This chapter has examined the hidden environmental costs of cheap food by focusing on the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex, the productive foundation of the food system in the United States, Canada, and other temperate countries. It explored how the pressures to standardize and mechanize agriculture magnify biological and physical problems and create new ones, how these problems get overridden, and how these overrides involve a large resource budget and pollution burden (amplified by increasingly meat-centred diets), with fossil fuels playing an integral part in all of these matters.
Citation: 2015. In Mustafa Koç, Jennifer Sumner and Tony Winson (eds.), Critical Perspectives in Food Studies, 2nd edition (Toronto: Oxford University Press).
