How food has changed with the times! As you are reading this right now, food is influencing us more than ever. Science and business, in particular, have changed our very perception of eating.

A major change that is quite obvious is how we achieve agriculture. We have replaced endless suffering serfs or prejudiced peasants toiling in the fields with efficient mega-farms. Take, for instance, the controversial method of battery farming. In "Egg City" outside of Los Angeles, 90 000 chickens toil day and night in oppressive cages to lay one million eggs a day. That's over 11 eggs per chicken per day. If the chickens fail to meet the required output, they are sent to become soup. Animal Rights activists have called this brutally efficient method of battery farming inhumane.

The family farms and plantations of the 19th and early 20th centuries, although still existent, have dwindled greatly in number. Today, many farms like these remain only as a quaint attraction or as tourist vistas.

Whereas in the past, the land dictated what kind of food one could produce, now the only limit is money. Engineering abilities have brought agriculture to virtually every part of the globe. Naturally good stretches of land, like the Pampas in South America and the Prairie in North America, have been converted into giant croplands. Poor soil has been made fertile with chemical fertilizers.

Some of the reasons for agriculture have changed as well. Political and international tensions have led some countries to be self-reliant. They produce food for themselves so that they don't have to rely on other countries' food. In the Middle East, nutrition has often produced conflicts. The scarcity of fresh water in this region has led to very bitter disputes over pieces of land containing that water.

Yet many better-off nations have produced more food for the opposite reason: trade. They can trade with many developing third world nations, who are in desperate need of crops and seeds, as they are to poor to begin any sort of nationalized agriculture system. However, there are still ways of increasing output in first world nations even more. Studies have shown that if the United Kingdom were to restructure its agriculture in a certain way, it could feed 250 million people - the population of the United States.

Many small farms have begun "restructuring" on a smaller scale. In one instance, a farmer had an apple orchard, with chickens in the orchard. The chickens could eat the fallen apples, and the trees could benefit from "natural fertilization" and the eating of worms and insects that might harm the tree. The weeds in this orchard could sometimes be harvested to be used as herbs. Organic farming is once again becoming popular, at least on a small scale.

This is not the route most mega-farms have chosen to take, however. Chemical pesticide use increased exponentially after the scientific revolution. However well they may destroy weeds or insects, many pesticides have been proven to adversely affect the environment. The most infamous example was DDT, banned in the 1970's in the United States. It was found to harm just about everything in its wake, despite its help in exterminating agricultural vermin.

To increase crop output, scientists have recently been developing genetically altered plants. They combine the genes of one plant with another to change certain traits. For example, the genes of a tomato might be altered to make it frost-resistant, or make its output remarkably large. Genetic mutation has given rise to many strange fruits and vegetable. Vegetables like broccoflower (broccoli plus cauliflower) and fruits like the pluot (plum plus apricot) have emerged and are now easily available. Critics claim that even though genetic engineering may seem to have benefits, they deserve to be called "frankenfoods" and have no place in the diet because of possible health risks. At a recent World Trade Organization meeting held in Seattle, anti-genetically-engineered food activists vocalized and demonstrated their complaints. One French man vandalized McDonald's in protest of its use of genetically altered foods. Farmers and distributors of genetically changed foods claim, that they pose no health concerns to the public, however.

Despite the broad advances agriculture has made over the past few decades, problems still present themselves. The major food problem nowadays is access to food itself. Starvation, a concern for everyone in history up until quite recently, has now become a problem of only the most poor. The problem is not that there is not enough food available to feed everyone, but we have not figured out politically correct way to get it to everyone. It certainly seems that not enough is being done about this problem.

On the other end of the spectrum are the exceedingly rich. They are often overfed, and have the "overnutrition" problem. Many of the well-off members of society are eating to many fats, salts, sugars and calories. This overnutrition can lead to many health problems like heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity ... the list goes on and on. In nations where overnutrition is a problem, especially in the United States, dieting has become a major obsession - often leading to health risks itself. Anorexia (where a dieter starves themselves so that they look more and more skinny) or bulimia (where a dieter eats a lot and then vomits) are common problems, especially for teenage girls. These conditions always lead to malnutrition and may even end up in untimely death.

Supermarkets are a symbol of the excess of food that is currently available in developed nations. Initiated in the 1940's, supermarkets display rows and rows of foods for the shopper's convenience. Gone are the days of subsistence, when everyone had to take care of his or her own food supply.

Gone too are the days of cooking over an old rusty kettle. Here is the microwave, perfected and introduced in the 1970's. It is pretty much a box that can be opened and in relatively no time at all, it can cook food. The basic premise of a microwave is that it sends waves of energy into the food it is trying to cook, and this energy excites the water molecules in the food. The movement of the molecules creates heat, thus warming up the aliment.

Due to the worldwide infusion of cheap fast food (i.e. McDonald's), quick access to food, albeit unnutritional food, has become the norm. In 1973, for example, the American magazine Advertising Age cited a survey that showed it was cheaper to eat away from home in some cases, than it was to eat at home.

The modern age has seen an inundation of new and efficient agriculture techniques, food processing methods, and food distribution to feed a greatly needing society. Can we really keep up with demand? Are there health risks in our future? We have yet to know where we go from here.

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