The Birth of a New Food Culture

The Birth of a New Food Culture

The past century has witnessed the evolution of the food culture all around us. The evolution has been caused due to two main reasons, changes in the consumer market and the birth of a billion-dollar food industry. The food industry has changed, it has expanded, it is now much bigger than it was 10 years ago with the presence of big corporations and food is one of the biggest tradable commodities in the consumer market. The consumer has also changed in the past few decades, he is now always on the go and has no time as a result fast food is the now the food of the millions. The industry has exploited these changes in our social and cultural environment over the past few decades to further drive up their profits. In this essay I will explore the two-principal ways in which our food culture has changed and what has lead to this change. I will throw light on the changes in the consumer's attitude and explore the change in the meaning of food over the past century. Along with that I will describe the evolution of the food industry in great detail. What has been integral to both these changes is the change in how we view our food; food is no longer just energy and a necessary human need but is money, it signifies a big market that is being exploited.

The growth of the food industry has been essential in shaping up the modern food culture as it is today. With technological innovation the food industry now draws much of its energy from fossil fuels instead of the sun. Michael Pollan in his book "Our National Eating Disorder" says, "the result of the innovation has been a vast increase in the amount of food energy available to humans"(Pollan 7). The increase in the amount of food energy available has only added to our troubles. Long faced with the dilemma about what to eat, we continue to struggle to understand ourselves and still do not know what to eat. This dilemma is exploited by the modern food industry to its advantage. According to Fischler, "The modern eater has become a ‘mere consumer': an increasing proportion of population consumes food of whose production, history and origins it knows nothing"(Fischler 289).

An industry without any big players, unorganized and with a great potential to be exploited, prompted the big corporations to take notice of it. As a result in the past two decades, there has been an increased presence of big food corporation in the food industry. With the increase in the amount of food energy available and with the growing demands of the multi-billion dollar food industry, big corporations have cleverly exploited the industry to their advantage. According to Nestle, "the US. Food industry is the remarkably successful result of twentieth century trends that led from small farms to giant corporations, from a society that cooked at home to one that buys nearly half of its means prepared and consumed"(Nestle