Have you ever thought where your orange juice, eggs and bacon, yoghurt and coffee for breakfast come from? One of the major ways to trace a product’s travel through the food chain is the commodity chain analysis, “which seeks to trace the path of food as it moves through the global supply system, from field to table, plant to plate (and sometimes beyond to the dump)” (Belasco, 2008, p. 62). I have eaten strawberry yoghurt for the past three days and decided to analyze the commodity chain that brought it to me fridge.
The principal ingredients for strawberry yoghurt are milk and strawberries. Strawberries are typically grown by farmers on small and medium-sized farms by means of chemicals and irrigation and with the help of workers or farmers themselves who pick up the berries. Although this food is for the most part by small farmers, they do not make much money. The reason behind this is that “most of the “value added” is made far up the food chain from the farm, for just a little over 2 million Americans were listed as ‘farm proprietors’ in 2002, while 1 million worked in agricultural inputs and servicing, 2.5 in agricultural processing and over 16 million in food sales” (Belasco, 2008, p. 62). In other words, “the longer the chain is the smaller the farmer’s share” (Belasco, 2008, p. 62).
As of today, most of the milk is produced on dairy farms. “While most American farms still have fewer than 100 cows, 86 percent of milk is produced on the 26 percent of farms that have more than 100 cows” (Kurlansky, 2014). By virtue of milking machines and other technology, modern dairy farms have made milk one of the most unnatural operations in farming. Therefore, corporate agribusinesses benefit from producing milk.
After that the raw ingredients form the farms are delivered to factories producing dairy products, including companies such as Nestlé and Kraft Foods, and transformed there into a real food products. It is worth noting that “food, the basis of all human flourishing, is placed in the hands of giant corporations, which are obliged to pursue profits in order to further enrich an elite of wealthy stockholders” and that what makes the strawberry yoghurt so expensive as compared to the net cost of its production (Albritton , 2010, p. 351). In order to extend the product’s shelf life, e.g. its sell-by date, the processors use special preservatives and packaging.
After the processing stage, the product gets from processor to retailer. The majority of big dairy companies and corporations conclude long-term contracts with retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores, Costco, Walgreen, and Target, where Americans buy their strawberry yoghurts.
References
Albritton, R. (2010). Between Obesity and Hunger: The Capitalist Food Industry. In C. Counihan & P. V. Esterik (Authors), Food and culture: a reader (pp. 342-352). New York: Routledge.
Belasco, W. J. (2008). Convenience: The Global Food Chain. In Food: The key concepts (pp. 55-78). Oxford: Berg.
Kurlansky, M. (2014). Inside the Milk Machine: How Modern Dairy Works. Retrieved February 03, 2016, from http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/real-talk-milk/
