Affect of Modern Food Industry

The modern food industry developed very quickly in recent years. The UK government said that the total customer’s expenditure on food, drink and catering services is £174bn in 2010 [1] while the cost on food increased by 20% between 2006 to 2009 [2]. More and more kinds of novel food impact on our life such as GM foods, fast foods, long-life foods, etc. Since we eat them every day, the influence of modern food industry grows deep and wide on our physical wellbeing lately.

Nowadays people make more concentration on health and find that some modern foods have an obviously negative effect on our body. Chemical additive can be found in vast majority of food which has been used for several decades. In the last 10 years we realized that many kinds of them damage us dramatically. Sudan I and melamine are the most famous illustrations. Another kind of modern foods is fast foods such as Mcdonald’s. The government survey demonstrate that we eat to much high fat and sugar food or drink which make up a percentage of our diet at 23%[3]. This bad behaviour cause obese directly. In 2008 25% of adults and 16% of children were over-weight [4]. Since there are so many risks on GM foods, the European Union has legislated in potential testing and labeling regimes of GM foods.

There are also some remarkable positive impacts of modern food industry. Can you imagine there are no frozen foods and long life foods in the supermarket? Without them people lives in the city will not eat any fresh milk or safe meat. You can taste the ocean fish with the help of modern deep-sea fishing. Research from the New Economics Foundation suggests that half of the amount of fish we eat in UK is from the ocean [5]. At the same time 48% of food we eat in British are imported from allover the world [6]. We can not eat Spanish vegetables or Japanese sushi without modern food processing and transportation industry. The modern agriculture and food processing industry also contributes on the