1. Michael Ganues<br />Comp 2<br />Mrs. Quinn<br />April 10, 2011<br />Food Engineering<br />With America’s tough financial situation that the citizens and companies are going through at this point in time it’s putting financial stress on everyone. Many citizens are cutting back on everyday things to make it to the next day. This is no different for businesses that are trying to stay in the states and not go overseas. They are sitting down and go over their numbers to make a profit at any cost. <br />Food engineering is something that as an American and as a human we should be keeping a close eye on and seeing what side effects can happen from it. Scientists spend countless hours trying to make food grow faster and cost less for the big companies so they can save money. Companies need to have ethical behaviors and understand that cutting corners and putting people’s health at risk is not a good thing and in the long run will destroy a company’s reputation in the market.<br />The definition of Food engineering is a multidisciplinary field of applied physical sciences which combines scienc0e, microbiology, and engineering education for food and related industries. They take “A gene which is a part of DNA that carries chemical information that gives people and other living things many of the personal characteristics or traits”(Parmalee, 7). The argument in this topic isn’t how qualified the people are that are playing with the genes, but if they should be putting chemicals in the food and animals to make the product cheaper for the company to make. When the company makes a product for less they drop the price, but it will take years for the company to drop the prices on the product because they will have to pay off all the scientists and tools that were used to make the product cheaper. It is not like they hire a scientist and over night he figures out the problems of altering the DNA of a crop to make it better. It takes years for a scientist to figure out what is the best approach in dealing with this situation. It takes a very long time to properly test the effects of what they have just altered.<br />Businesses do need to sit down and rethink about the situation that the company is in financially. There are many areas where they can cut cost and not be harmful to customers cost. Businesses are put in situation that are ethical and none ethical this would fail into the none ethical era which is a bad path for a company to fall into. When I company starts dangering there customers they risk losing their company credibility and could possibly be suede.<br />The history of food engineering cannot be pin pointed exactly in time because we have been doing this for hundreds of years to be able to know an exact date. Food engineering is a big part of the United States because it has the highest production of any area of its size in the world wirh regards to farm crops, together with pasture and rangelands that support live stock. Food engineering is anything that can help the production of food easier and faster. An example of this is heating up milk in the factory to kill all the dangerous pathogens that are killed at a certain temperature. The earliest form of food engineering is when farmers finally realize when you plant a crop that the crop takes nutrients from the soil. They did this by noticing that when they plant corn year after year the crop became less and less valuable. This means that there were less corn stalks and the size of the corn stalks were smaller. The early form of food engineering could have only imagined what this field has developed in to. <br />Food engineering is a wide range topic it comes from animals, crops, and the production of food. The production of food is the biggest area of food engineering. An example of this comes from knowing what foods need to be kept at a certain temperature to keep it from spoiling. In my research I really didn’t look into this subject as much because there wasn’t any debate coming from the production of food. The topic of food engineering that I researched was the process of breaking down the DNA of a crop and altering the crop to add and take out DNA. I also looked into how they give animal’s enhancement food because they grow faster and end up fatter so they can make a larger margin in profit.<br />There are a lot of negatives to food engineering the first one is that it’s too new on the market to know if it may have an effect on the human body in any way. There have only been studies for weeks, but that’s not long enough to know the true effects of what the chemicals can do to your body. Many diseases do not just show up over night they take a lot of time and they need to know what can really happen. Chemicals act different in different people of all shapes and sizes this needs to be tested on a large scale for a long period of time to insure the chances that nothing bad is happening from the chemicals. There isn’t an organization to make sure that this test is up to a standard. With the small amount of testing they did with food engineering they still ended up making the front pages “18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger died on September 17, 1999 as a result of his particpationin a medical trial”(Parmalee, 13). As you can see that food engineering can be a dangerous thing. Would you want a scientist to make medication that they say is healthy and it works, but they don’t have long enough testing on it to make sure it’s healthy and you’re just going on based on what they say? Would you still take it if it didn’t have FDA approval? <br />Another negative aspect of food engineering is that they put chemicals in the food so they do not have to spray the crops saving money and time. The old school way of growing crops was digging up the soil, planting the crops, spraying the crops, than harvesting the crops. The reason they sprayed the crops was to stop bugs from eating the crops and having the loss of money. The farmer in the old days didn’t want to do this because they thought it would be against everything they preach about; being natural and fresh, but they had to do this to put food on people’s plates. To take the chemical off the crop the entire customer has to do is make sure they wash the plant off so it’s not on the crop anymore and have the chance to go in to your body. The companies wash it all off, but you should still wash it off to be safe. The new way is not to spray the crops, instead they put the chemical in the crop. The reason why they do this is so they don’t have to spray the crop saving them thousands of dollars. There is a problem with this like there is a “disadvantage in that crop is the only plant in that field can servive, so we end up with a monoculture of crops and nothing else”(Ford, 74)<br />Food engineering isn’t just for crops it’s also affecting animals and how they are raised and treated which brings up a debate about animal cruelty. Scientists have learned that they can give live stock different foods and growth enhancements that can make the animal grow faster and fatter and the same time making the animal have more meat. They give the animal vitamin A and D so they do not have to go outside because the vitamins give them the energy and nutrition that the sun gives an animal. The animal never sees outside they are just used for meat and that’s it. They do not live a healthy life at all. The less they run and the more unhealthy food they eat the fatter they get making the animal worth more money in the companies eyes. When the economy is in a slump it’s easy for a company to cut corners and get away with it because the consumers do not have as much money as they used to and they want food cheaper. With the large companies doing this it makes it hard for the local farmers to stay in a float as a business because they have to charge more than the big farms because they aren’t cutting the corners. This is hurting the local economy by not keeping the money in the small business’ instead putting the money back into the big business’.<br />A huge problem that can come from food engineering is the most dangerous. This happens when “horizontal gene transfer can give rise to new pathogens”(buzzers). While increasing the immunity to diseases in plants, the resistance genes may get transferred to the harmful pathogens.”If the soil is absorbing the chemicals then the soil isn’t healthy so the crop is growing in a hydroponic system” (Ford, 74).If a human body has a lot of anitbodies in it they do this by getting small amounts of pathogens and in time it makes an anitibody to fight against it. With the food engineering it is putting new pathogens in the air making your body useless to fight against the pathogens giving you a greater chance of becoming sick from the pathogens. The scientists are not yet sure what kind of pathogens that the chemicals are making. They could be harmless or very dangerous and make new supper disease that could kill.<br />There are positve sides to Food engineering like putting in more vitamins into a simple crop like a carrot. The problem is that the big companys are taking to it far and cutting corners to make a quick dollar at the customers costs. A big thing that almost everyone says is a pro of food engineering is that it would stop world hunger. They would do this by lowering the cost of food because it is cheaper for companies to make so in theory they would lower prices because it’s cheaper to make. This is wrong because the reason the world has world hunger is not from the amount of food, it’s from countries paying their employees too little so they can’t make enough money to buy food. It would make the richer countries separate further from the poor countries because they could not afford the technology that is needed to alter the DNA of a crop and animal.<br />The second positive thing is they say comes from food engineering is that “Crops like potato, tomato, soybean and rice are currently being genetically engineered to obtain new strains with better nutritional qualities and increased yield” (buzzers). They say because some companies put extra vitamins in the crops to make it healthier and making it worth while for someone to eat it. I agree that in theory it is healthier, but it hasn’t been tested properly. The big companies are taking it to the next level and taking vitamins out of the crops to help it grow faster. They say that we don’t need those vitamis because a average human already gets too much of that vitamin in a day. <br />As you can see Food engineering has not been properly tested to show the real effect it has on the human body which potentially can lead to major problems in the long run. Companies need to stop cutting corners at the customer expense instead they need to do it the right way. We as humans have rights on healthy foods and should be able to not worry about what chemicals are in the supposedly fresh carrott.<br />Annotated Bibliography<br />Ford, Brian J. The Future of Food. New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Print.book<br />The author Brain J. Ford has been discussed in Scientific American, Nature, New Scientist, and the British Medical Journal, and his popular science books have been published in over 90 editions worldwide. He also has hosted the television series Food for Thought. The audiences that the book is directed toward are people that are looking for information on the effect of food that has been genetically altered. It is extremely informational and has a lot of facts and information. Compared to the other things I have cited this book has taken a more scientific background and really brakes down the genetics and history of food engineering. This book will help my paper by giving me more of a science look on food engineering other than a business point of view.<br />Oak, Manali. quot;
Pros and Cons of Genetic Engineering.quot;
Buzzle Web Portal: Intelligent Life on the Web. 2010. Web. 07 Dec. 2010. <http://www.buzzle.com/>.<br />Oak Manali spent most of her life in the software industry building and making software developing codes. She gave that up to be able to pursue her passion in writing article that will help people understand what is going on in the world. The audience for this article is geared towards people that want to see both sides of food engineering. She gives information on the benefits of food engineering and the negative effects of food engineering. Compared to the other articles she gives information on both sides and never tells what side she thinks is right. By showing both sides she is not being opinionated in anyway letting me pick witch side to stand on. The other article just takes a negative or a positive effect of food engineering. I will be using this article to show the overall effects that food engineering has.<br />Parmalee, Thomas. Genetic Engineering. Edina, MN: ABDO Pub., 2008. Print. <br />Thomas A Parmalee paid his way through college working as a newspaper reporter. Being in the newspaper industry is where he got a lot of knowledge on editing and writing articles. He wrote another book called “Legalized Gambling.” He won an award for his investigative reporting in 2008 from the Specialized Information Publishers Association. In 2009, the same association awarded him top honors for “Best Print Marketing Effort” for compiling “The Funeral Directors Economic Survival Guide”. The audience targeted for this book are people that want to gain an overall knowledge on the topic of food Engineering. Compared to the other articles it gives a lot of overall information that will help me build my paper. The difference from this book from the other articles is that it looks at the history of food engineering and how it was a great idea till companies learned that they could make a profit off of it. <br />Shah, Anup. quot;
Genetically Engineered Food — Global Issues.quot;
Global Issues : Social, Political, Economic and Environmental Issues That Affect Us All — Global Issues. 26 Sept. 2002. Web. 29 Mar. 2011. <http://www.globalissues.org/issue/188/genetically-engineered-food>.<br />Anup Shah, MD is a dual fellowship-trained orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Shah is currently finishing a Shoulder fellowship at Harvard Medical School under the tutelage of Dr. Jon JP Warner and Dr. Laurence Higgins. The attended audience for this article is geared towards people that want to know the effects of food engineering on a global interest. Compared to the other cites this is the only one that looks at it from a global stand point. He talks about what it could do to the economics of the world and also what diseases it could bring to the world. Just like the other articles he puts in a lot of facts to back up his theories and thoughts. I will be using this article to show the impact that food engineering will have on the world bringing more of an impact behind my information.<br />Throne, Dan. quot;
Machinery Integration Accelerates Condiment Production.quot;
Food Engineering. 01 Jan. 2011. Web. 28 Mar. 2011. <http://www.foodengineeringmag.com/>.<br />Dan Throne is an Industry Sector Manager- Food, Packaging & Printing at Bosch Rexroth Corporation in Greater Chicago Area. His education background is from DeVry Institute. The audience for this article is companies that are looking for information based on the machinery integrating into factories. Compared to all my other cites this is the only one that doesn’t factor into the genetic aspect of food engineering. They look at the way the food is produced on the assembly line by using robots and people to work together. They will be able to package the products faster and cheaper at the same time. I will be using this article to help write my paper giving me a different view of the subject of food engineering.<br />