The United States invented the factory assembly line process. Ever since then, American businesses have been seeking more ways to squeeze out profits from all types of products. These days assembling products is much cheaper in foreign countries than the United States. This has led to the export of Americans jobs overseas. However one type of business that isn?t largely exported overseas is the production of food. These food corporations face an ever growing demand to create food products for low cost to millions of the citizens of United States and even abroad. This has led to the commercial food industry to boom in the past 50years. Today, there are only few large corporations that control America?s food supply. In order to stay profitable, they have adapted factory line production style and extremely large and dense commercial farming operations.

 The process of growing domestic animals is also not done in an environmentally friendly way.  Most of the companies? goal is to make profit out of their business. They want to put in minimum money and get the maximum profit out. The pigs, cows and chicken grown by large corporations are often in very poor conditions. They have no space to move around so they get stressed, then humans injects chemicals to relax them. Also, they inject drugs that make the animals grow faster. The indiscreet use of chemicals and drugs can potentially harm humans. Additionally, animal producers have to give large amounts of antibiotics and even slight doses of poisons to keep their animals disease free. However the growing use of antibiotics in animals has led to the increase and development of drug resistant bacteria and viruses. This has the potential to cause greater infections in human especially if those animal diseases mutate and affect humans such as the avian flu.

During the process of dealing with the food production, large commercial food processors face challenges in waste management. It takes lot of money to deal with the waste, so some companies illegally dump their waste in to the sea or river. This obviously pollutes the water and affects the water ecosystem and human water sources. Excess organic matter in water ways can lead to terrible consequences.  Because of excess nutrients in the water, algae blooms can rob water of oxygen as the algae dies killing all fish and water ecosystems. Additionally, if the waste are not properly managed in the processing factories itself, it can lead to cross contamination  and tainted meat products which has actually killed people.

In order to protect the safety of citizens, the United States government the EPA and FDA have strict standards for food safety, however because of the budget cut, the number of inspectors have been dramatically cut. There are not enough inspectors to inspect all food processing plants on a regular basis to make sure that the companies are following health standards. In order to fix this imbalance, the government needs to spend more money on food safety measures.