Production and Consumption Habits

Production and Consumption Habits

Population demographics, or change in population rates, have been the number one reason for many global production and consumption habits for people today. People need to produce goods and services in order to sustain the global population, just as people need to consume products and services in order to maintain a certain standard of living. Two production habits are food production and industrial capitalism. Two main consumption habits are food products and technology.

The world population is always changing, either increasing or decreasing depending on the birth rates of a particular time period. After the last ice age, the world's population began to increase, and the need for more food to sustain all of these people was in higher demand. "Pastoralism is a subsistence pattern in which people make their living by tending herds of large animals" (2011, Para 1). Pastoralists are a part of the food industry, raising large amounts of livestock for the production of goods, such as meat, milk, and eggs. Farmers who grow crops are also producing food goods, such as corn, rice, cotton, and wheat. Different types of agriculturalists produce different products, but the food industry in general has the same common goal, to produce enough food products to sustain the growing population.

Large families were very common for agriculturalists because it meant that families had more hands to help tend the farms. Summer vacation in schools was originally started because families needed their children home in order to help harvest crops. During the industrial revolution, large families were also welcome because people realized that children were an essential part of the work force there as well. Children as young as four or five were working in factories in order to help their families make money, as well as help the industrial revolution grow even bigger. With these larger families, the population continued to rise, which required more food in order to sustain the growing human population. Almost from the beginning of the human existence, farming and food production has been a part of our lives. Today, people can go to the super market and buy their meats, dairy, and eggs, but they still have to come from somewhere, which is generally what we now call factory farms (industrial farms).

Another major production is industrial capitalism, or industrial workforce. Industrial capitalism is the production of workforce and time in exchange for money or currency a person obtains in order to buy goods and services they need or desire to live. The concept of industrial capitalism has been around almost as long as people have. Years ago, a person could work for a farmer in exchange for some crop or animals. Today people work for money in order to maintain their bills and to buy goods or service that they need or want. The time and work the people give to the companies they work for help produce other goods and services for people. It doesn't really matter which industry a person works with today, the industrial workforce is the same. No one works for goods and services anymore; they all work in exchange for money to buy what they want with it.

A consumption habit of material resources would be the consumption of food products. The production of food supplies is closely related to the consumption of food by the human population. The world has been seeing a population increase since before the industrial revolution, and even more so over the last 200 years. Back when families were having more children in order to help within the workforce, whether farming or industrialization, the amount of food these people need to consume increases. Today, the global population is in