I think that most of you at some point have gone to the supermarket with your parents to buy a yummy meal. Well, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Most kids grow up thinking that the meat and other products come from farms that are places where animals are free to roam and eat as much as they like. That is not necessarily true. In this article, I will talk about how our food system is broken and if we can still fix it.   

Introduction 

Hi, my name is Marie, and this article will be talking about what is happening to our food system and if we can fix it. I will be breaking down what is happening and simple but effective ways that we can help. I will tell you a little bit about the main topics so that you know what to expect and look forward to. I will also give keywords. 

Topics: 

1. What is a CAFO? 

2. What is a GMO?

3. Who created GMOs and CAFOs?

4. How can we help?

5. Why are we doing this?

6. What is the dark side of the industrialized food system (plus a video link)? 

7. sources and outro.

Now to the information part of the article. I hope you enjoy and have fun :) and not get disgusted. 

What is a CAFO?

CAFO, or concentrated animal feeding operation. A CAFO is an agricultural facility that keeps a large number of animals confined to a small, densely populated space. Unlike free-range farms where cows graze through a pasture or chickens forage for food in fields, CAFOs bring feed to their animals, who are forced to remain stationary. As mentioned in the Humane League if you want to read more about it (link to article), what they are trying to say is that CAFO, also called "factory farming" or "linkestock," is a place where animals are kept to create more food fast and cheap. There are pros and cons to this, and it is easy to be confused when comparing them, so I will give you my pros and cons list with my opinion included.

Pros of CAFO: very cheap, so good for the economy, easy for everyone to afford.   

The cons of CAFOs are that they are bad for the environment, bad for our health, and bad for animals because they cause them great stress and depression to be in a cage all day.    

In my opinion, after making a pros and cons list, I think that CAFOs are bad from the animal point of view, but from the human point of view, they are good. In conclusion, I think that cafos are bad. When I started researching this, some numbers popped up, and I wanted to put them out there because I was astonished! In the Netherlands, there is not an official counting of CAFOs, but like greenhouses, it is a very popular thing. There are tens of thousands of CAFOs out there in the USA; there are 21,000 CAFOs left, and this number is still growing.  I hope you understand the gravity of this problem.

What is a GMO?
A GMO, or Genetically Modified Organism, is a plant, animal, or microorganism that has been subjected to biotechnology. 

To put it more simply, it is an organism that has been altered genetically.

GMOs can be processed into other genetically modified ingredients. Genetically modified ingredients can be found in food and personal care products.

GMO developers use biotechnology to alter an organism's fundamental characteristics. Biotechnology includes techniques such as using synthetic genetic sequences to change the organism's genetic material (i.e., DNA or RNA) or forcing the combination of very unrelated organisms that would not normally reproduce in nature.

When biotechnology is applied to a living organism, the result is a GMO. While GMOs are used across many industries, the Non-GMO Project's areas of concern are food, personal care products, and animal feed.

Some examples of GMOs include:

• Corn containing bacterial genes that cause the plant to produce an insecticide

• Fast-growing Atlantic salmon with genes from a Chinook salmon and an ocean pout

• Soybeans with edited genes which increase the amount of oleic acid

• Hens with an inserted lethality gene that can kill their male offspring before they hatch

• (They have links to articles explaining in detail.)  

• This is a way for people to grow crops faster and more efficiently with a cheaper cost, but since this crop grows faster, it may have less nutritional value, so it feeds us less than a real plant. 

Who created this, and why are we doing this?

First, who created GMOs and CAFOs?

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were created in 1973 by American biochemists Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen, who developed recombinant DNA technology to transfer antibiotic resistance genes into E. coli bacteria. This breakthrough enabled the first genetic engineering, with subsequent developments in plants by scientists like Mary-Dell Chilton in the early 1980s. 

The term "CAFO" (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) was created by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1976. It was developed as a regulatory classification to manage water pollution from large, industrial livestock facilities following the 1972 Clean Water Act. 

Those are the people who created GMOs and CAFOs. Important to note is that they just invented it, and it is other people who took this overboard so that now we have to write articles about these subjects

What is the state of the industrialized food system?

The industrialized food system, while providing high-volume, affordable food, causes severe environmental degradation, contributes significantly to climate change, drives biodiversity loss, and fuels public health crises like obesity and chronic illness. It relies heavily on chemical inputs, monocultures, and factory farming, often causing severe ecological damage, antibiotic resistance, and social inequities. 

To learn more about it, I have this amazing video that explains a lot about this topic. 

Sources and Conclusion

Now I know that was a lot of information, but I feel like this is a very important topic. I hope that you now know what is in our food. Now, I will state my sources below if you would like to learn more about this on YouTube and other websites; they have amazing ways to explain it simply, or you can ask me privately.

We can help in many ways. First, we can pay more attention to what we are buying and eating. Second, take a minute to read a good article about these subjects and read food labels sources 

Source 1     Source 2   Source 3 source 4 Source 5 source 6

thank you for reading 

and stay healthy. :)  

Marie, MYP 1A