Going into this, I really wasn't certain how far I would get. I was pretty confident that I could investigate and find out the distributors and manufactures of the food products, but where those manufacturers where obtaining their ingredients was another matter. So, let me preface this post by saying that I tried to look at this research into the origins of my food from the standpoint of not as someone who was trying to thoroughly delve into the workings of these companies and flesh out enough information to write a full-sized paper. Rather, I took the stance of an average American trying deciding for a day to put some extra effort into thinking and discovering where my food was coming from.
SO HERE WE GO!
Breakfast:
- 1 container of Chobani Greek Yogurt
I had known that Chobani's factory was in the Upstate New York area, but had no idea where it was specifically. Here's what some snooping around on the internet found:
Chobani is very public about its ingredients, nutritional facts, and other traits of their products on their websites; they get brownie points for that. However, there has been a lot of ruckus lately about Chobani using dairy from NY cows that were fed GMOs. Specifically, http://gmoinside.org/ had a few recent posts on their blog that called for action against Chobani's use of GMO-fed dairy cattle.
Personally, I don't have any qualms with ingesting food that involved GMOs in the making of them. It was, however, that if I was concerned with this issue, this information on the dairy cattle and the product they created was not available from them. Rather, I discovered it after blog posts made only in the past months.
Besides this debate of GMO feeding, I was not able to find any more information on where the dairy was coming from for the yogurt.
Lunch:
- 1 personal pizza from the Coop
NOTE: Please excuse the horrible lighting in this picture. It really makes this look unappetizing when in reality it was quite delicious.
Because this was a prepared food, the origins here were a little more complicated. Luckily, one of the wonderful workers at the Coop, Brett, went looking for the packaging for the cheese, dough, and tomatoes used in the pizza when I asked him for help. So, shout out to him for being fantastic! Here's what I gleaned from the packaging he showed me:
The cheese was from Great Lakes Cheese, Inc. I learned a lot about the company and the serves they provide in manufacturing and distributing cheese on a mass level. Mainly, their beautiful website consisted of information for potential buyers, pretty pictures, how they were one of the largest privately owned companies in the US, and blurbs about their devotion to creating a beautiful cheese product.... But nothing about their sources of dairy or how exactly the cheese I was eating was made.
The dough was a Rich's foodservice product. While trying to find out more about the product I was eating, I discovered just how gigantic of a company Rich's was. It produced breads, ice creams, coffees, seafood, and just about everything in between. It was a little frightening just how wide the range of products were under one behemoth company. After some searching, I found a whole webpage devoted to the product I was consuming: http://richsfoodservice.com/products/pizza/pizza-dough-a-crust/fresh-n-ready-oven-rising-sheeted-pizza-dough/7q-fresh-n-ready-oven-rising-sheeted-pizza-dough/07386 It has nutritional facts and cooking instructions galore. Anything about where those ingredients were truly from? Nope. Nada.
Finally, the main ingredient in the sauce, tomatoes, came from a subset of ConAgra Foodservice, Angela Mia. Similar to Rich's, ConAgra was an absolutely huge corporation, acting as the umbrella company to multitudes of companies that I thought to be independent. Here's a list of said food companies: http://www.conagrafoods.com/our-food/brands Frankly, it's scary how many different access points this one company has into our daily consumption. I did find the Angela Mia tomato product on their site. Again, all the allergy and nutritional information I could want, but no sign of a source for their tomatoes.
After all of that searching, I learned a lot about the companies that supervised my food consumption. I really got more information about that company's "middleman" role in my food than I was looking for. However, I came up empty-handed as far as information on the actual origins of my food. Even with such little ingredients as yogurt, these companies provided me with virtually no knowledge as to what the beginnings of my food were.
No comments:
Post a Comment