This past summer, I attended a Philadelphia Phillies baseball game with my dad and sister. Throughout the game, vendors holding large buckets of popcorn, hotdogs, peanuts, and beer roamed around the stands looking for sales. After a couple innings I found myself getting quite hungry, and gladly bought a hotdog and peanuts from the vendor. If I had other options for what to eat for lunch, I almost certainly wouldn’t have picked a hotdog. However, I was at an MLB baseball game, and these types of food are synonymous with attending games. The peer pressure to eat the typical baseball fan food and the lack of other meal options led me to choose the hotdog. This system is set up to benefit a wide range of organizations, from the stadium owners to the owners of the factory farms where the meat for hotdogs came from. By not allowing fans to bring in their own food, the stadium owners leave no option to the fans other than buying from the vendors and thus funding the system.

The limited and unhealthy food options available at major sports stadiums in the US ultimately support a number of serious societal issues. By purchasing, and then selling the hotdogs and hamburgers that are so common at baseball games, stadium owners are supporting factory farming. By keeping the demand for such foods high, the baseball industry is encouraging and perpetuating the practice of factory farming. Additionally, all of the uneaten food that is made in baseball stadiums is simply thrown out. Such negligent waste of food harms the environment by creating more waste and dangers down the road. I think that in order to work towards solving this problem, the governing body of the MLB should pass rules that require stadium owners to offer a wider variety of foods, including more nutritionally rich foods. Another way to help attenuate this problem would be to allow fans to bring their own healthy snacks into the stadiums.