Processing

Food processing ranges from minimal transformation of food such as peeled garlic to the creation of completely novel food products such as plant-based meat substitutes. There are many reasons to process food. Drying fruit and pickling vegetables delays inevitable spoiling, allowing humans to consume a variety of nutritious, seasonal foods throughout the year. Pasteurizing milk destroys harmful pathogens. Creating novel food products allows businesses to expand by creating new consumer bases.

Questions to consider: what are the material inputs that food processing requires? What are the lives of meat processing workers like, and why? How do power imbalances influence the answers to these questions?

Recent News

• Costco’s 100 Million Chickens Will Change the Face of Nebraska (Civil Eats, 2018)

Books

• The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives (Simon, 2017)

Podcasts

• The Hamlet Fire: What an industrial accident tells us about industrial food (Eat This Podcast, 2018)