Food & Agriculture: Industrial Chicken, BSE, and Food Production Evolution - Prof. Amy Tra, Study notes of Geography

Download Food & Agriculture: Industrial Chicken, BSE, and Food Production Evolution - Prof. Amy Tra and more Study notes Geography in PDF only on Docsity! 4/12/2011 GEOG1101 1) Geographies of Food and Agriculture a) Rationalization: The Industrial Chicken i) 8 billion chickens sold in the US in 1997 (1) Health concerns, falling prices, food processing ii) Poultry Science (1) Decreased growth time (gain #1/week) (2) Concentrated numbers in chicken houses (3) Debeaking to reduce damage from aggression from overcrowding iii) Contract farming (1) Transnational corporations provide chicks and feed, farmers provide the labor and infrastructure b) Rationalization: BSE i) Bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE) (1) Prion: malformed protein (2) Human variant: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (a) Debilitating, degenerative, fatal brain disease (b) Feed source: rendered meat infected with TSE ii) Britain, 1987: (1) 180,000 cows, 36,000 farms to date, 143 human cases iii) United States (1) US: December 2003 (2) Curious “hot spots”: 8 cases of CJD at Cherry Hill Racetrack, New Jersey c) Parma vs. Kraft i) Parma (1) 11th Century (2) Raw and skimmed milk heated in special cauldrons (3) Brined for 3 weeks (4) Aged for 12 months (5) 1996 PDO – protected designation of origin (6) Preserve tradition, local economy ii) Kraft (1) First introduced in 1945 (2) Milk, cheese cultures, “enzymes”, salt (3) Aged 6 months (4) Streamlined production to produce inexpensive product (5) Employ minimum wage workers in assembly line style factory d) Conventional Agriculture i) Adaptation of natural environment (1) Mono-cultural production systems (2) Chemical amendment of soil (3) Eradication of “pests” (plant/animal/fungal) ii) Manufacture of food “products” (1) Farmers grow commodities not food iii) Vertical integration of economic systems