Food industry Quotes

“The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. Poultry, a significant part of the modern diet, is emblematic of the whole dirty deal. Having no self-sustaining bloodlines to back up the industry is like having no gold standard to underpin paper currency. Maintaining a natural breeding poultry flock is a rebellion, at the most basic level, against the wholly artificial nature of how foods are produced. ”

“Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner; cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring–to the carelessness of both producers and consumers that characterizes our economy today. Of course, the global economy couldn't very well function without this wall of ignorance and the indifference it breeds. This is why the American food industry and its international counterparts fight to keep their products from telling even the simplest stories–"dolphin safe," "humanely slaughtered," etc.–about how they were produced. The more knowledge people have about the way their food is produced, the more likely it is that their values–and not just "value"–will inform their purchasing decisions.”

“And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day.”

“Try as we might, each of us can eat only about 1500 pounds of food a year. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1% every year (growth of American population).”

“Without food, we cannot survive, and that is why issues that affect the food industry are so important.”

“You do need some dispensation for local farmers, because the fast food industry will promote the unsanitary conditions of farming. With vegetables, you have to be careful where they come from; you have to know the farmers and trust them. If you buy from the farmers' market, it's already been investigated.”

“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.”

“The food industry profits from providing poor quality foods with poor nutritional value that people eat a lot of.”

“If everyone followed through on their resolutions, the conseqences for humanity would be dire: The fast food industry would collapse, the gyms would become unbearably crowded, and lifestyle magazines would have nothing left to say.”

“In recent years personal injury attorneys and trial lawyers have attacked the food industry with numerous lawsuits alleging that these businesses should pay monetary damages to those who, of their own accord, consume too much of a legal, safe product.”