The 99¢ Cheeseburger is a miracle (Fig. 1). In a mere seven minutes a minimum wage worker in Ontario can earn enough to purchase one. It combines products from all over the world: onions, tomatoes, mustard, lettuce, pickles, mayonnaise, ketchup, beef and of course cheese. 160,000 years ago when modern humans first walked the earth it was impossible to make anything in such little time (Smith et al., 2007). Not only were the ingredients necessary to make the burger tens of thousands kilometers apart but many of them needed years of domestication to be edible. For example, the tomato was small and poisonous before domestication, and was not used prominently in western culture until the 1880’s. (Bai and Lindhout, 2007; Smith, 2001).
Figure 1: The ultimate symbol of food in modern society (Brand Eating, 2011)?
The 99¢ cheeseburger is not only a miracle but a symbol of humans struggling to define what it means to feed the world. The first real success in fighting hunger was the Green Revolution (1940’s-1970’s) in which agriculture was industrialized. Synthetic Fertilizer allowed for many nutrients to be delivered into the soil that were once the limiting factor in growth, such as nitrogen and phosphorus (Fig. 2). This was accomplished by the Haber and Ostwald processes, in which ammonia and nitric acid (forms of nitrogen plants can use) are created from atmospheric nitrogen (Galloway, 1995). Plants well-nourished by fertilizers grew so large they began to topple over, resulting in the need to produce dwarf varieties (Hedden et al., 2010; Fig. 3). These varieties known as high yield crops (HYC), characterized by dwarf stature and gigantic editable parts, have dominated the agricultural industry. It is likely that you have never eaten a non-HYC, as HYC are very prevalent and can be produced both by selective breeding or genetic engineering.
Figure 2: The production pathways for common fertilizers. The left column contains raw inputs, the far right shows final plants needed before product shipping (NEED, 2013; Galloway, 1995).
Figure 3: The effects of different Rht (reduced height) alleles on plant height (in bread wheat, Triticum aestivum). Wheat is hexaploid meaning it has three sets of diploid chromosomes. The captial letter in the allele name describe which set of chromosomes the allele can be found it. The wild-type contains Rht-B1a and Rht-D1a allsles in the B and D set of chromosomes(Hedden et al. 2010).
Despite its promises, the Green Revolution has left over 800 million people without any food. Many more suffer from malnutrition, environment degradation is at its peak (caused largely by intensive land use and fertilizer run off) and people are dying from obesity (Wu and Butz, 2004). The cheeseburger is the symbol of our failure in pursuing food security; it is a cheap food that kills the planet, those who can afford to eat it, and those who cannot afford. Many feel it was nothing more than a vain attempt by wealthy nations to solve the third world’s problems (Falcon, 1970).
Things are beginning to change. A new view has come into the picture. One that opposes the notion of food security. Food sovereignty, first defined by La Via Campesina (an organization for developing unity between small farmers) as “organiz[ing] food production and consumption according to the needs of local communities,” is a step towards changing the unequal distribution of food (Schanbacher, 2010). The biggest issue now is not being able to produce enough food, but being able to make food available to those who need it most (Abbassian, 2011).
As many people across the world fight for food sovereignty and combating the negative effects of the Green Revolution we as individuals must decide: Is the 99¢ cheeseburger a miracle or failure?
Work Cited
Abbassian, A., 2011. How much is enough? The Economist. Available at: http://www.economist.com/node/18200702.
Bai, Y. & Lindhout, P., 2007. Domestication and breeding of tomatoes: what have we gained and what can we gain in the future? Annals of botany, 100(5), pp.1085–94.
Brand Eating, 2011. Wendy’s – Jr. Cheeseburger Deluxe. Available at: http://www.brandeating.com/2011/01/review-wendys-jr-cheeseburger-deluxe.html [Accessed January 26, 2013].
Falcon, W.P., 1970. The green revolution: generations of problems. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 52(5), pp.698–710.
Galloway, J.N. et al., 1995. Nitrogen fixation: Anthropogenic enhancement-environmental response. Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 9(2), pp.235–252.
Hedden, P. et al., 2010. Plant Physiology Online: Green Revolution Genes. Available at: http://5e.plantphys.net/article.php?ch=&id=355 [Accessed January 26, 2013].
National Energy Education Development Project, 2013. Fertilizer and Crop Production. Available at: http://chemistry.need.org/curriculum/fertilizer [Accessed January 27, 2013].
Schanbacher, W., 2010. The Politics of Food: The Global Conflict Between Food Security and Food Sovereignty, Praeger Security International. Available at: http://mcmu.eblib.com.libaccess.lib.mcmaster.ca/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=497431.
Smith, A., 2001. The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery 2nd ed., Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Smith, T.M. et al., 2007. Earliest evidence of modern human life history in North African early Homo sapiens. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(15), pp.6128–33.
Wu, F. & Butz, W., 2004. The Future of Genetically Modified Crops: Lessons from the Green Revolution, Washington: Rand Corporation. Available at: http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG161.html.