Nutritional Document Analysis

An appropriate reaction while analyzing where my food that I consume every day comes from would be “where does this come from?” As a frequent question that I continuously asked myself when I looked the food labels. When I would look at the package, I would run through a pre-thought-out checklist, “Nutritional facts? Check. Questionable ingredients that could potentially be harmful to us? Check. Origin of product? Distributed by company ‘so-and-so’ in ‘United States city.’” That was all the information the label gave me in regards to the origin of the product. It did not give me the location of where the food or the ingredients came from, only where it was packaged and distribution location. This was similar to the “What’s in my Closet?”
assignment, where I constantly noticed that we – the consumer – only know the final location of the product. As I learned from that experiment, there is an entire interconnected global market that is theoretically invisible to us because everyday consumers do not care about where their product comes from, only how much it will cost them in the end. Therefore, I was determined to find out where some of this food came from.
Specifically, I was curious about where the two brands of coffee that I drink acquired their beans from because coffee is not normally produced in the United States. When I looked at Java City Coffee, instantly, I found out that they acquire their coffee beans from the Aceh Province of Northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Also, I found out they are Fair Trade Certified, which means that there is fair compensation for farmers and workers. On the other hand, Folgers required further research because the website did not have a direct location of where they acquired their beans. Fortunately, a PBS article “Black Gold: Behind the Beans” stated that Folgers acquired their beans from Central America, Asia, Oceania, North America, Ethiopia, and Mexico. Additionally, there is no indication that company are Fair Trade Certified, which according to the article, Folgers has been criticized for in the past. Both finds were of interest because it shows; (a) how expansive our globalized food market is when we do the proper research, and (b) how multimillion corporations such as Folgers are more secretively about the origin of their
products. Furthermore, when reflecting on my data above, I noticed that the top three distribution locations are Orrville, OH.; Grand Rapids, MI.; and Chicago, IL. Grand Rapids and Chicago I knew were global distributors of food products. As of now, most of my diet consists of Meijer brand food, most of the time the food will be packaged and distributed from Grand Rapids, MI. – the home of Meijer. For Chicago, the main distribution company that I noticed was Kraft Heinz Foods Company. Initially, the only relation between those names that could be drawn were cheese and ketchup. However, that one company additionally includes 24 other brands such as Oscar Meyer, Planters, Velveeta, Jell-O, and many others. This was an astonishing discovery because I never realized that this many different brands are owned by a single company. Lastly, prior to this assignment, I have never heard of Orrville, OH. When I researched them, they are a small town, but the home of The J.M. Smucker Company. Also, the town is home of the Smith Diary Products Company, the Schantz Organ Company, JLG Industries, and Folgers Coffee Company. This kind of pattern made me wonder why are these specific companies stationed at these locations? Is it a prime location where distribution of food is made simpler? Or, is there an underlying factor in these locations that can never be determined with basic google searches. Like the “What’s in my Closet?” assignments, I am left with more questions than answers. Prior to this assignment, I never paid any attention to the food that I bought.
I never cared about where it came from, and which company produces and distributes it. The only thing I really cared about was it affordable. Being a college student, who does not have a lot of money, this was my mindset. Now, I have been looking at my food and wonder about the origins. There is a larger interconnected global market that I am unaware of because I was only concern about the price. Granted I might not live the healthiest of lifestyles at the moment, but it is knowledge that I can take with me when I go back home for the summer. One change I would like to make in my consumption habits is to pay attention to the products that are Fair Trade Certified. Recently, I feel more compelled to purchase these products because they pay their employees fairly unlike other corporations. This assignment has shed new insight into my perspective of the global food market, and like the “What’s in my Closet?” assignment, we really do not know as much as we believe. We only know the end, which is not enough as the
consumer.