invulnerable.

Cutting cost also means underfunding when it comes to actually taking care of the

animals.

If a company is willing to cut cost in its own product, imagine how they treat their

workers and other farmers.

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Work Cited

Frey, Rebecca. “Animal Abuse.” Gale Encyclopedia of Public Health, 2020, pp. 60–68.

Cockshaw, Rory. “The End of Factory Farming: Alternatives to Improve Sustainability, Safety,

and Health.” Voices in Bioethics, vol. 7, 2021, https://doi.org/10.52214/vib.v7i.8696.

House, Hans R., et al. “Agricultural Workers in Meatpacking Plants Presenting to an Emergency

Department with Suspected COVID‐19 Infection Are Disproportionately Black and

Hispanic.” Academic Emergency Medicine, vol. 28, no. 9, 2021, pp. 1012–18,

https://doi.org/10.1111/7.14314.y

Ramos, Athena K., et al. “‘No Somos Máquinas’ (We Are Not Machines): Worker Perspectives

of Safety Culture in Meatpacking Plants in the Midwest.” American Journal of Industrial

Medicine, vol. 64, no. 2, 2021, pp. 84–96, https://doi.org/10.1002/ajim.23206.

Valentinov, Vladislav, et al. “The Anti-GMO Advocacy: An Institutionalist and

Systems-Theoretic Assessment.” Kybernetes, vol. 48, no. 5, 2019, pp. 888–905,

https://doi.org/10.1108/K-01-2018-0016.

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