Stolen Harvest by Vandana Shiva

Author:Vandana Shiva
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2016-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

MCDONALDIZATION

Globalization has created the McDonaldization of world food, resulting in the destruction of sustainable food systems. It attempts to create a uniform food culture of hamburgers. The mad-cow-disease epidemic tells us something of the costs hidden in this food culture and food economy.

In 1994, Pepsi Food, Ltd., was given permision to start 60 restaurants in India: 30 each of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) and Pizza Hut. The processed meats and chicken offered at these restaurants have been identified by the U.S. Senate as sources of the cancers that one American contracts every seven seconds. The chicken, which would come from an Indian firm called Venky’s, would be fed on a “modern” diet of antibiotics and other drugs, such as arsenic compounds, sulfa drugs, hormones, dyes, and nitrofurans. Still, many chickens are riddled with disease, in particular chicken cancer (leukosis). They can also carry salmonellosis, which does not die with ordinary cooking.

Both KFC and Pizza Hut have guaranteed that they will generate employment. However, according to studies conducted by the Ministry of Environment on other meat industries, Al-Kabeer has displaced 300,000 people from their jobs, while employing only 300 people at salaries ranging from Rs. 500 to Rs. 2,000 per month. Venky’s chicken has not employed one extra person after getting the contract for chicken supply from KFC and Pizza Hut. In fact, the company is being encouraged to mechanize further rather than use human labor.

Junk-food chains, including KFC and Pizza Hut, are under attack from major environmental groups in the United States and other developed countries because of their negative environmental impact. Intensive breeding of livestock and poultry for such restaurants leads to deforestation, land degradation, and contamination of water sources and other natural resources. For every pound of red meat, poultry, eggs, and milk produced, farm fields lose about five pounds of irreplaceable top soil. The water necessary for meat breeding comes to about 190 gallons per animal per day, or ten times what a normal Indian family is supposed to use in one day, if it gets water at all.

KFC and Pizza Hut insist that their chickens be fed on maize and soybean. It takes 2.8 kilograms of corn to produce one pound of chicken. Egg-layers also need 2.6 pounds of corn and soybean. Nearly seven pounds of corn and soybean are necessary to produce one pound of pork. Overall, animal farms use nearly 40 percent of the world’s total grain production. In the United States, nearly 70 percent of grain production is fed to livestock.

Maize, though not a major food crop in India, has traditionally been grown for human consumption. Land will be diverted from production of food crops for humans to production of maize for chicken. Thirty-seven percent of the arable land in India will be diverted toward such production. Were all the grain produced consumed directly by humans, it would nourish five times as many people as it does after being converted into meat, milk, and eggs, according to the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology.

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