Candy, Soda, Cheese, Bread. All of these things sound amazing, but many Americans are digging their own graves through the food they consume. Whether you’re rich or poor, tall or short, everyone has the common need of eating in order to survive. The good thing about the food industry is that there are endless amounts of choices. Whenever you make a choice to buy a food product you are “casting your vote” with your money, to say that you like this product and want to see it keep being made. However, the bad thing about the food industry is that we live in a capitalistic society, with many different competing food companies.

When buying a product it can be easy to believe that the company’s intentions are to provide the best and freshest product. But in most cases, it’s not. It’s easy to forget the fact that these companies go to great lengths to make as much profit as possible, in most cases, operating for profit over the people.

Companies you buy from on a daily basis like Nestle, Tyson foods, and Sysco perpetuate this practice. Unnecessary ingredients like sugar, high fructose corn syrup, preservatives, and chemicals are added into our daily diets through every processed food we consume. This food is also stripped of important nutrients like fiber and vitamins and replaced with fillers like hydrogenated oils, aspartame and sodium nitrate. All in all, this leaves the food products having more calories and less nutrients. This makes these foods cheap to buy for low income families and extremely addictive through the high sugar and aspartame levels. 

Capitalism and over consumption in our country go hand in hand. Whether it be a billboard, radio, or social media ad, food advertisements are plastered everywhere throughout our lives. “About 42.4% of Americans were reported to be obese,” stated the CDC in 2020.  The food industry profits off of their consumers eating unhealthy amounts of non nutritional food.

This action also gives opportunity to a completely separate industry: the medical industry. The US food industry creates the problems and the US medical industry will fix them for an absurd price. This article isn’t meant to say abolish all processed foods from your diet, as some things you just have to accept. But this article is meant to make you realize the corruption behind the food industry and hopefully help you make a more conscious decision next time you’re at the store.