‘Our food system is an hourglass. In one chamber are tens of thousands of farmers and ranchers, but their sands are steadily receding. In the other are hundreds of millions of eaters, whose sands continue to swell. In the narrow middle between growers and eaters sit a handful of giant corporations, what economists call an oligopoly.’
Aman Singh, Forbes magazine1
WALK INTO ANY major supermarket, almost anywhere in the world, and you’ll be confronted by a cornucopia of choice. Shelves are filled to capacity with cereals, drinks, snacks and desserts; displays are stacked with cartons, cans, bottles, bags and packets of food; boxes overflow with fresh fruit and vegetables flown in from all over the world; counters are piled high with poultry, fish and meat.
When Barry Schwartz, Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College, visited his moderately sized local supermarket in the US, he counted: ‘85 different varieties and brands of crackers . . . 285 varieties of cookies . . . 13 “sports drinks”, 65 “box drinks” for kids, 85 other flavours and brands of juices . . . 29 different chicken soups . . . 16 varieties of mash potatoes . . . 120 different pasta sauces . . . 275 varieties of cereal . . . and 175 types of tea bags.’2
While this superabundance of choice might seem sufficient to satisfy even the choosiest consumer, the range of products available from local stores pales into insignificance compared with the 50,000 or more products on offer at a major supermarket. You can find three times as many products as were available thirty years ago, yet still new ones arrive in their hundreds each and every month. According to Donald Stull, from the University of Kansas, and Michael Broadway, from Northern Michigan University: ‘In 2010 alone, more than 15,000 new foods and beverages came to market in the US. But such is the competition for our food dollar that many of these new products will fail. So much to choose from, no wonder we usually come home with stuff that wasn’t on our shopping list.’3 Yet this unprecedented range of options, this seeming ability to satisfy each and every consumer’s individual desires, masks the fact that the number of sources from which our food now comes has declined sharply over recent years. This has led some more discerning customers to ask in bewilderment: ‘Whatever have they done to our food?’
In this chapter we aim to address that question and to describe both the benefits and the less desirable consequences of the way food is now grown, processed, marketed and sold.
In their book, Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography, Peter Atkins from the University of Durham and Ian Bowler from the University of Leicester identified three successive ‘food regimes’ between the mid-1800s and today.4 Each one is characterised by very different forms of production, marketing and retailing.
Up to the early 1920s, agriculture in the UK, Europe and much of the US was based on small (typically family run) farms, with much of the produce sold locally, often within a few miles of the farm gates. The invention of the mechanical reaper in the 1840s meant that farmers could harvest five to six acres daily rather than the two acres previously possible, enabling them to move from a modest level of production to commercial agriculture.5
The construction of refrigerated ships during the 1880s meant that distance was no longer an obstacle to transporting perishable foods, such as butter, meat and fruits. As a result, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, increasing amounts of food were imported from Africa, South America and Australia. Here, the land was owned, and production mostly controlled, by white farmers who employed native labour on low wages and frequently under appalling conditions.
Farm yields peaked during the first half of the twentieth century, only to be obliterated in the USA by the Dust Bowl and, on both sides of the Atlantic, by the Great Depression. These brought the inefficiencies that plagued this method of food production and distribution into sharp focus and led to the development of the second agricultural regime.
After World War II, American concern for feeding the poor led to significant increases in agricultural production, dubbed the ‘Green Revolution’. Dr Norman Borlaug, known as the Father of the Green Revolution, dedicated his early post World War II career to improving wheat production. His goal was to develop a strain of wheat that was thick stemmed, resistant to disease and gave a higher yield than the varieties then available.6
The new semi-dwarf wheat he developed was such a success that by 1963, 95% of Mexico’s crops were varieties of this, and the average yield was six times greater than twenty years previously. Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the American National Medal of Science for his work, which has had a profound effect on our ability to provide sufficient food to the developed and developing world.7
Intended to aid the poor, and those hardest hit by droughts and crop failures, the Green Revolution was in many ways a major achievement. It takes significantly less land, and less energy to grow the same amount of food; for example, in the eighteenth century it would have required almost five acres of land to feed one person for one year. By the 1980s it took just half an acre.8 Millions were lifted out of poverty and famines were averted, with developing nations enjoying a boost in food security as the Western world transferred the knowledge from its scientific and industrial revolutions into agriculture.9 It is estimated that Borlaug’s practices saved over a billion lives.10
However, the results of the Green Revolution were not uniformly positive. The fusion between science and agriculture paved the way towards new practices in irrigation and the increasing use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Many scientists believe that these developments have brought with them a host of new problems, perhaps eroding many of the so called benefits. Indian physicist Vandana Shiva, for example, dismissed the Green Revolution as a hoax by Big Agriculture, simply a vehicle for large agribusiness to exploit soil and capitalise on poor farmers. This has led her to suggest that these techniques have left Indian crops more vulnerable to drought and reliant on ‘poisonous’ agrochemicals.11 When Borlaug tried to employ similar strategies in Africa in the 1980s, the World Bank and Ford Federation had to reduce funding as a result of pressure from environmental lobbyists.12 Environmental lobbyists often cite the fact that business interests will complicate agricultural practice, and will destroy biodiversity and soil quality in the process.
Moreover, while the Green Revolution was originally aimed to address the food production needs of the most destitute, the new agricultural crops began to be used to produce more food for the wealthy as well. Food became a commodity to be manufactured, with the farmers providing ‘inputs’ to a production system, which acts as a direct feeder to Big Business, rather than ‘outputs’ for direct human consumption.13
For example, cocoa, coconut, rubber, bananas, tea and coffee were produced on ‘large-scale, mono-cultural, capital intensive farms employing hired workers and with management and supervision by expatriates . . . often under control of agribusiness corporations.’14
Products, such as sugar and oil, which had once originated exclusively in the tropics, started being sourced closer to home through crop substitution – sugar beet and high-fructose corn syrup in place of sugar cane; soy and rape seed oil rather than palm and coconut oil. Big businesses became more interested in food production as new farming efficiencies (afforded by advances in technology) paved the way for larger and larger profits.
Academic researchers coined the term ‘Big Food’ to describe the mighty conglomerates which have arisen to dominate the food markets in the US, Europe and, increasingly, the developed world.15 The inevitable consequence of the abundance of low-cost crops, and the takeovers and mergers of the 1980s, is that much of today’s heavily processed food is marketed and retailed by just a handful of huge corporations that wield tremendous economic and political power.
In the US, half of all food is produced by just ten of such corporations: Ferrero, General Mills, Grupo Bimbo, Kellogg’s, Kraft Foods, Mars, Nestlé, PepsiCo, the Coca-Cola Company and Unilever.16
The continuing pursuit of profits in the food industry has led to the rise of what is termed ‘Food Fordism’.17 By breaking down complex manufacturing tasks into a series of simple, repetitive ones which, while requiring specialised tools, could be carried out by relatively unskilled labour, Ford created the template now used in today’s food industry. The journey of food from field to factory to retailer is now organised like an industrial production line. This has enabled transnational corporations to satisfy worldwide demands for low-cost food.
Today, of the £19 billion in UK food exports, £11 billion consists of highly processed food, and £6.4 billion of lightly processed food, while only £1.4 billion is made up of unprocessed foods.18
The erosion of food cost and explosion of food supply has not happened without serious health consequences. It is the power of mass production and the desire to increase profit margins that has led to our supermarket shelves being filled with the cheap HED foods which are so tempting and potentially so dangerous.
Although not among the regimes listed by Atkins and Bowler, we would add a fourth category that seems set to transform the face of the countryside for ever within the next few decades. By 2050 at the latest, farms as we know them today will have almost ceased to exist. Those few that remain are likely to be either niche producers catering to a small number of high-income consumers, or else heritage sites and visitor attractions. They will otherwise have become too costly and inefficient to survive.
Since both of us come from farming backgrounds, we make this prediction with great sadness. But, given the rise of the global population, which the UN predicts will have increased by 2.5 billion by 2050, and the need to curb greenhouse gas emission, which the UN estimates could have increased by 30% through agriculture alone in the same time, it is clear a different approach will have to be taken.19
Even today, 80% of the land suitable for cultivating food is already in use. By 2050 it is estimated that 70% of the population will live in cities.20 As a result, many experts see low-energy, city-based farms as the only option to safeguard the environment whilst ensuring that sufficient food is produced. While cereals such as wheat and corn will still be grown in the open air, fruits and vegetables are far more likely to be planted and harvested by robots than traditional farmers. Livestock, too, will be tended and monitored by sophisticated, computer-controlled machinery. The people still employed in farming are as likely to be computer technicians and engineers as agriculture specialists.
This future has already arrived in the Netherlands. At Hoeve Rosa farm in the Dutch province of Limburg, robots monitor and care for the wellbeing of 180 cows.21 They milk them when required, keep their stalls clean, and alert farmer Fons Kersten via a phone app should one of the animals need his attention. Since installing the machines in 2008, at a cost of 500,000 euros ($730,000), Fons Kersten has been able to double his number of dairy animals and has seen the yield from each cow rise between 10% and 15%. And Dutch scientists have developed robots fitted with cameras to assess when tomato plants need a shot of pesticide. These machines are reported to have reduced total pesticide usage by up to 85%.
Soon fruit and vegetables will grow not in the soil and under the sun, but in hydroponic factories with liquids providing the nutrients and LEDs the light. Located in Portage, Indiana, 50 km outside Chicago, is Green Sense Farms, the world’s largest vertical farm. Here herbs and leafy greens are cultivated in 25-ft-high carousels under 7,000 LEDs. Because these lamps produce less heat than fluorescent lights, the plants can grow in much closer proximity to them. This means that rather than expending energy growing upward, the plants grow outward and become denser and leafier. Their roots are planted not in soil but in nutrient-enriched water trickled over pulverised coconut husks; not only does this keep the plants clean and free from pests, they are also reported to be ten times denser, with yields up to 30 times greater than conventionally grown plants.22 They are also far more environmentally friendly, significantly reducing both the water use and the carbon footprint of every plant grown. ‘The lettuces are more intensely flavoured and crisp,’ says CEO Robert Colangelo. ‘We can generate 150 heads per tub every 30 days.’23
The food business currently revolves around making huge quantities of energy-dense yet nutritionally poor food using the cheapest possible ingredients. This allows for excellent profit margins – but at the expense of a surge in global obesity. Problematically, the new agri-tech could actually just make matters worse by making it cheaper than ever to do that. Yet, with these new advances, fresh, non-processed foods could also be much more readily available, even in the poorest parts of the planet.
It is to be hoped that we will indeed see people in Western industrialized countries revert to more traditional ways of eating. Yet, just as we begin to reap the benefits of traditional diets once more, the crest of the high-fat, high-sweet tsunami is beginning to break on those living in developing countries. Academics and dieticians often argue that Big Food is responsible for the phenomenon known as the ‘nutrition transition’. This is the change, particularly in lower- and middle-income countries, from a traditional local diet to Western-style consumption – unprocessed foods rich in nutrients and fibre are replaced by the same processed foods, high in sugar, salt and fat, with which we have become so familiar.
We’ve repeatedly mentioned the prevalence of cheap ‘processed’ foods in the world today, but have yet to explore what exactly we mean by this term. It is time that we did so.
In a sense, there is nothing new about processing food. It began the moment humans discovered how to cook meat, grind grain into flour, and to pickle, salt and smoke food to preserve it. However, with the Industrial Revolution came the technology, organisation and investment capital which enabled processes such as milling, refining, distilling and fermenting on a large scale, meaning foods ranging from bread and jam to sugar, beer and wine could be mass produced.24
‘Our ancestors ate whole grains . . .’ comments Dr Gene-Jack Wang, chair of the medical department at the US Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York, ‘but we’re eating white bread. American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup.’25
Unfortunately, only a minority of today’s shoppers understand what constitutes a ‘processed’ food. They often assume that the term only refers to a small number of manufactured products. In fact, with the exception of fresh fruits and vegetables, anything that comes in a box, tin or bag can be considered processed. According to a controversial paper by the food industry-linked American Society of Nutrition, there is nothing wrong with this, since processed foods ‘make up an essential part of the American diet.’
‘Many staples in the diet, such as bread, cheese, and wine, bear little or no resemblance to their starting commodities,’ points out lead author Connie Weaver, from the Department of Nutrition Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette. ‘[They] are highly processed and prepared but are often not regarded as “processed” by consumers.’26 The logic being that, because, say, bread doesn’t look anything like yeast, flour and water, it’s hardly surprising that a lot of foods go through radically transformative processes. Not everyone has been entirely convinced by this line of thought.
Interestingly, the majority of members (7 of the 12) on the editorial board of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which published the contentious article, list major corporate affiliations. ‘The list of food companies for which they consult or advise is too long to reproduce,’ says Marion Nestle in her blog on Food Politics, ‘but it includes Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, The Sugar Association, The National Restaurant Association, ConAgra, McDonald’s, Kellogg’s, Mars, and many others.’27
While we are certainly not suggesting that anything improper occurred in the writing or publication of this article, such potential conflicts of interest could raise questions in the minds of others.
One problem we see with the article is that the authors fail to draw any distinction between the sort of ‘processing’ involved in washing, freezing and packing products such as fruit and vegetables, and what has been termed ‘ultra-processing’.
Many ultra-processed products are created from substances extracted from whole foods, such as the remnants of animals or inexpensive ingredients such as ‘refined’ starches, sugars, fats and oils, preservatives, and other additives.28 While perfectly legal, many of these products are in effect fake foods; they may be engineered to look, smell and taste like familiar foods, but they are not always quite what the consumer imagines them to be.
‘At the extreme, these are foods that all but glow in the dark,’ says David Katz, of Yale’s Prevention Research Center, speaking of ultra-processed foods. ‘On the other hand, cooking, freezing, drying, and fermenting are also forms of “processing”, making grilled salmon, frozen peas, dried figs, and organic plain yogurt “processed foods” too. So much depends on just what we mean.’29
One of the most controversial processed foods of all is what the meat industry describes as ‘lean, finely textured beef’ (LFTB). Critics have dubbed it ‘pink slime’ or Soylent Pink.fn1 Used in foods such as hamburgers as an additive, LFTB is manufactured from leftover beef scraps after the production of the usual cuts of meat.
To produce it, these unwanted remnants, which might once have been used as animal feed, are first heated to around 100°F. They are then dumped into giant grinders, to deal with the fat, bone, cartilage and connective tissues, before being placed in a centrifuge. Here they are spun at 3,000 revolutions a minute while being exposed to ammonia hydroxide gas to kill bacteria. From there the meat travels to 14-ft tall drums, where it is flattened by giant rollers and frozen to produce a lighter colour. Finally, it is transferred to a grinder to produce a 60-lb ‘meat brick’ ready for shipment to hamburger manufacturers and other processed-food producers.
Following a controversial US TV programme from celebrity chef Jamie Oliver on the subject of this ‘pink slime’, many major customers cancelled their orders, forcing plant closures. The industry fought back, with Beef Products Inc., the leading producer of the filler, opening its plant in South Sioux City, Nebraska, to journalists and local governors.
‘We’re trying to get people to eat better and now what is going to happen because of this unmerited, unwarranted food scare, and that’s what it is . . . you’re going to drive up the price of lean ground beef,’ Kansas governor Sam Brownback told reporter Andrew Stern.30
While many will find the way LFTB is manufactured unattractive, the meat is perfectly safe to eat. Amongst the vast host of different processed foods, it is arguably far from being the most dangerous from a health point of view; high-fructose corn syrup and even refined sugar are likely to present more of a health risk, given how inclined we are to overconsume sweet foods.
For this reason, we need to be equally sceptical about health scares as we are about ‘super’ foods. The kinds of foods that blatantly encourage passive overconsumption, such as those high in sugar, salt and fat are the ones we really need to be worried about. Other foods, however unpleasant they are to manufacture, may not be as ‘unhealthy’, and the sensationalistic warnings they attract derive from the way they are made, as opposed to the effect they have on our body.
As Mark Twain remarked: ‘Those that respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made.’
The phrase ‘Big Snack’ was coined by Carlos Monteiro from the University of São Paulo and Geoffrey Cannon from the World Public Nutrition Association in Rio de Janeiro31 to describe companies that exclusively produce packaged, long-shelf-life products designed to replace meals.
With many of these hyper-palatable, energy-dense foods being specifically formulated to be addictive, they have become key factors in the development of obesity. The famous 1963 slogan on Lay’s potato chips – ‘Betcha can’t just eat one’ – ‘might have seemed cute and innocent . . .’ comments author Michael Moss, ‘but today the familiar phrase has a sinister connotation because of our growing vulnerability to convenience foods, and our growing dependence on them. “Betcha can’t eat just one” starts sounding less like a light hearted dare – and more like a kind of promise. The food industry really is betting on its ability to override the natural checks that keep us from overeating.’32
Monteiro and Cannon share his concerns. ‘Governments and international institutions now tend to cede their prime duty to protect the public interest to vast transnational corporations whose primary responsibility is to their shareholders,’ they claim. ‘The prevailing political, economic, and commercial policies and practices have also given these corporations freedom to expand across borders. Consequently, the leading food and drink product corporations are now colossal concerns. Their brands sell throughout the world in outlets that range from large supermarkets to filling stations, and from restaurants to kiosks.’33
On one point, all health professionals are in agreement. Action needs to be taken by regulators to counter the obesity-producing power of the modern snack. In Brazil, where adult obesity levels are around 14%, the caloric contribution made by such ultra-processed foods has risen from around 20% in the 1980s to 28% today and is predicted to climb as high as 60% over the next few years. It may not be too surprising to learn at this point that the nationality which consumes the greatest number of snacks, Brazilians, have a 37% higher probability of developing obesity.34
The food industry has invested millions of research dollars in creating snacks and other products that are, quite literally, irresistible. In his ground breaking book, Sugar, Salt, Fat, American investigative journalist Michael Moss describes an economic equation that captures the way our concerns for health are overridden by the pleasant and rewarding feelings associated with eating junk food. The ‘bliss point’ is an economic term referring to the moment where a consumer is completely satisfied; as we saw in Chapter 9, in the context of food it refers to the point where sugar, fat and salt are optimised for palatability.35
While we may view our own tastes as inherently unique, many human flavour preferences are about the same. For example, 10% sucrose solution achieves maximum pleasantness; and, perhaps not surprisingly, most soft drinks hover around this 10% sweetness mark, enjoying enormous popularity.36 Sensory scientists work within the food industry to create foods that align with innate taste preferences like this.
‘Humans like sweetness, but how much?’ asks psychologist Robert McBride, founder of Sensometrics, a Sydney-based research company. ‘Pleasure from food is not a diffuse concept, it can be measured just as the physical, chemical and nutritional factors can be measured. For all ingredients in food and drink, there is an optimum concentration at which the sensory pleasure is maximal. This optimum level is called the bliss point. The bliss point is a powerful phenomenon and dictates what we eat and drink more than we realize.’37
Yet, as industry veteran Howard Moskowitz told us: ‘Bliss points are hard to find. We know they exist, we know they’re evolved, but they also depend on the person and the time.’38 Moreover, there is significant pressure to produce blockbuster products; 75% of all processed food concepts fail, and only 3% are capable of generating revenue for years beyond initial launch.39
In most regions of the world, the ingredients in food, whether heavily processed or not, have legally to be stated on the label; however, research suggests that only a minority of consumers actually take the time to read this information. This isn’t all that surprising – it’s typically in a small print, often further obscured through the use of coloured type.
In a study in our lab we used eye-tracking technology to analyse how much attention people pay to food labels. People were fitted with glasses that tracked the movements of their eyes, meaning we could see what parts of the packaging they looked at, in what order, and for how long. Given a packet of processed ‘honey roast ham’, for example, nearly all our participants looked only at the colour photograph on the front of the packaging and read the product description printed in large, easy-to-read type. Fewer than one in ten took the time to turn the pack over to study the far smaller and more difficult-to-read list of ingredients. Had they done so, it would have been apparent to them just how much additional sugar, fat and salt it contained.
Even if you do read the label, the information is often presented in complex nutritional jargon, which can mask both the number of calories and the amount of salt, sugar and fat a product contains. How many consumers, for example, would understand that ‘sorbitol’ and ‘xylitol’ are actually sugars produced by alcohol?40
For millions of consumers around the world, fast food is, overwhelmingly, the preferred way to eat out. In 1987, McDonald’s had 951 restaurants worldwide. By 2002 this had grown to 7,135, and today there are an estimated 32,000. 41 In America, the number of fast-food restaurants per capita doubled between 1972 and 1999, as obesity rates climbed from 13.9% to 29.6%.42
Nor is fast food only available from outlets on the streets of towns and cities. More than 500 US universities and college campuses offer fast food, as do over 5,000 schools. More than 95% of American schoolchildren are able to identify Ronald McDonald, the McDonald’s clown, a character whose popularity is second only to Santa Claus.43 Unsurprisingly, due to its generally high calorie content, large (and increasing) portion sizes, and use of processed meat, refined carbohydrates, unhealthy fats, and high levels of salt and sugar, fast food has been linked with both obesity and cardio-metabolic diseases in both developed and developing nations.44
Despite this, the extent to which it contributes to obesity remains contentious.45 Only recently have researchers started investigating the strength of the association between the two. The World Health Organization has found that fast-food consumption is independently and positively associated with Body Mass Index (BMI).46 That is to say, the greater the concentration of fast-food outlets, the higher the mean BMI for the population as a whole; with each additional fast-food restaurant leading to a fractional increase in BMI.47
Unfortunately this also means that transnational food corporations are among the leading vectors for the global spread of obesity and other non-communicable disease risks associated with an HED diet.48 Small wonder, then, that most scientists and public health advocates support the regulation of both the fast food and Big Food industries.49
It was the tobacco industry that pioneered corporate techniques for influencing the public, the press and policymakers by shifting the focus of attention on their products away from the true consequences of consuming them.50 A notorious tactic from the Big Tobacco playbook is what trans-nationals euphemistically refer to as their ‘corporate social responsibility’ programmes. CSRs are an ‘evolving concept’ that includes a company’s ability to ‘play nicely’ and accept accountability for economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic commitments to society in addition to its financial duties and accountability to shareholders.51 ‘Cause marketing’ is a type of CSR that connects a company to a specific social benefit or ‘good cause’, often a community initiative or organisation that benefits from the sale of a product or brand.52 In many cases CSRs are responsible for a great deal of good work, for which their companies should be given credit. However, we should also be aware that they can be used exploitatively; giving the impression that a company is behaving responsibly when in fact this is far from being true.
By substituting an unrelated charity, the organisation circumvents the real responsibility in acknowledging the problems with their products. In the case of Big Tobacco, the cancer risk is ignored, while charitable donations are promoted and celebrated. Big Food, many critics would argue, have adopted a similar approach by encouraging healthy, active lifestyles as opposed to dealing with actual caloric value of the foods they produce. This is an indirect way of dealing with mounting concerns about the effects of their products, and the way they are marketed, on public health.53
The American Beverage Association (ABA) is an industry trade group that lobbies energetically against taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages. ABA members, primarily consisting of beverage companies, are part of the front group ‘Americans Against Food Taxes’, which has aired a $10-million TV campaign against taxing beverages, promoting individual responsibility as the primary remedy for obesity.54
Encouraging personal responsibility is the first defence for both the tobacco industry and food industry. Yes, everyone should be encouraged to take personal responsibility for their health and what they consume, yet at the same time, the relationship between obesity and personal responsibility is not a straightforward one. Campaigns such as those funded by the Americans Against Food Taxes need to be considered in the context of the fact that sugary beverages can play an important role in the development of the pathologies associated with obesity discussed in Chapter 5. 55
While in developed countries education and awareness mean that companies have to address the potentially negative consequences of consuming their products head on like this, in the developing world people are only just beginning to learn about the effects that processed food can have on bodyweight. The food industry is increasingly targeting developing countries as regions for expansion.56 In Vietnam and India, per-capita consumption of soft drinks is projected to have doubled from 1997 to 2015, and in Egypt, China, Tunisia, Cameroon and Morocco, consumption of soft drinks is estimated to have increased by about 50% within the same time frame. The changing consumption patterns of these nations speak for themselves: Mexicans now drink more Coca-Cola than milk.57 Furthermore, studies have found that a 1% rise in soft drink consumption results in an additional 4.8 overweight and 2.3 obese adults per 100 of the population.58
Between 1971 and 1995, the UK lost over 120,000 independent retailers; Spain 34,000; West Germany 115,000 and France 105,000. They had been driven out of business by the purchasing power of the supermarkets; few small grocery stores remain.59 Today, the top five UK supermarkets sell more than 70% of all groceries bought, up from 29% in 1973. 60 In the US the largest five supermarkets were found to control 48% of the market in 2005, up from 24% in 1997. 61 The number of Wal-Mart outlets alone increased by 50% between 2001 and 2005, standing at more than 11,000 today.62
Because these ‘Big Box’ retailers often purchase processed foods at large discounts, they are able to significantly reduce their price, encouraging consumers to purchase, and therefore consume, more.63
So, what people eat is increasingly driven by a few multinational food companies and retailers; the world’s food system today is more like an oligopoly than a competitive market place of small producers. This set-up may directly impact obesity rates, as a handful of retailers buy the majority of their stock from a handful of large food companies. It may seem as though we have a dizzying array of choices in the supermarket, yet to a large extent we are simply being presented with a cascade of energy-dense foods, all more or less the same, yet packaged and reformulated to convey the idea of choice.
There has been a certain amount of pushback against the rise of the supermarkets. The past decade has seen a rapid growth in the popularity of locally produced food and farmers’ markets, the resurgence of the latter originating in California. There are now more than 8,000 farmers’ markets in the US, and around 500 in the UK, while farm shops have often been transformed into extensive food halls attracting thousands of customers weekly.64 In 2013, a survey found that a third of British households shopped in farmers’ markets on a regular basis. Locally produced food, with its apparent environmental benefits and reputation for being healthier, have a powerful feel-good factor which appeals to many consumers.
Some economists, however, warn against what has been termed the ‘locavore’ movement.65 There is also growing scepticism among environmentalists. While it may seem like a better way to shop, ultimately substituting farmers’ markets for our current industrialised food production techniques could actually jeopardise the climate further, leading to a greater use of chemicals and increased acreage under cultivation to meet food demands.66 In the longer term, it could also endanger world food supplies, making food scarcity for the most vulnerable an even greater concern. The high crop yields and low costs we take for granted would be under immense threat were such local markets to become mandatory or enforced by law. According to Kevin Frediani, head of sustainable land use at Devon-based Bicton College, in the southwest of England, a head of lettuce grown in Spain and then transported by road to the UK has a carbon footprint of around 1.5 kg. The same lettuce produced under glass in the UK has a footprint of about 1.8 kg. ‘We just don’t have the light,’ he explains, ‘and glass is extremely inefficient at keeping heat in.’67
So, despite seeming a more natural, authentic way to produce food, trying to turn back the clock to a past age of food production is not a viable solution if we are to have any hope of feeding the planet; and so we are back to the need to use efficient new agri-tech methods to mass-produce nutritious food, as described earlier in the chapter.
In summary, food is now one of the world’s most heavily marketed commodities, and one of the most cleverly and astutely marketed at that.68 And, unfortunately, the current reality is that the tastier and less nutritious a food is, the more profitable it is, too – a state of affairs which is likely to remain until new, more efficient models for growing nutritious foods are widely adopted. With their low production costs, long shelf-life and high retail value, such fat and sugar-laden foods are more likely to sell than products that may be less pleasant to eat but are significantly better for our health. Since they have a responsibility to their shareholders, companies naturally want to go for the least risky option.
Fat bottom lines indeed.
fn1 Derived from ‘Soylent Green’, the name of a new food in the 1973 film of the same name. Soylent Green was a government euphemism for introducing cannibalism as a way of feeding an ever-growing population. The film was based on Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room!