Whither Food in the Twenty-First Century?

Our so-called “food system” is a complete mess, one that must be set to rights if the people are to have a chance of thriving in the coming years, which are likely to be stressful because of other messes.  This dire situation has been described in Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet by Stuart Gillispie (September 2025).  This book will live up to its blurbs, from Chris Van Tulleken, for example, “The essential food book of this year and years to come,” whose Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food, was discussed here in March 2024.  As Marion Nestle points out, Gillispie’s focus on the international food system is natural, given that he has been working on international nutrition for more than forty years.  He begins with this:

The problem we face now is the simple fact that our global food system is an anachronism.  In the last century it has performed miracles [1], but in this one it’s a source of jeopardy.  We should not speak of reform and repair, because it’s not actually broken.  The system we have is working just the way those who control it want it to work.  For capitalism to sustain itself, it needs to generate (continually increasing) profit (through growth instead of development).  And in 2025, after nearly fifty years of neoliberalism, the most profitable food system is the one that manufactures ultra-processed products which are marketed aggressively across the world.

Throughout Food Fight, Gillispie demonstrates how:

The global food system has itself become a large part of the problem (of a persistent if well camouflaged colonialism from our perspective), having been captured by transnational corporations who profit from public ill-health while using an array of tactics to stop Government (and the people such as they have any agency) from getting in their way.

The main problem with our current food system is that those who are caught up in it (poor and rich alike) are at the same time undernourished and overfed.  Thus, we have an obesity epidemic that has penetrated every part of the world, while at the same time producing malnourished people at a large profit.  Research has shown that undernutrition in the early stages of life causes physiological damage and aftereffects that potentiate obesity later in life.  This is a virtuous cycle only for the purveyors of poor but tasty, and habit-forming if not addictive in the clinical sense, food-like substances.  Earlier books on this subject include Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal (2001) by Eric Schlosser and Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (2014) by Michael Moss, along the essential work of Marion Nestle (pronounced “ne-sel”).

Perhaps the first modern food fight is exemplified by Nestlé, the Swiss corporation (“Good food, Good life”) that brings us the Kit-Kat along with other delectable delights.  In 1867 Henri Nestlé developed a “formula” to mimic human milk.  A hundred years later the eponymous transnational corporation sent sales representatives dressed as nurses into what at the time was inelegantly called the Third World, where:

They promoted formula foods as a replacement for breast milk.  Mothers were provided with one free can when they left the hospital – a potentially lethal freebie.  Most mothers lived where the water was not safe, where the feed could easily be contaminated in preparation lead to diarrhea, dehydration and often death.  Bottles were not sterilized. Mothers would over dilute the formula…which meant the newborn was not able to absorb the nutrients…after starting the baby of formula…they couldn’t switch back to breastfeeding – it was too late in the lactation cycle.

No wonder the Nestlé Boycott that began in 1977 continues, albeit without apparent effect, in 2025.  The handiwork of Big Food:

In a 2018 study, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) estimated that 10,870,000 infants had died between 1960 and 2015 as a result of Nestlé baby formula used by “mothers [in low and middle-income countries] without clean water sources”, with deaths peaking at 212,000 in 1981 (See Mortality from Nestlé’s Marketing of Infant Formula in Low and Middle-Income Countries, pdf).

In 2024, a report by Swiss nonprofit Public Eye and IBFAN stated that Nestlé adds more sugar to baby food sold in lower- and middle-income countries compared to healthier versions sold in affluent.

And as Gillispie puts it, the jump from this first Food Fight to the subsequent Fake Food Flood was a natural progression.  Baby formula is an ultra-processed food (UPF), and the food science used to produce it was adapted to produce “food” for children and adults with alacrity, initially with breakfast cereals and later with the modern ultra-processed manufactured items that fill the central aisles of the typical supermarket in row after row after row of ersatz abundance.

The NOVA system to characterize ultra-processed food was developed by Carlos Monteiro of the University of São Paulo:

• Group 1: Unprocessed or minimally processed (e.g., frozen vegetables)
• Group 2: Oils, butter, lard, sugar, salt derived from Group 1 foods or from nature by pressing, refining, grinding, milling, or drying
• Group 3: Foods processed by adding Group 2 ingredients to Group 1 foods (canned vegetables, sauces) [2]
• Group 4: Manufactured food-like substances

The simple definition of UPF from Gillispie is: UPFs are industrially produced foods wrapped in plastic, containing ingredients not available in the home. UPF is formula food for all ages. [3]  Food scientists have developed these by manipulating sugar, salt, and fat to hit the bliss point of taste and mouthfeel.  They are really quite remarkable.  Speaking from recent weak-minded experience, a Nabisco Pinwheel is the perfect synthetic food-like drug.  NOVA 4 products are not meant to nourish people, but they are delicious.

Ultra-processing also allows manufacturers to alter their products in virtually unlimited ways.  Reliance on a few crops (e.g., maize, wheat, soy) is not a barrier to Big Food when these feedstocks, the exact analog of oil and natural gas as industrial feedstocks for plastic and fertilizer manufacturers, are so changeable.  These few basic materials can be “transformed into a kaleidoscope of products with different shapes, size, colors, tastes, flavors, smells, textures,” limited only by the imagination and techniques of food scientists…UPFs are really profit-generators disguises as food.”  Gains are privatized and costs in environmental degradation, illness, and disease are socialized.  And most remarkably:

In 2022, Nestlé acknowledged that most of its products weren’t healthy and never will be. In April 2024, nine out of ten shareholders at the annual general meeting in Lausanne voted to continue to prioritize unhealthy foods.

Or maybe this is not remarkable at all.  Shareholder value is only a trope invented by Milton Friedman in an article in the New York Times Magazine in 1970.  But its foul myth has become another feral fact, along with “growth must be pursued at all costs” in a finite ecosphere, belying the notion that capitalism can be “reformed.”

The virtuous corporate cycle continues.  “Diet” UPFs have become an antidote to UPF-induced disease:

The stratospheric popularity of GLP-1 agonists such as Ozempic and Wegovy has provided yet another example of industry capturing new markets created by the harms of their products.  As users report cravings of protein-rich products in smaller portions…to reduce gastrointestinal (GI) side effects, the industry is innovating to provide them what they need…(in)…a brand-new market estimated to reach 15 million people by 2030.  In May 2024, Nestlé announced Vital Pursuit, a new line of frozen, high-protein foods. ‘We want to be there for every moment of our consumers’ lives – today and in the future,’ said Steve Presley, CEO, Nestlé North America.

So, to simplify, but not by much: UPFs led to the obesity epidemic, virtually everywhere in the world.  GLP-1 agonists are then developed to help those who can afford them lose weight.  But while doing so these people who are living with sociogenic obesity need high-protein UPF ready-to-eat “meals” to lessen their GI discomfort (one can only marvel at the name of this website: “goodnes.com”).  These new UPFs are provided by the original UPF manufacturers.  This is the perfect progression of modern capitalism in the form of an industrial, ever-growing, self-licking ice cream cone (naturally, the ice cream and the cone are UPFs).

The consequences of our UPF addiction are also maladaptive in other parts of the ecosphere.  Our current food system presents us with a bleak landscape filled with food swamps and food deserts.  A food desert is an area where finding any healthy food is a challenge. [4]  A food swamp is an area inundated with outlets selling calorie-dense, ultra-processed junk and fast-food intended to be eaten on the street or in the car.  These food swamps are often healthy food deserts.

Food swamps filled with UPFs are also environmental nightmares:

Ultra-processed foods account for 30-50 percent of diet-related energy use, biodiversity loss, greenhouse-gas emissions, land use, food waste, and water use.  Emissions from UPFs increased by 245% between 1987 and 2018.  Nestlé’s emissions are  three times those of its host country, Switzerland. [5]

Two of the largest environmental culprits in the UPF business are palm oil and soy, feedstocks of the category error that is industrial agriculture.  Palm oil is used to increase their caloric load and to stabilize UPFs (saturated fats are solid at room temperature).  During the last fifty years more than half of the virgin rainforest in Indonesia has been destroyed to produce palm oil.  Soy is used to feed livestock (for example in CAFOs and feedlots):

At over 40 per cent protein, soy is ideal for bulk-feeding animals.  Soy protein isolate is used to improve ‘mouthfeel’ in UPFs and to allow the product to be marketed as high in protein.  In the meat, fish, cheese, eggs and milk we eat and drink in the UK, we’re effectively consuming over 60kg of soy every year that comes from a Wales-sized chunk of land carved out of the Amazon rain forest.

The three major consequences by Big Food’s UPF production are (1) loss of agrobiodiversity and soil health caused by the industrial production, not farming, of wheat, soy, and maize; (2) destruction of water sources for the production of UPFs, including fizzy drinks and bottled water; and (3) plastic pollution.  None of these problems needs further elaboration, but the key point is also the primary reason that capitalism “works”:

“Negative externality” is bloodless economist-speak for the price to be paid for capitalist economic growth.  A price to be paid not by the employer, but those who couldn’t insulate themselves from it by living elsewhere.  Unintended and hidden consequences that are not reflected in prices paid by consumers or received by producers.

By ignoring externalities, market prices of foods are delinked from the true cost of production.  The more costly production of healthier, more sustainable foods becomes less profitable for farmers and food businesses than the production of unhealthy food that has lower direct costs but much greater externalities.

Food systems are now destroying much more value than they create.

This is not a problem with only the food system,  But in the words of the author, Nil desperandum!  Despair not, there is reason to hope.  The high costs associated with the food system, US$15 trillion per year, including $11 trillion in health costs associated with malnutrition, point to a potential payoff that is unimaginably large even if it is overestimated by 50%, if only we could fix the food system.  This is covered in The Economics of the Food System Transformation (2024, pdf).

Which brings us to how this transformation might be accomplished.  But it is essential to remember that business per se is not the problem.  Instead, a near monopoly held by a handful of transnational corporations of neoliberal late capitalism is the problem:

Private sector is not a helpful term for us here: it’s way too broad.  We need to distinguish small- and medium sized enterprises that could collaborate in the social change process from the giants that derive their power from peddling junk food.

Nor does the solution like in public-private partnerships, because there is always incompatibility between a private interest and a public duty…For-profit corporations have a conflict of interest when they engage in public governance.

This will always be true, just as it is for Big Philanthropy, which is neocolonialism on steroids.  We as a citizens of the world must learn to ignore the “dark arts” of the persuaders and Merchants of Doubt.  This will require the removal of money from our “electoral democracy” in which one dollar equals one vote.  At the moment this is unimaginable, but we can proceed with a thought experiment that assumes a true democracy of one citizen-one vote.  Our solution will not rely on the transnational “private sector,” which is not private and will never be democratic.

Gillispie’s focus is international, as befits a global catastrophe of neocolonialism.  However, the end of this food fight will not come from Big Food or Big Philanthropy, such as the Rockefeller/Gates Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).  The solution must come from below instead of above, the world over.  It is a mistake to view colonialism that happens only in the periphery – Africa, South Asia, South America.  Colonialism happens in the Global North, too.

For example, the former rural culture of Norfolk, where most of the fresh produce in the UK is grown has been supplanted by Big Ag, is a colony.  The same is true in the American South, which has been a colony since before the American Civil War, and the American Midwest and Great Plains, which became colonies slightly later.  In each of these colonies, commodity crops are produced, not farmed, for the benefit of Big Ag and Big Food instead of the people.

In any case, food cannot be “global,” despite its commoditization in the global trade.  Food can only be local.  If we, again as citizens of the world, focus on the colonies closest to home and revive local and regional culture and foodways, the problems of an unhealthy but very profitable global food system that ignores negative externalities will dissipate and eventually disappear as Big Food shrinks into oblivion.  Yes, a thought experiment.

Still, we must figure out a way to sustainably and profitably produce food for use. [6]  This can be done, perhaps through the lens provided by Mariana Mazzucato in Mission Economy, where her plan is to mend capitalism rather than end it.  A better approach might be found in Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, which seeks “to create a balance between the needs of the people” and planet Earth.  Some would prefer that we simply pay attention to Herman Daly and start developing a better life instead of growing our way further into polycrisis.

But whatever we do, and Food Fight is a very good place to begin to plan, it will be different in the coming smaller world as the climate changes and real needs are addressed of necessity.  Eating Will Be an Agricultural Act once again, without the need of industrial “farms” mono-cropped in maize, wheat, or soy that extend beyond the horizon, and the feedlots that use their products.

Notes

[1] Primarily in the form of the so-called Green Revolution, for which Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.   The Green Revolution was a success by the metrics used in the 1960s.  But the eclipse of indigenous and regional agriculture by unaccountable transnational corporations engaged in industrial agriculture was not sustainable, except as a wealth-taking enterprise that continued colonialism in an ostensibly benign form.  Modern hybrid seeds did not improve nutritional status even as they increased productivity by conventional measures.

[2] The Michaels of Brooklyn “Fresh Tomato & Basil” sauce in my pantry that contains only tomatoes, fresh basil, fresh garlic, Italian olive oil, salt, black pepper and fresh parsley is a Group 3 food.  It is good enough (I have no desire to imitate Stanley Tucci, yet) and was purchased at a local Fresh Market, which simulates an old-fashioned market in that everything is not pre-packaged and wrapped in plastic, including at the meat counter.  The Fresh Market is more pleasant than Publix, Kroger, HEB, or Safeway, and marginally more expensive.  Conventional sauces with extenders, chemical preservatives, palm oil, hydrogenated vegetable oil, and the like are NOVA Group 4.

[3] NOVA 4 includes Fizzy drinks; packaged snacks; chocolate, ice cream; mass-produced packaged breads and buns; margarines; biscuits, cookies, pastries, breakfast cereals, energy bars; energy drinks, fruit yoghurts.  Also, pre-prepared ready-to-heat pies, pasta, pizza; chicken nuggets; pre-cooked meatballs; powdered and packaged instant foods; meal replacement shakes and powders.  These industrial products take up most of the space in the typical American supermarket.  None of them is healthy or nutritious.  All of them are manufactured to taste good and feel good.  When the occasional NOVA 4 item is considered a treat, all remains right with the world (e.g., the 6.5-ounce reusable glass bottle of Coca-Cola of my childhood).  But UPFs have become dietary staples.  And the Pause that Refreshes (ignore the AI-generated workslop at the top of the page) has become a 32-ounce, or larger, Big Gulp instead of that pause.

[4] On more than one occasion I have needed to remind a medical student that thousands of people within a few miles of our building live in food deserts where the only thing on offer at the independent “convenience” stores and bodegas are beer, other non-alcoholic fizzy drinks, UPF snacks and ready-to-eat microwavable meals, cigarettes, and lottery tickets.  Local public transit might be a four-hour round trip to a supermarket for our fellow citizens.  The people in these neighborhoods are afflicted with the usual consequences of our food system: malnourishment from being undernourished but overfed, along with hypertension, dyslipidemia, and obesity, the latter three usually undiagnosed.  The same goes for those at the local country club, too, where most of the shirts for sale in the pro shop are XL and XXL, with a few XXL.  Ozempic has become very popular in those circles.

[5] While reading Food Fight, I paid close attention to the references and sources cited.  They seem sound throughout.  The references supporting these environmental conclusions can be found here, here, and here.  They are convincing.  The only “scholars” who dispute the obesity epidemic, plastic pollution, profligate natural resource (water) and energy use, and the consequences of anthropogenic climate change are the usual economists and Merchants of Doubt along with the occasional adventitious Nobel laureate who maintains that anthropogenic global warming will not really have much of a deleterious effect on the economy.  But see the business of property and casualty insurance, Florida and California Divisions; my homeowner’s insurance has increased by 80% in the last 6-7 years despite making only one claim, far away from either state, for roof damage caused by a hailstorm, in 37 years.

[6] Profitable for the farmer, the grocer, the rancher, and the trucker instead of the shareholders and executives of Nestlé and similar Big Food transnationals.