This is a YouTube video titled "Our Food System Was Built On Slavery" containing a monologue or speech recorded on July 12, 2020. The speaker discusses the historical and systemic issues in the U.S. food system, focusing on labor exploitation, monopolization by large agribusinesses, and the need to decentralize food processing to improve wages and community involvement.
Our food system is built on, and this is our food system originally was built on slavery. Let's be honest here. And so it hasn't changed that much. It's using low-paid workers to produce food. But now all of a sudden, they are in a position where they're essential. Well, why weren't they essential all along? And why aren't they getting paid more all along? Really, this can be taken care of pretty quickly. How would you do that? Over the last 40-50 years, these big food producers have bought out the little guy. They are all very centrally located. It's very, they become monopolies. When you have four companies that process the majority of meat that we eat in this country, they become monopolistic. And we can't break them up. And they should be broken up because our food system should be spread out. It's too centralized right now. So if we spread it out, this is actually one of the things that we talk about on our podcast, one of the issues we deal with. We spread it out, we actually put it into communities. And so when you have a processor that is in the community, they're not a big agribusiness that is actually Brazilian, are in Smithfield's case, owned by the Chinese. Yeah. Smithfield sounds like an American company, but it's owned by the Chinese. Most of the pork in this country. Yeah, and so when you have processors now that are part of the community, Wages will go up.
