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11.5: The Food System

  • Page ID
    40646
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    The food system is a network of farmers and related operations, including food processing, wholesale and distribution, retail, industry technology, and marketing. The milk industry, for example, includes everything from the farm that raises livestock, to the milking facility that extracts the product, to the processing company that pasteurizes milk and packages it into cartons, to the shipping company that delivers the product to stores, to the markets and groceries that stock and sell the product, to the advertising agency that touts the product to consumers. All of these components play a part in a very large system.

    A cow being milked by an automatic milker machine Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Image by Morten Just / CC BY-NC 3.0

    Two important aspects of a food system are preservation and processing. Each provides for or protects consumers in different ways. Food preservation includes the handling or treating of food to prevent or slow down spoilage. Food processing involves transforming raw ingredients into packaged food, from fresh-baked goods to frozen dinners. Although there are numerous benefits to both, preservation and processing also pose some concerns, in terms of both nutrition and sustainability.


    This page titled 11.5: The Food System is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Jennifer Draper, Marie Kainoa Fialkowski Revilla, & Alan Titchenal via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.