You do it to yourself, you do

You and no-one else

[Thom Yorke, 1995]

It’s a great song, but when it comes to most people on our planet, it just isn’t true.

Which made this recent Guardian headline jump off the screen the other day:

‘At least 80% responsibility for ill health in old age down to individual, study says’

Where to start with this?

Well, first of all, it’s not a ‘study,’ it’s a short report, written by ‘four long-time friends’ who came together in Oxford in 2021.

The first report of the Oxford Longevity Project…which implies more will follow.

It’s funded from the profits made by Oxford Healthspan, a company that sells spermidine – a supplement ‘sourced from Japan, guided by Oxford science that’s designed to support cellular renewal and healthy aging from within.’

The report is essentially a series of anecdotal opinion pieces (‘chapters’) by each of the four friends. It has just 10 citations, none of which are to scientific studies, most of which are self-citations.

The 80% number appears to have been pulled out of thin air.

The authors don’t declare any conflicts of interest, despite one of their top recommendations being a judicious use of supplements.

But worst of all, the report completely ignores the work of hundreds of scientists who for many years have been investigating and documenting the major upstream social, commercial, economic, political and environmental determinants of health.

Discussions of the way poverty, inequity, racism, childhood trauma intersect and interact with health are not mentioned.

To state the obvious, there are reams of scientific papers that show that most chronic diseases, including heart disease, cancers, dementia, diabetes are heavily impacted by factors that, in the main, are beyond individual control. Structural, not behavioural, factors.

This all varies with regard to who we are, where we are and what we’ve lived through (our ‘exposome’) and it will vary by disease – but cumulatively, for most people, these risks are far, far larger than any we can control by what we choose to do.

The lifestyle deception

‘Lifestyle’ is a word that was confected and propagated by industries to obscure and deceive – to distract us from the harms they were generating. To keep the spotlight on the consumer, not the product or the practices behind it.

‘eat a balanced diet as part of a healthy lifestyle’

‘Lifestyle’ frames public health at a personal level – effectively blaming individuals for making irrational decisions that are harmful to their health.

The logic of this framing is that we are to blame when things go wrong, when we get sick. The false narrative of ‘individual empowerment’ is not just a smokescreen, it’s a get-out-of-jail card for both industry and government.

Big Food can conveniently obviate responsibility for harms, just as it passes the cost of these harms down the line to individuals, households and health systems.

The lifestyle deception aligns with the ‘nanny state’ argument made by libertarians and passive governments. Libertarian think tanks (sic) even have ‘lifestyle economists’ while ‘lifestyle medicine’ gurus flood social media with ‘nutritional advice’.

It’s so seductive (including to Guardian editors!) because it sounds so empowering, at a time when trust in our public institutions is so low.

But it’s a deception, a smokescreen that stigmatizes, alienates and insults people.

If something is addictive, how can it be described as a choice?

If you’re too poor to access or afford a healthy diet, how is that a choice?

Are young children expected to exercise personal responsibility?

If these are not choices, then you’re not personally responsible.

And it’s counter-productive — the failure of the nudge theory of behavioural change, as recently admitted by its proponents, is just one example.

The wild west of wellness

The ideology of lifestyle and personal responsibility is foundational to the multi-trillion-dollar wellness industry that now encompasses myriad products and practices affecting health and well-being. (I wrote about its dangers earlier)

Just out is this excellent perspective piece by Nancy Karreman and colleagues that applies a commercial determinants of health lens to ‘wellness’, examining its intersections with systems of capital production, corporate interests, and neoliberal norms of personal responsibility.

The wellness industry (‘Big Well,’ if you will) comprises the commercialisation, business activity, and financialisation of wellness.

And boy, is it financialised!

One estimate puts its value at $6.8 trillion in 2024, with projected growth to $9 trillion by 2028.

An industry that revolves around supplements, into which Big Food is now moving fast. (Nestlé for example is buying up supplement and lifestyle companies, including the Living Matrix functional medicine platform and the ‘lifestyle brand’ Vital Proteins)

Wellness is still the wild west. An industry that’s barely regulated as its products are not considered to be medical products and they have no novel ingredients. Rarely tested, they’re assumed to pose little risk to consumers.

Safety and effectiveness are of course two different things. If a product is safe but not effective, then you’re wasting money. If it’s neither safe nor effective you’re wasting your money and your health.

Just as ultra-processed products displace healthy foods, wellness products displace other conventional, evidence-based therapies and products (e.g. chemotherapy regimens to treat cancers.)

And money continues to be made.

Economic structures underpinning the wellness industry overlap and intersect with those enabling Big Pharma and Big Food. (‘now we’ll sell you the cure’)

It’s fuelled by the digital revolution which amplifies misinformation. Social media disseminates and amplifies health messaging while being itself a commercial determinant of health. Especially mental health. (most anti-vax disinformation comes from 12 wellness influencers according to a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2021)

Karreman also examines the ‘wellness to alt right’ pipeline whereby wellness is increasingly associated with right-wing political positions and values.

MAHA in the US is a case in point as it has finally come to be seen for what it is. A movement that has not tackled the systemic problems with food and health systems, as it promised. Instead MAHA recommends new research and data (while research and data organisations are being decimated), lifestyle change programs and industry self-regulation, none of which will make much of a difference.

This take on MAHA was one of the earliest and one of the best, starring RFK Jr. as one in a long historical line of wellness influencers:

“Like religion, wellness doesn’t captivate by empirically proving its truth to adherents. But it does meet certain psychological needs. By contrast, the crucial project of the U.S. public-health apparatus is not to soothe its citizens’ existential woes, but to make policies that address the health of the masses. An administration that prioritizes the sacraments of wellness above all—especially if it undermines the efficacy of vaccines, cuts funding for infectious-disease research, and reduces regulation around raw milk—won’t make Americans healthier.”

And there’s this vid on the ‘MAHA funnel’ linking up conspiracy fantasies, healthcare demonisation (including anti-vax) and the brazen promotion of supplements and hacks by influencers who are invested in them.

MAHA was always going to be trumped by MAGA.

*

The personal empowerment/individual responsibility/freedom of choice narrative is still deeply entrenched in the UK, as recent work has shown.

This scoping review by Nestor Serrano-Fuentes and colleagues shows that across the domains of the public, mass media and government, poor diet and obesity are almost consistently framed as being an individual responsibility.

Interestingly, in this review, left-wing media appeared to be more likely to focus on underlying structural drivers of ill-health (though apparently not with regard to the Guardian and the Oxford Longevity Project, it seems!)

The UK review didn’t cover academia as a domain. But here we see academia (Oxford University, no less) amplifying industry narratives which are then further amplified by the mainstream media.

To do

For an evidence-informed read on what drives ill-health, check out various Lancet series from recent years, including the commercial determinants of health (2023) and the ultra-processed food (2025) series. And have a read of Devi Sridhar’s excellent book .

None of the above implies that we don’t have any responsibility…that everything is pre-determined or driven by forces beyond ourselves. Of course not. We have agency – both individual and collective – but the sad reality is some have a lot less than others.

What we really need is a radical shift in public, media and policy framing to drive strong regulatory action by governments.

Media need to find better ways to counter the pollution of discourse on food and health and to tell the stories that really matter. One part of this, would be to inoculate the public by exposing the commercial origins of language used to distract from real causes. Words like ‘litterbug’, (carbon) ‘footprint’, ‘nanny state’, ‘lifestyle’, ‘climate change’ (not crisis), ‘global warming’ (not heating) – that all originate from industries keen to pass the buck on to us.

With a more truthful, evidence-informed framing of the drivers of ill-health, we can better demand our governments protect all citizens from public health harms.

Fifteen years ago, at IFPRI, we launched a five-year programme with a five-partner consortium called Transform Nutrition. It was an exciting time when funding and action to reduce malnutrition was on the up after years in the doldrums.

For our initial bid to DFID, we needed a name to capture the energy and drive. We decided it should be a verb in its command form, not a noun. And it definitely wasn’t going to be an acronym.

At that point, funding was skewed to diagnostic deep-dives of problems, evaluations of interventions and to scaling up.

But this was our chance to go above and beyond and investigate the black box of the political economy of malnutrition and what it would take to cultivate and sustain an enabling environment for nutrition.

‘Transform’ was the aspiration then.

(Over time, we did get to deal with politics, but we didn’t address commercial determinants of malnutrition. Our donors were still prioritising undernutrition and they weren’t keen for us to go beyond policy and programmes.)

All this was before ‘food systems transformation’ took off as a goal of numerous organisations and initiatives. Some of whom viewed it as aspirational, some as operational.

An analysis by Scott Slater and colleagues showed that between 2016 and 2020 there were 42 major food systems reports. Nearly one a month.

This is a bit disturbing in itself — do we really need all these?

The analysis was aimed at comparing their stated goal (food system transformation) to the recommendations to achieve it. We’ll come back to this.

But first…

What is food systems transformation?

Well, it’s hardly surprising there are several definitions and conceptualisations.

Ioan Fazey and John Colvin of the Transforming UK Food Systems Programme (in an introductory guide to transformation in 2023) highlight key features, which I’ve boiled down to this.

• Transformation is a fundamental systemic change that occurs over time. It is not adjustment or reform. It is political and involves shifting patterns of power, agency and inclusion. It requires a shared aspirational vision of a future system and it’s driven by many different actors.

We can look at transformative change visually.

First, here’s a graphic from a 2018 FSG report:

Second, from Vivica Kraak and Kim Niewolny’s 2024 review of food system governance frameworks and models that were used to develop this typology:

(I discussed this in an earlier post: ‘Are we transforming?’ )

And third, from a recent paper by Dori Patay and colleagues:

So, what did Slater et al find in their review?

A huge disconnect. Most studies were about incremental reform (e.g. labelling, product ingredients), not transformation.

In 2026, we still get multiple reports, reviews and papers on food systems transformation.

Last month, one was published in Science ‘Strategies for achieving healthy, sustainable and equitable dietary transitions’ It’s a useful paper in focusing on the ‘missing middle’ in the food system – key actors that tend to be missed out in discussions.

This lively graphic shows the strategies (around the outside) and their relationships to key actors in the system. Unsurprisingly, not so different to those emerging from the EAT-Lancet 2025 report.

But there’s something else missing, it seems to me. Certain actors who have immense power are nowhere to be seen.

Where are the upstream investors — the hedge funds and asset management firms?

We have a heavily financialised food system (dominated by the Big Three). Check this report, just released by the Society for International Development: Feeding Profits, Starving People: How Food Financialization Is Eating The Planet

Where are the politicians?

Where are the corporate lobbyists who aim to defuse, dilute and delay regulation?

The chart is focused on product and process, not politics and power.

Deep in the report, however, there is this statement:

‘The main challenge is political: to ensure regulation that resists interest group capture so that state interventions meant to advance sustainability, health, and equity objectives are not instead turned into instruments that reinforce the power of regulated, commercial firms’

But there’s a stronger emphasis on behavioral change and nudges.

‘Nudges to caution purchasers about unhealthy food and suggest healthier alternatives likewise show promise’

(On nudge, it’s interesting to see how two of its original proponents have changed tack. In their new book It’s on You , behavioral scientists Nick Chater and George Loewenstein show how corporate power deploys a clever sleight of hand – blaming individuals for social problems, with behavioral economics an unwitting accomplice, while lobbying against systemic changes that could actually help. Real progress, they now argue, requires rewriting the social and economic rulebook for the common good. Here’s a review by Duncan Green.)

A similar set of findings emerged from another analysis last year by Tanita Northcott et al. The predominance of informational measures and consumer education in nutrition policies is well known, but this analysis shows this bias empirically and specifically in relation to ultra-processed food (UPF)-related regulatory interventions. Interventions mainly target consumer choices – not businesses in food supply chains, or the structural and broader systems-level drivers of the rise of UPFs in human diets. The onus is still on individuals to change their behaviour. The UPF industry is not challenged.

And here’s a 2025 report from FAO: ‘Transforming food and agriculture through a systems approach’. There’s a lot to admire in it. Though, while it speaks of power struggles, it’s not clear who is involved. There’s no discussion of the power and purpose of the food oligopolies that have captured every stage from farm to fork in our global food system.

None of these words actually appear in the report: corporate, corporation, commercial, profit, ultra-processed.

The report does mention ‘power relations’ as 1 of 10 key relationships to consider, with the example of ‘concentration of market power among transnational agribusinesses, production, exports and food manufacturers.’ But it’s a bit apolitical as a manifesto on real transformation.

Along similar lines, another paper emerged last week that used the CGIAR (host network of my former employer, IFPRI) as a case study. ‘No systems transformation without systems literacy’ is an intriguing paper that triggered memories in me of struggles to get beyond ‘publish or perish’ and ‘impact or implode’ incentives. To break free of logframes, top-down theories of change, donor demands, including the need to demonstrate short term impacts, conveniently attributable to their funding!

These are all highlighted in the paper. Systems literacy is key but we still need a sea change in thinking and action on transformation itself.

Unveiling purpose and power

In 2024, I started this newsletter with a post about power. Power is a lead character in my book. And, as we see, it’s the silent elephant in the room in discussions about food system transformation.

If it’s mentioned at all, it’s in phrases like this ‘managing power dynamics’ or ‘navigating power asymmetries’.

We hardly ever see an explicit statement of intent or course of actions to actually change the balance of power in food systems.

Most food system report recommendations – as Slater revealed – focus on ‘first-order’ change i.e. surface-level adjustments to minor parameters, without fundamentally altering underlying structure or system dynamics.

This is not transformation, it’s tweaking at the margins – piecemeal incrementalism that effectively just supports business-as-usual.

Development discourse is replete with co-opted and sanitised phrases and concepts – that’s not new. It’s so much easier to talk about managing things rather than changing them.

But words matter – they’re the lifeblood of stories, the source of epistemic power. Don’t we need to be more specific in our language and ditch the clichés and slogans?

To me, the acid test in transform-speak is whether these three ‘Ps’ are addressed:

• Purpose – profit…or people and planet?

• Power – what forms, who uses it, for what purpose?

• Process – what is actually happening (actions not words)?

We should remember Rebecca Solnit: “the purpose of a system is what it does”

Of course, it’s not easy.

In 2022, Chris Béné wrote ‘Why the Great Food Transformation may not happen’ in which he highlighted four big, self-reinforcing, forces that lock food systems in their present state:

1. resistance to change by transnational corporations and their shareholders

2. divergence in interests and values of governments and citizens

3. technological innovation driven by profit (not sustainability), and

4. failure of science, due to a dysfunctional ‘politics of evidence’.

I think we’ve also seen a fusion between commercial and political power in recent years that further consolidates lock-ins.

Without a stronger focus on this political-commercial nexus, it won’t be possible to go beyond the first level of the inverted FSG pyramid. We’ll still only be focused on policies, practices and resources.

Without a stronger and deeper political analysis, relational and transformational change will be out of reach. Power relations will be unchanged.

We need to go deeper to drive and enable:

• Second-order changes – structural shifts that alter the underlying dynamics and behaviours in the system.

• Third-order changes – shifts in actors’ mindsets, values and relationships that lead to profound and systemic transformations.

In later posts, I hope to explore what this looks like…

Finally, my thanks…

…to the Guild of Food Writers and to Fortnum and Mason for selecting ‘Food Fight’ as a finalist in their book of the year awards.

And to any one of you who has spent time with it!

[CERTIFIED: This post was brought to you by a real human, aided and abetted by nothing more than the time on his hands, the random thoughts streaming through his head and the multiple contributions of researchers, activists, writers and other humans to books, journals, blogs and social media that happened to cross his field of vision since the last post]

Five hundred top public health, food and nutrition scientists and activists, in just two weeks, have signed an open letter to the UNU Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) calling for an immediate reversal of its decision to partner with Nestlé.

It was featured in today’s Lancet.

As readers of this and any other food or health newsletter know, Nestlé has a long and deep history of unethical marketing of infant formula. A history that led to another UN agency, the WHO, establishing the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes in 1981.

It also has a well-honed set of tactics and tricks to infiltrate policy and derail, dilute or delay public health regulation.

These activities have not gone away. There’s a large body of evidence documenting continuing predatory practices that are linked to infant and young child malnutrition and preventable death – most recently highlighted in the 2023 Lancet Breastfeeding Series and the 2025 Lancet Ultra-Processed Foods and Human Health Series.

This latest move is corporate capture, bluewashing and global marketing all rolled into one.

There’s also a deep irony, given Nestlé’s history of sucking out groundwater from drought-hit communities around the world (with its former Chair stating that water was not a human right.)

Five months ago, I wrote about the amazing ‘power map’ in Paper 3 in The Lancet Series on UPFs.

The map shows the interest group memberships of corporations, the largest of which, Nestlé, is a member of 137 of the 207 groups around the world.

I’m just going to drop that segment in here again, slightly abridged:

Nestlé is the world’s biggest food company with a long history – expanding from 80 factories in the 1920s to 340 factories across 76 countries in 2023, supported by 24 research and development centres serving 188 markets.

Let’s take a look at what it’s been up to in recent months.

A recent Public Eye investigation into sugar-boosted Nestlé products being sold in Africa found that 90% of 100 Cerelac samples in 20 countries in Africa contained added sugar. Similar products in global-northern countries contain no added sugar.

Here’s a recent paper on Nestlé and commercial determinants of infant health in Africa.

Nestlé sponsored the Africa Food Prize, an initiative of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

Nestlé has supported the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Food Systems, funding research on food and nutrition as well as hosting and mentoring postgraduate student

Nestlé co-funds an astroturf group (a fake grassroots organization) called ‘Americans for Ingredient Transparency’ whose goal is to lobby the US Congress to override new state laws, like California’s AB1264, which will ban the unhealthiest ultraprocessed foods from school meals.

Nestlé and Tufts University launched a new partnership last year.

Going global

Any response to corporate capture of markets and politics has to be global – just like the problem and the industry.

UN agencies have a big role to play – in developing technical guidance, integrating UPF-based metrics into surveillance systems and establishing global and national targets on reducing the dietary share of UPFs.

Paper 3 makes the case for an international policy framework – like a WHO convention – to empower national government regulators. UN human rights bodies could interpret treaty provisions in relation to UPF-related harms. Though the Lancet Series focused on human health, there are huge implications of our UPF-dominated food systems for unfolding biodiversity, plastics, and climate crises.

So how is the United Nations responding?

Is it actually united?

Well, the overarching UN Business Compact is limited. Why does it not include health in its list of criteria (along with human rights, labour, environment, anti-corruption, terrorism, crime, arms, pornography, gambling, tobacco)?

UN agency positions also differ.

UNICEF and WHO do not engage with Nestlé but UN Women, UNESCO do.

FAO’s guidelines contain exclusionary criteria including: ‘manufacturers of sugar-sweetened beverages and/or high in fat, sodium, and/or sugar foods’ but it’s not clear whether this precludes sharing platforms at policy conferences.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is not immune – the Chair of its Board was a Board member of Nestlé for her full term.

UNICEF’s position – like that of Nutrition International – is unequivocal. Two beacons of light, highlighted here.

*

That was five months ago...

Another common feature of corporate reputation-laundering is the response when questioned.

In that there is none…just silence.

It was the same with UNU-INWEH and Nestlé…no comment.

Roger Mathisen puts it well:

This is a failure of institutional leadership. UNU has talented staff doing important work. They did not make this bad decision, but they will carry its consequences. Their research will face harder scrutiny. Their credibility will be harder to defend. That is the cost of a decision made above them…The way forward is straightforward. End the partnership. Strengthen due diligence frameworks. And recommit to the independence that gives UN institutions their value in the first place.

Of course, it’s not just Nestlé (…though they do seem to have a thing about the UN at the moment.)

The now-cancelled PAHO–Ferrero partnership is another case in point, as highlighted by Simon Barquera and colleagues.

In the context of financial cuts and rampaging authoritarianism, global nutrition and health governance is in jeopardy.

Like the UN Global Compact, WHO’s Framework of Engagement with Non-State Actors (FENSA) doesn’t go far enough – lacking clarity on engagement with UPF corporations.

The paper outlines a simple set of guardrails:

• Exclusion criteria for partnerships with companies that undermine public health

• Mandatory, transparent due diligence on corporate political practices and conflicts of interest

• Public registries of all multilateral public-private partnerships and financial relationships

• Independent oversight mechanisms to review and monitor engagements

• Reduced reliance on corporate funding through strengthened public and pooled financing

Without this, how can the UN stay true to its founding principles?

In sharp contrast, it’s interesting to note how a separate UNU institute – the International Institute for Global Health is doing some great work on corporate accountability, as highlighted in an earlier post.

Which begs the same question…why isn’t there a joined-up approach?

Four candidates for UN Secretary General have this week been involved in dialogues. Among the myriad challenges confronting the winner, come 1 January 2027, strengthening governance and unity is surely non-negotiable.

On the radar…

The other week I attended a lively screening and panel discussion of the National Emergency Briefing, organised by my local Lewes Climate Hub.

If you haven’t seen the film, you should…basically. It doesn’t pull its punches, but crucially there’s enough on how to turn things around.

One of many great quotes, this from Hugh Montgomery: ‘you can’t confront an emergency with talk and homeopathy’

What’s the damage?

This is not new, but worth reiterating every now and again….

Every year, the global food system generates around $15 trillion in hidden costs, or >$41 billion/day. More than it contributes to the world economy.

That’s $1.7 billion per hour, day and night, $28.5 million per minute or $475,000 per second. Choose your stat...

Check this excellent new review on the bidirectional effects of global food production on the environment. A few headlines:

First, from food systems —> climate crisis

• Business-as-usual food emissions could breach the 1.5 °C, and even 2 °C, target on their own

• 52% of global irrigation is deemed unsustainable.

• 33% of soils are moderately-to-highly degraded.

• Agriculture drives >90% of tropical deforestation.
  

Second, from climate crisis —> food systems

• Under high-emissions pathway, the share of cattle exposed to dangerous heat jumps from 7% today to 48% by 2100.

• Maize, soy, rice, wheat, cassava, sorghum projected to lose 5.5 × 10¹⁴ kcal/yr for every 1 °C of warming by 2100.

• >90% of blue food production is vulnerable to anthropogenic environmental stress.

Options to respond:

• Plant-sourced foods deliver calories with a slope 8× steeper than animal-sourced foods on the calorie-per-environmental-pressure curve.

• Alternative proteins could cut GHG emissions by 88% and land use by 82%.

• In Europe, a circular food system could cut per-capita land use by 71% and GHGs by 29%, while still feeding everyone.

• Supply-side fixes need to be paired with demand-side shifts (dietary change, waste reduction).

‘It shouldn’t take a war for Britain to wake up to the need for food security’

Great article by Tim Lang in The Guardian, outlining 7 priorities for the UK to address food insecurity: i) politicians need to get real (we need more short, diversified chains, with incentives to primary producers to grow food domestically), ii) apply defence-strategy thinking, iii) regionalise food production, iv) address food inequality (social cohesion is preparedness), v) develop nutrition guidelines for resilience (incl planning what modern food rationing would look like), vi) rethink national and regional storage (incl. new powers to local authorities and mayors to ramp up public engagement) and vii) increase numbers of allotments (+ gardening organisations to help (re)skill consumers).

Lots of activity on school meals in the UK with deep-fried food to be banned and high-sugar items restricted in schools in England. The biggest challenge to fund this - which govt should help with - will be for smaller schools. More in this Food Foundation pod.

UPFs and plastic. Excellent paper by Rob Ralston et al on the embedded links between ultra-processed foods and the global plastic pollution crisis

Another on ‘cooking, gender, and ultra-processed foods: toward a public valorization of culinary knowledge’ by Patricia Jaime and Murilo Braga – pointing to the imperative for gender inequalities in food and care to be confronted in any food systems transformation. Brazil’s National School Feeding Program and solidarity kitchens show how cooking can and should be viewed as a public good.

And finally, huge congratulations to Sofía Monsalve Suárez on her appointment by the UN Human Rights Council as Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

See you next month!

Along with tens of thousands of others, I’m an avid follower of Grace Blakeley’s posts. Last week, belatedly, I finished her magnificent Vulture Capitalism. I then zoomed in to a great lecture by Jason Hickel, perused the latest paper by Ben Wood et al and an op-ed by George Monbiot before zipping up to London for the UPF Policy Forum at Imperial College.

What links all the above is the question of who is free, who isn’t and what’s to be done.

We’ll start with the first part…

Life behind bars

Blakeley starts by exploding the myth that twenty-first century capitalism was ever about free markets and our freedom. This is just a smokescreen. Capitalism is defined by the division between those who own all the stuff needed to produce commodities and those forced to work to produce those commodities. The former make the big decisions ‘about us, without us’ – and they remain unaccountable to the people they affect the most.

Reviewing her book through the prism of food, her arguments land every time. We have a food system in which a handful of ‘vast sprawling enterprises cooperate with one another and with states as much as they compete.’

Corporate behemoths get to set the wages and conditions of workers, the prices paid to suppliers and the prices paid by consumers. They no longer bother competing, as they no longer need to – they simply buy up competitors or erect barriers to their entry into the market. They have the power to block workers’ attempts to organize and – via myriad tactics – to infiltrate politics in order to block, delay or dilute any policy that may get in their way.

[For more on the multiple ways our agency is undermined, dig into Jennifer Clapp’s 2025 paper on corporate concentration in food systems]

Monopolisation is a central to capitalism as profit maximisation. As Blakeley says, markets now ‘resemble a crowded room in which one or two people have a megaphone’

In this world, profits aren’t channelled into new productive investment, they’re distributed to shareholders and executives, thus driving down productivity and driving up inequality. The cost-of-living crisis is really a cost-of-profit crisis.

Innovation is determined by the logic of profit – not public health or net-zero – which means it’s technological, not social.

Governments are often co-opted. There is no binary between political and corporate power. After half a century of neoliberalism, capitalism has become a hybrid in which the state has been re-tasked to enable profits to be privatised as the costs are socialised.

In Food Fight, I had a chapter ‘Do-Nothing Politics’ but the more you look, the more you see how political inertia is more than just ‘not-acting’ in the public interest. From the viewpoint of Big Food, it’s enabling.

In the UK, the government has raised ‘economic growth’ to such a hallowed place that it’s terrified of reining in Big Food (in its erroneous belief that it generates net wealth).

And yet it’s also wary of what the public are thinking – which means it’s beginning to realise many of us are getting seriously fed up with what we see.

Around the world

We have a new imperialism in the 21st century. Empire now refers to the multiple ways in which the world’s most powerful capitalist institutions plan who gets what.

In his excellent IDS lecture, Jason Hickel describes how capitalism has generated a ‘double crisis’ in which the breaching of several planetary boundaries coincides with mass human deprivation.

Most production occurs in global south but is controlled by the north via a massive appropriation of resources, including labour. We now have an excess production of unnecessary stuff coinciding with an insufficient production of necessary stuff.

People and planet sacrificed for plunder and profit.

Global multidimensional deprivation (as measured by the Decent Living Standards metric) is staggering with food insecurity and inadequate access to healthy diets among the worst indices.

Hickel then digs into the history of resistance and the pursuit of sovereign economic and social development. After the landmark Bandung conference of newly independent Asian and African states in 1955, the north – primarily the US and US-controlled organisations – hit back in three ways. Engineered coups, sanctions and structural adjustment programmes were all deployed to keep the south dependent on the north.

The Big Three behind Big Food

What lies behind our teetering food system are not just transnationals and governments. There’s a third layer of control, as Ben Wood and colleagues explore in this insightful paper.

Financial intermediaries that pool money from other investors (e.g. pension funds, insurance companies) into investment funds, which are then invested into a variety of asset classes in the form of shares of companies and corporations.

BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street – the Big Three in the asset management world - manage close to US$25 trillion in assets, mostly in the form of corporate shares.

$25,000,000,000,000

More than 20% annual global gross domestic growth in the hands of 3 organisations.

In 2024, the Big Three held more than 20% of shares in 14 of the 40 largest corporations in health-harming commodity industries. Immense power…which they use to drive profit at any cost. Not one of 41 identified shareholder proposals relating to public health and other social and environment issues were successful – though seven of these may have succeeded if they had received the support of the Big Three.

Then there’s the ESG investment portfolios which are supposed to be…well, ESG…driven by environmental, social and governance concerns. With the Big Three though, this is a bit of a game. ESG-washing.

Nearly 40% ESG funds marketed by the Big Three included at least one leading corporation from harmful industries. Vanguard’s ‘Ethically Conscious International Shares Index Fund’, for example, included Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, two of the world’s biggest plastic polluters and no strangers to violations of other labour, human rights and environmental protection norms.

This op-ed in the New York Times uses a different word:

‘Financialization is a grift, a rarified form of bookmaking, of no net value to workers and consumers, the economy, or society as a whole. Let’s treat it accordingly. Economists and the news media can stop using the word “invest” in contexts where no investing occurs. “Speculate” or “bet” will do just fine.’

Vulture-proofing food futures

‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.’

[Ursula Le Guin, quoted by Grace Blakeley]

There are multiple examples through history of ‘intractable problems’ that we’re not supposed to be able to do anything about – like feudalism, slavery, women barred from voting, child labour. Centuries of coal-fired pollution in The Big Smoke (London) were seen as an inevitable consequence of industrialisation, back in the day.

Vultures thrive on apathy and hopelessness and a default setting of ‘it is what it is, it ain’t gonna change.’

So, the first thing is to ditch the doom and use our power.

In a recent post, Blakeley speaks of the power of imagination

‘The world-enders want us to spend all our energy worrying about the apocalypse. Imagining what a new world might look like – even if only in our own neighbourhoods – is a form of resistance.’

The escape from corporate capture requires the democratisation of our society by redistributing political and economic power.

As I wrote in Food Fight (p215), governments have three levers to address excessive corporate power:

1. Dispersion – the decentralisation and redistribution of concentrated corporate wealth and power using antitrust (competition law) to prevent and break up monopolies.

2. Democratisation in which corporate decision-makers are compelled to take into account the interests of all actors (e.g. via diverse stakeholder representation on corporate boards).

3. And third, if all else fails, dissolution – the complete revocation of privileges, if and when corporations fail to disperse or democratise.

Breaking up is not hard to do — it’s a political decision, that can be made by any government with teeth.

Here’s Hickel and Varoufakis in a recent piece:

‘The solution is staring us in the face. We urgently need to overcome the capitalist law of value and democratise our economy, so that we can organise production around urgent social and ecological priorities. After all, we are the producers of the goods, the services, the technologies. It is our labour and our planet’s resources that are at stake. And so we must claim the right to decide what is produced, how, and for what purpose.’

From a global ecological perspective, Hickel argues in his IDS lecture, this is about reclaiming and reorganizing productive capacities in the South and delinking from exploitation by the Northern. It’s about ‘a new law of value.’

No magic bullets and it won’t happen overnight, but there are levers to pull.

To deal with the Big Three and other aspirants in our financialised world, Woods argues for fiduciary duties to be established to ensure that private financial entities explicitly and systematically consider the impacts of their portfolios on the welfare of communities and the environment. Rules could also be put in place to ban financial intermediaries from voting unless under instruction from the ultimate investor.

The Guardian’s George Monbiot:

‘We know what needs to happen: break up the big corporations; bring the system under proper regulatory control; diversify our diets and their means of production; reduce our dependence on a handful of major exporting countries; build strategic food reserves, accessible to people everywhere. But there’s a problem, and it’s not just Trump. Almost all governments are beholden to corporate and financial power.’

Finally…for now, at least…there’s the local level. Here, there’s huge potential (and big challenges) in building alternative food systems from the ground up that reflect different values. Henry Leveson-Gower and Dil Green explore this in Taking the Die out of Diet where they propose a set of tools to escape the tyranny of Big Food.

‘The shift away from purely capitalist relationships in food is not an abstract ideal, but a practical, ongoing process’

I’ll return to the question ‘Are we transforming?’ in a later post…

Ultra-processed food policy

The epitome of corporate food system capture is a tube of Pringles or an ultra-processed snack bar, wrapped in plastic, emblazoned with health claims and an unreadable list of ingredients, that’s available any time, any place.

Which brings us to the Ultra-Processed Food Policy Forum held on 24 March at Imperial Business School in London.

It was a lively meeting, full of great visuals, punchy summaries and updates of new findings, new opportunities, new directions. I was really pleased the organisers had invited Austin Frerick to highlight corporate capture, drawing on his mindblowing book Barons.

Here’s the summary report and video.

The forum started with an update on the evidence by Carlos Monteiro who succinctly addressed criticisms of UPF research, shooting down the ‘healthy UPF’ argument. We shouldn’t waste our time comparing one product against another, when what’s really driving harms is an aggregate dietary pattern in which there has been a near-wholesale replacement of minimally processed foods by UPFs. When what’s really driving harm is an entire system that has been, and continues to be, progressively tilted away from people and planet towards profit at all costs.

Monteiro concluded with a call for global action to reverse UPF production and consumption. Of course, research (especially on mechanisms) should continue but there’s no reason to wait for policy action.

As expected, the industry backlash didn’t take long.

Here’s one critique by the British Nutrition Foundation, an organisation that believes it’s perfectly fine to dismiss science on UPFs while happily taking funds from world-famous UPF manufacturers like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle, Kelloggs, Tate and Lyle, Ferrero, Mars, Mondelez.

Such industry-funded counter-attacks have a long history, reaching right back to the middle of the last century when Big Tobacco realized its days were numbered. It could no longer hope to beat the science, so the next best thing was to buy it.

Even now, we still hear phrases like ‘the big debate about UPFs.’

What debate is this, I wonder?

Invoking ‘the big debate’ seems like another delaying tactic. The evidence is in, it’s clear. The real debate is why some are still calling it a debate (and who’s paying them)?

“Designed addictive products that harmed young people”

The proof behind this statement clinched last week’s verdict against Meta and Google.

At the UPF Policy Forum, the day before, Ashley Gearhardt spoke powerfully (and disturbingly) of another form of addiction – to ultra-processed foods.

Addiction is not about where something comes from...it’s about how a product is engineered. So, how do you engineer it? With four levers:

• Dose - pack in more of the reinforcing agent

• Speed (of the hit)

• Sensory - engineer flavours that keep you coming back

• Ubiquity - make it available everywhere, always

Big Tobacco successfully took a non-addictive plant, engineered nicotine delivery, optimised dose, speed, flavour and ubiquity to develop one of history’s most addictive products. Big Food then took a few basic ingredients and engineered ultra-processed products, applying the same principles, sometimes the same industrial techniques, to generate the global public health crisis we’re currently enmeshed in.

I wonder how the UPF industry is taking the recent verdict on Meta and Google?

Caught my eye…

• This episode of Ways to Change the World where Krishnan Guru-Murthy speaks to Eric Schlosser (of Fast Food Nation renown) about the hidden economics of food, the political power of the industry and what meaningful reform of the food system might look like.

• A Quick Bites webinar where Tim Lang discusses food system resilience with Anna Taylor, and the urgent need for a Good Food Bill in the UK.

• A new paper by the Consortium of the Center to End Corporate Harm at the University of California, San Francisco on using internal industry documents to craft counter-strategies to corporate vectors of chronic disease.

• A position statement by the Association of Directors of Public Health in the UK on the commercial determinants of health, on corporate tactics to dodge, delay or dilute government policy to rein in their power, and how to respond.

• A fascinating new analysis of the legal status of a right to nutrition in Zambia by Kaaba and colleagues

• A news release on Norway being one of the first countries to implement the WHO recommendation to ban the marketing of unhealthy foods and drinks to children. Regulations apply to traditional and digital advertising, covering sponsorship, influencer marketing, product placement and indirect branding.

All for now…see you in April!

Bit late with this…

I’ve been travelling, picking up a nasty virus before tearing a calf muscle while over-doing a run to celebrate recovering from said virus, etc…

But here are some eye-catching items that have risen to the surface:

First up was an essay in the New York Times by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg. The headline (‘We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great-Great-Grandparents’) and accompanying photo caption (‘Ultraprocessed, Industrial Food is Fine’) unfortunately set me off on the wrong foot. I wasn’t the only one.

I mean…how many more straw men and false binaries do we have to confront? Of course it’s meant to provoke, but this constant parade of ‘either/ors’ is getting a tad tedious.

Straw man/false binary number one:

• Choose either to eat like your great-great-grandparents / chase a fantasy of Edenic premodern food…or choose the industrial food model.

What’s it to be?

I haven’t read the book Feed the People!: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How To Make It Even Better yet. It’s just come out and isn’t on sale in the UK (for some reason shipping from the US will take months!)

However, despite one of the authors telling me to ‘read the book or shut up,’ I feel (like 400+ in the NYT comments section alone) the need to say something about the essay itself.

The first chapter of the book has also been shared here. Here’s a quote from it:

‘Most food writers suggest that the modern food system needs to be discarded and replaced with one where consumers search for locally sourced, labor-intensive, and cooked-from-scratch options, supporting the small, alternative, and artisanal purveyors who represent a pastoral ideal of sustainable food.’

I wonder who these folk are? The vast majority of people I’ve run into, after far too long in this food world, fall into neither of these two camps.

A few more lines (and my thoughts) from the NYT essay:

‘Food that is local, organic and low-tech is vastly more expensive than food grown through conventional methods.’

Indeed, these are the conventional methods that have locked in an industrial system that sucks up huge upstream subsidies and generates more damage than value.

‘Many Americans simply don’t want to or don’t have time to cook all their foods from scratch.’

Agree…and it’s not just Americans. There are other ways to shape a food system to support access and affordability to diets that are healthy, sustainable...AND convenient.

‘Consumers should make better choices when they can and eat less of the obvious junk.’

A helluva lot of heavy lifting is being done by ‘when they can’ in this line.

Where’s purpose in all this, I wonder? The current ‘industrial model’ is driven by its core purpose…like most things are. Which is to maximise profit. The most profitable products are the most processed and the least healthy, for ourselves and the world we live in. We don’t need to debate this, we know it.

Apart from the FSEC global work and FFCC’s UK work on the downstream damage of this lumbering monolith, we have many hundreds of studies (including four out of four gold-standard RCTs) which show the harms generated by diets in which a high proportion of calories derive from its main output – ultra-processed foods.

To be fair to the authors, they seem to recognize this too.

As this FT review states

‘Belying Feed the People’s “why industrial food is good” subtitle, [it] catalogues a very long list of existential threats its production methods pose to the planet.’

So, to argue that everything is basically fine, we need to just tweak the system is, to my mind, deeply flawed. It will still be a system driven by the same purpose. If we want to improve our diets, our health, our planet – don’t we need a radical overhaul?

No return to a mythical Garden of Eden or to whatever ‘food system’ my great-great-grandparents relied on….we need to look to the future and forge a new food system that nourishes our grandchildren and their children.

Different purpose, different system, different outcomes.

Of course, it won’t happen overnight…but that’s another story.

On misleading narratives

More on framing and narratives from a recent paper by Leandro Rezende et al.

They argue that asking whether certain ultraprocessed foods subgroups are more harmful than others requires a proper counterfactual to test the effect of ultraprocessing. The real question is whether the health effects differ between the same food in its ultraprocessed and less processed forms (see table below).

Where the MAHA rubber hits the road

Or not…

Check this interview with RFK Jr.

If you’d rather not, just read this quote from him, which pretty much captures it:

‘I’m not saying that we’re going to regulate ultraprocessed food…Our job is to make sure that everybody understands what they’re getting, to have an informed public.’

As expected, MAGA trumps MAHA

For updates on MAHA, I would heartily recommend Helena Bottemiller Evich’s Food Fix and Marion Nestle’s Food Politics.

Who eats?

Interesting piece by Eduardo Porter in The Guardian. If AI makes human labor obsolete, who decides who gets to eat?

‘If artificial intelligence grows as powerful as Silicon Valley’s oligarchs expect it to become, the only available strategy to keep us all fed in the world after work might be to go hat in hand and ask the moguls, politely.’

Europe’s final frontier?

Last week, I was in Portugal – a country that has resisted predatory fast food marketing more than most European countries.

Which is why pretty much every bus stop I came across looked like this:

Prevent and treat

Treatment with GLP-1 drugs must not replace obesity prevention in low and middle income countries argue Kent Buse, Angela Carriedo and Simon Barquera in the BMJ.

The big risk of GLP-1 drugs for healthcare systems in lower-income countries is the political economy of their introduction – the risk that rollout of the drugs will entrench a ‘treatment first’ paradigm. Prevention has always been vulnerable to delay, dilution or defunding compared to medical treatments. Inequity in access remains a huge issue.

The authors propose a five-point agenda:

1. Public coverage of GLP-1s conditional on a minimum prevention policy package.

2. Ringfenced prevention funding floors established within NCD budgets.

3. Revenues from soda/junk food taxes earmarked for prevention and primary care.

4. Transparency and spending controls for GLP-1 drug procurement.

5. Firewalls against commercial interference established and information published.

Another great read on GLP1s comes from Nick Easen on Wicked Leeks, exploring their impact on what we eat and grow.

Conflicts of interest – the policy process

Here’s a really useful paper on the process of developing a conflict of interest policy. Ten years ago, at IFPRI we revised our institutional policy for engaging with the private sector. I know both how important this is and how it’s easier said than done!

But it’s critical, especially for multi-partner consortia (which is pretty much every new initiative). Which is why such guidance is great to see. A few years ago, there was the FoRK toolkit that addressed this too.

This new paper by Amber van den Akker and colleagues reminds us that CoI disclosure is simply not enough. A reflective case study approach was used to document the development and implementation of a COI policy. Embedding CoI policies in complex collaborations supports more robust research governance and helps safeguard the integrity of public health research.

Bullet-proofing access to good food

Promising news from the UK where The Food Foundation, Sustain and Green Alliance have corralled more than 100 organisations (including supermarkets, food businesses and investors) to call for the introduction of a Good Food Bill.

This follows polling that shows:

• 69% of people think the government should be doing more to ensure everyone can afford and access healthy food

• 65% of people support a ‘Food Bill’ that would introduce duties and targets on government bodies to make healthy food more accessible and affordable

Big step forward….

Thin Ink

Being a huge fan of Thin Lei Win and her lively newsletter, I was thrilled and honoured to be invited to discuss my book with her: A Food Fight Worth Having

Thin Ink is now five years old – there have been so many great posts…take a look here.

It was a wide-ranging chat. We discussed corporate capture and why we need to focus on purpose, power and governance in any discussions of change or transformation.

Thin started by asking me to choose three pivotal books from the last century. There have been many, but the one that always springs to mind first was pretty much the very first one I read on the ‘real reasons for world hunger’ back in 1976.

As we were discussing Susan George’s epic How the Other Half Dies, the news came through that she had just passed away, aged 91. She was a huge inspiration for me and for thousands of others. That book – which grew out of work for a counter-report to the historic World Food Conference of 1974 – changed my life.

In last month’s Food Fight Files, I linked to the re-issue of another seminal book: Fast Food Nation

A day later, the FT reported that fast food sales in the US are slumping ‘as the model breaks under the weight of labour shortages, beef price spikes, climate impacts, and falling real wages.’

IPES wonders

I just noticed that the brilliant Raj Patel is on this platform now…which is great and a little daunting too, as everyone will have to up their game!

Errol Schweizer (‘The Grocery Nerd’) has been on for some time…championing access and affordability of healthy, sustainable foods in multiple pithy posts.

Raj and Errol are both members of IPES-Food which has just celebrated its 10^th year!

The enshittification of academic publishing

Substack has its critics…but then so do most other platforms and outlets…

A recent Conversation piece posits a downward spiral in academic publishing. Growing commodification of research is shifting value from merit to marketability, as pay-to-publish journals proliferate. Quality declines as profit-driven models compromise peer review and oversight. With so many publications – including fraudulent journals spreading hoax papers and pirated content – it’s harder to identify authoritative work. Academics are stuck, the authors argue, as there’s a lack of credible alternatives.

‘Countering this trend demands interventions and the creation of alternatives. These include a reassessment of evaluation metrics, a reduced reliance on commercial publishers, and greater global equity in research.’

New cover, new price

Food Fight is out in paperback on 9 April (with a new green cover!) This will be followed by an ‘in conversation’ event with D’Arcy Williams, CEO of Bite Back 2030 in Spitalfields, London on 16 April (more on this later).

I have a few author copies available. If you’re interested, a student of food, nutrition or health, an NGO worker or activist and you’re in the UK, email me.

All for now…see you in a few weeks!

The last few weeks in the UK have felt like a scene from Blade Runner with its relentless rain and perpetual gloaming (…cue gratuitous clip of the epic ending).

But while I’m (still) determined to prioritise posts on agency and action this year, I cannot follow the UK government and ignore one of the most seismic reports to emerge in recent years. A report from one of its own departments.

The national security assessment on Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security should have been out last year. But, according to this disturbing Guardian opinion piece by George Monbiot, it was deliberately kept in the dark. As were we.

Deemed too scary and too revealing of a governmental failure to act, it took a freedom of information request by the Green Alliance for it to see the light of day. Even then, the media chose to ignore it in favour of more pandering to the attention-junkie in the White House.

The report makes seven ‘key judgements’ with linked confidence ratings as follows:

Smack in the middle of this list is the high-confidence judgement that:

‘ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (irreversible loss of function beyond repair).’

In her excellent debut Substack post, Sammi Landsman unpacks the key word:

‘it is striking how cleanly ‘function’ separates nature from people, as if we are not made of the same materials. As if degraded ecosystems are not already showing up as degraded lives.’

Another recent expert consultation has highlighted the ways in which multiple chronic challenges – climate crisis, poor policy implementation, rising inequality, food supply chain consolidation and risks from just-in-time food supply – have created a tinderbox of acute risk of food crisis in the UK.

Three triggers – a cyber-attack, an extreme weather event or a new international conflict— could lead to a ‘food availability and/or price shock that could result in widespread fear of unsafe or inadequate food, leading to violence.’

To build resilience, the report calls for deep system-wide changes. First we need to bullet-proof policy from shifts in governments. Food system transformation isn’t going to happen overnight.

Second, beyond rhetorical promises, we need serious cross-government coordination and harmonized action on a shared food systems agenda. And third, strengthened international collaboration and forums to bring in diverse voices including those most affected by food insecurity (‘not about us, without us’).

On food governance

A recent narrative review and literature synthesis by Scott Slater and colleagues asks ‘How has the global food governance system evolved, and what challenges does it currently pose for food systems transformation?’

The brief history of global food governance is worth checking out:

(We had a similar nutrition history timeline in our IFPRI 50^th anniversary chapter)

The authors move on to outline the big challenges we now face before offering a set of priority recommendations for multilateral organisations and national governments.

The latter broadly align with earlier proposals by IPES-Food, HLPE and others. These include eliminating conflicts of interest, reducing power asymmetries, repurposing food system subsidies and financial flows and moving towards more robust legal mechanisms that hold all actors (especially the powerful) accountable for social and environmental harm.

Food economies need to shed decades of corporate capture and become grounded in principles of agroecology, justice, human rights, and food sovereignty in which the voices of those most affected are heard and acted upon.

On food justice and equity

Two more recent publications examining the links between food system transformation, equity and justice caught my eye.

The first: Sustainability without Justice? unpacks equity and how it underpins and shapes what food systems look like and what they can become. Three aspects are key:

• Distributive equity – fair access to resources and opportunities

• Procedural equity – marginalised people participate in decisions that affect them

• Recognitional equity – acknowledgement of the way historical discrimination has driven unequal access to resources and opportunities.

Second, a paper by Marta Lopez Cifuentes and colleagues which applies a ‘just sustainability transitions’ lens to food governance. We need to view ‘justice’ not just as a goal, but as dynamic, relational and process-oriented.

Which reminds me of Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘The end is pre-existent in the means’

Devoured by Big Food

Back in the UK, another recent blog by farmer and writer James Rebanks asks who do we want to feed us, now that Big Food has ‘devoured British farmers’?

The first country in the world to industrialise, Britain seems to be hanging on to this heritage as one of the world’s biggest consumers of industrial UPFs. Most food now comes from factories, not farms.

It’s actually top of the European charts, with over half its diet deriving from UPFs compared to just 10% in Portugal, 13% Italy and 14% France.

‘These nations defended their traditional food cultures, as a matter of pride. They never stopped believing that eating well remained an essential part of a good life. They also used planning laws and local government to make life more difficult for Big Food corporations, and encouraged their politicians to say no.’

Hooked on power

‘From Tobacco to Ultra processed Food’ – a new paper by Ashley Gearhardt, Kelly Brownell and Alan Brandt unpacks the way industrial engineering fuels epidemics of preventable disease.

Kelly Brownell (and Kenneth Warner) had first caught my attention with this fascinating 2009 paper on ‘the perils of ignoring history’ that led to more digging. The extraordinary story of the tobacco industry became the lead in to the ‘dark arts’ chapter of my book.

This new paper reveals how dose optimization and hedonic manipulation are key engineering strategies that Big Food has adopted from Big Tobacco. UPFs should therefore be evaluated not only through a nutritional lens but also as addictive, industrially engineered substances.

‘Unlike tobacco, however, the solution is already in our hands: minimally and traditionally processed foods that have sustained human health for millennia. Legal action against health damages and misleading health claims, re strictions on UPF advertising, taxation of nutrient-poor UPFs, markedly reducing UPFs in schools and hospitals, and clearer labeling of ultraprocessing could all serve as next steps.’

In another opinion piece from the Iowa Gazette, Sofia DeMartino includes a disturbing anecdote on industrial power. At a recent Iowa Governor’s Conference on Public Health a public health official from a small town stated from the podium that she had to be “careful” when talking about all of the illness, injury, and death related to the local processing plant because they were also the area’s biggest employer and economic engine.

‘Public Health didn’t feel comfortable protecting the PUBLIC from the CORPORATION. That’s not corruption, it’s structural dependence. And it’s exactly how a food system becomes an economic system, becomes a political system, becomes a public-health crisis.’

Which brings us to Mike Tyson’s $10 million, 30 second ad at the Super Bowl.

Shame they didn’t pay a bit more to add ‘ultra’ or ‘highly’ to the beginning…

On commercial determinants of health

Check out these newsletters…

First, Commercially Determined, launched by Yulia Chuvileva. This lively post lists out key ploys and tactics corporations use to stop governments getting in their way.

I do enjoy these:

1. It’s not a problem. It’s totally normal… actually a good thing.

2. The problem is so complex. Many factors contribute to it

3. Fine, maybe sometimes harm happens, but we had no idea…

4. Anyway, it harms only a few “problem” consumers. Don’t punish the rest of us.

5. Consumers are ill informed. You should just educate people.

6. Trust us, we are the good guys…we’re experts.

7. Don’t trust their scientists…they’re emotional, biased, incompetent

8. No need to regulate, we’ll change on our own

9. Policies won’t work…they’ll hurt the economy, kill innovation, destroy jobs.

10. Regulation is government overreach…a nanny state trampling freedom

We see these same tactics and tropes employed by the fossil fuel industry lobby, tobacco (as above), gambling, UPFs, plastics, chemical pollutants.

Another punchy newsletter, edited by Diarmid O’Sullivan, is Critical Takes on Corporate Power – for ‘people from civil society around the world who see the power of multinational corporations as a serious problem for justice, democracy and nature.’

Moving on to the super-important, much-neglected issue of accountability (for commercial determinants), the UNU International Institute of Global Health have just posted these two webinars:

Corporate Accountability and Sustainable Food System Transitions

Rethinking Corporate Accountability in Global Health: Beyond Rankings & Voluntary Measures

And finally, WHO has released this call for papers on commercial determinants of health – accentuating positive, curtailing negative impacts…take a look.

Fast food, fast forward

A quarter century after his seminal first edition, Eric Schlosser has a re-issue of Fast Food Nation on the shelves.

After considering a full re-write, he figured that many of the same problems described then were still very relevant now. Multiplied by 10. Which is why he chose to bring out it out ‘as is’ with an afterword/update. This long read tells the story.

Check out the advert that appeared just before it, in the hard copy:

This is telling:

‘The history of the 20th century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power,” I wrote in Fast Food Nation. “The 21st will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.” Well, at least I got it half-right. We now have to struggle against both.’

I’m off to Berlin for a food documentary before cycling and hopefully some sun in Portugal. See you in March!

Over the last few weeks, I seem to keep running into the same aphorisms. This normally happens at the beginning of the year, but in 2026 it’s gone into overdrive

The first is the famous quote by Antonio Gramsci:

‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters’

Written a long time before Trump was born. Bart de Wever, the Belgian PM even used it yesterday in Davos.

Are we in a Gramscian ‘interregnum’ now? Canadian PM Mark Carney calls it a rupture.

And then (unsurprisingly) there’s WB Yeats a decade earlier, after the first world war:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Back in the food world, I’ve been hearing a lot about the power of stories and framing.

One goes like this:

‘things are not bad and getting worse; they’re good and getting better, but not fast enough’

This has been around for some time e.g. Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World . More recently I heard it in ‘food futurist’ Jack Bobo’s talk at the Oxford Farming Conference (the Big Food-sponsored one of the two) held two weeks ago.

Now, I’m a complete convert to the power of stories, and I’m not a doom-monger but this one really grates.

Why?

Well, first, I think it’s the casual way such a framing airbrushes out the realities of so many people. People with limited power who are working in, or dependent on, the food system.

It’s a framing that defaults to population averages and trend lines on a graph. (Hans Rosling was the master at this.)

It does not focus on those left behind – or rather, actively held back – by structures and systems that are built to maximise profits for a few (including OFC’s donors), not to ensure equity.

The story of averages is about linear growth, while the story of gaps is about equity.

Second, it’s a framing that implies we just need to stay on the same path – the one that’s brought us to this implied peak in human progress. We just need to continue doing what we’re doing but do it faster.

This implies we don’t really need to change what we do.

Incrementalism not transformation. Accelerated business-as-usual.

I just don’t buy it.

This often leads to questions about optimism/pessimism like – do you see a glass that’s half-full or half-empty?

What if you see a glass that’s cracked and leaking? Maybe we need a new glass.

A third reason I don’t like the ‘good and getting better’ story is it defaults (conveniently) on to continuing innovation. But a type of innovation that follows the logic of the system – that is therefore technological, usually dominated by large corporations…or philanthropists who’ve made their billions from tech. Not social innovation which rarely makes money for anyone.

It’s a statement that’s almost designed to dampen down any discussions of the politics of food – of who wins and who loses.

In his talk, Bobo argues there’s a trust deficit.

I agree with him – but I’m not sure we agree on why that is.

A large part of the trust deficit relates, I think, to the persistent and pervasive infiltration of science and policy spaces by actors and organisations for whom public health and well-being are not the main goals. They’re striving after a different goal.

This skews the political discourse in ways that lead to false narratives and straw men. Such as this selection of industry-propagated tropes relating to ultra-processed foods, highlighted in a recent post and this paper.

• There’s not enough evidence, more research is needed; challenging the UPF industry is ideological; there’s nothing wrong with ‘food processing’; unhealthy diets are due to nutrient imbalances, not ultra-processing; unhealthy diets are due to poor choices, a lack of awareness, poor education – it’s an individual responsibility; don’t touch UPFs, they’re convenient, they also generate economic growth; UPFs can be reformulated to make them healthy; nanny state regulations restrict our freedom; leave it to us – the industry can regulate itself; regulation stigmatizes poor and vulnerable individuals who can only afford cheap UPFs…

And on and on…

If science and policy processes have been polluted by powerful actors pursuing profit, not public health and nutrition security, then we’re bound to have a trust problem.

Five years ago, mistrust was frequently invoked as a roadblock in the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) process. Summit leaders even blamed activists who asked basic questions about governance and power.

If there’s still a trust deficit, why not address it?

So, what’s the real story?

Well, obviously there are several – we need to select the right one at the right time.

It will never be enough to highlight problems, even if we do frame them more positively as challenges. We need to go further and focus on change – both what and how.

In this, we need to go below the waterline.

In their excellent book Inflamed, Rupa Marya and Raj Patel remind us that ‘diagnosis’ comes from ‘dia’ (apart) and ‘gnosis’ (to know). A diagnosis is a story pulled apart. Many diagnostic narratives, they argue, are out of joint because the story begins in the middle with a symptom – not at the beginning with the underlying cause. To figure the solution, we need to dig deeper into structures and systems.

We cannot have revolution without revelation. In between the two, there may be anger and outrage, but this can be useful. Complacency is not useful.

We need a proper discussion of problems – including the voices and perspectives of those who have been held back. Human rights are key, not a trend line showing growth of population averages.

This 2022 opinion piece by Nason Maani et al still resonates:

‘Policy is to a large degree shaped by who prevails in framing problems and their solutions. All too often, the choices we make about what we say and how we say it are influenced by and reflect corporate interests. In this way, corporations can define the world of the possible and the impossible, the blameless and the guilty. We need to find better ways to tell the stories that matter, and better ways to counter the pollution of discourse on health.’

We need better stories and better storytellers – both infused with a hefty dose of radical hope and radical realism.

Rhett Butler wrote about this last week in ‘Beyond the doom loop: the case for informed optimism’

‘Problems still come first. But they are not the final word. In program work, it means breaking large, abstract challenges into visible outcomes that people can recognize in their own lives: cleaner water, steadier incomes, fisheries that recover, and forests that once again support livelihoods. These outcomes matter not only because they improve conditions on the ground, but because they restore a sense of agency.’

Hope is fed by evidence and by experience of the real world.

Radical realism, in turn, demands a confrontation with hard truths without sugarcoating or doom paralysis. But crucially it requires using a proper diagnosis of the problem as a springboard into transformative change.

Of note…

I’m behind on reading this week – bit distracted by insane geopolitical crises and orange monsters — but a couple of things rose to the surface…

On UPF fetishism

One of the main drivers of the inertia and lacklustre response to UPF-saturated diets is the dominance of ‘UPF fetishism’ in scientific, public, and policy discourse, argues Ben Wood and colleagues.

Drawing on Marx’s concept of ‘commodity fetishism’, the paper investigates the tendency to view UPFs only in terms of their final qualities or characteristics at the point of purchase (price, quality, convenience), while failing to consider all the socio-ecological processes, relations, and activities involved in their provisioning (e.g., intensive agriculture, value extraction).

Product obsession/fetishism lends itself to distracting binary discussions about Product X versus Product Y. It obscures the multiple harms and inequities that lie deeper and it forecloses discussions on alternatives and approaches to improving diets for everyone. A deliberate myopia that bogs us down when we could be ‘illuminating meaningful opportunities for collaboration within the vast ecology of values-aligned movements seeking better diets, food systems, and economies for people and planet.’

On change, activism and social movements

Finally, here’s a great new initiative by Duncan Green and Tom Kirk at LSE – aimed at combining research, training and discussions on how to expand people’s ‘freedoms to be and to do’, (a la Sen) in the face of the insane brutality of the woodchipper. They ask:

‘How can small groups of dedicated activists influence those in positions of power to bring about change?’

What tactics, modes of collaboration and response work? The initiative draws on Duncan’s work at Oxfam on ‘From Poverty to Power’ and this excellent book How Change Happens (now in its 2^nd edition) which, a decade ago, influenced Transform Nutrition’s stories of change programme.

‘Til next month!

Well, here we are again…

2025 has been a seriously weird year.

Bloody awful in the bigger picture…Gaza, Ukraine, Trump…and closer to (my) home, a stuttering government that spends way too much time behaving like it’s in opposition, overly obsessed with a dysfunctional far-right party led by a racist liar.

Lies were normalized in 2025, led by liar-in-chief, Big Orange…and by AI going into overdrive for better and worse. God knows how this will all work out for the creative arts…including writers whose work is being stolen. Marion Nestle has had a particularly rough time with pirates and hijackers. I’ve had my book reproduced under a fake cover…and subjected to an online conversation between two AI bots for half an hour.

2025 was the year that killed the ‘it will all turn out fine in the end’ default. Complacency died. Years ago, when we ran the ‘stories of change in nutrition’ series, we distinguished between drivers and trends that had indirectly influenced nutrition – and those that had been proactively designed to do so. We have to focus a lot more on the latter now.

One of the reasons I left the world of research, five years ago, was an increasing discomfort I felt with the lack of action – at least, what I perceived to be an imbalance between time and money spent on new research and the energy being directed to using the evidence and experience we already have. And to basic learning-by-doing.

Having said that…

However bad this year has been for so many, I do think we’ll see a turnaround in ‘26. The green shoots will become impossible to ignore…and they will have their own inspirational power.

The seeds were sown by many organisations and visible in landmark events including the Lancet Series on Ultra-Processed Foods and Human Health, an historic lawsuit filed against the UPF industry in California, two excellent reports by UNICEF…and in the UK, via groundbreaking work by Food Foundation, Bite Back 2030, Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, the Planeatry Alliance… to name just a few

Of course, it takes time to build things – so important to set the foundations, to course-correct as things develop and – as Mike Lee states – cultivate something called patience.

To play the long game!

On a personal level, it’s been a fascinating year spent zipping around the UK giving food-fighting talks at literary festivals, seminars, lectures or online via webinars, podcasts, radio, TV. Thirty-six in total….including one when I was given 30 seconds to prepare for a breakfast TV slot in Canada (when I’d been expecting a radio chat)

I wrote the book as I wanted to write in a different way, for a different audience. And I wanted to learn more from the latter. All have happened. I’ve met some amazing people along the way, including on my doorstep (via local events) and I’ve been fortunate to see Food Fight on several ‘recommended’ lists.

Now I have to figure out what to do in 2026 – beyond this twice-monthly Substack which will continue…and remain free!

Is there space for a history of activism in the food, nutrition and health space, including pivotal figures – how they emerged, what motivated them, their modus operandi, strategy, tactics, experiences, outcomes, stories? Individuals, organisations and social movements. Are there crossover lessons to be learned from different fields – food, health, AIDS, climate and other social justice campaigns and movements?

I’m not sure…what do you think?

One thing I am planning is a ‘tour de France’ in early summer. En vélo…but unlike Le Tour, it will be under-pinned by an over-indulgence in local cuisines and wines along the way. And some gate-crashing on old friends…whether they like it or not 😊

Bonne année….and hope to see you on the other side!

The UK’s food sector is:

• the ‘beating heart of our economy’, generating £153 billion of economic activity and employing more than 4.2 million people.

and/or…

• a chronic disease generator that costs £268bn each year via lost lives, lost health, lost productivity.

A fascinating new report ‘Net Gain or Net Drain?’ was released by the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) last week. Written by Dolly van Tulleken and Hannah Haggie, it sets out the results of a scoping project to identify an approach to assess the full performance of the UK agri-food system.

The foreword by Tim Jackson (who wrote the report that led to the headline above, a year ago) dives straight in:

‘What does it tell us when a Labour MP hosts a 60th birthday party for KFC in Parliament and a Conservative MP declares that she had a “cluckin’ good time” there?’

Does Big Food generate a net benefit to UK citizens – or does it represent a ‘massive false economy?’

What’s clear is value cannot be captured by economic metrics alone. Any measure needs to incorporate fairness, healthiness and sustainability – effects on people and planet – that go well beyond short-term corporate profit.

But who gets to determine the values and metrics we use?

The authors’ response is simple – we do!

Citizens decide. The ground work is already there in the form of the Food Conversation – FFCC’s comprehensive programme of deliberative conversations with UK citizens. Many of whom expressed profound frustration with how the current food system works in practice. They want change.

Results from the Food Conversation were used to develop a framework based on a set of 15 value components, or themes, within four categories:

Future work aims to:

• shed light on whether Big Food is generating net-positive value to the public, or whether it represents a net drain?

• identify policies, regulations and market structures to ensure the food industry contributes to improving the lives of citizens

Results are intended to help assess progress towards the UK government’s food strategy goals. Next steps include refining the framework and calibrating the targets, developing a set of metrics to undertake a value analysis on a sample of companies, evaluating market power dynamics and finally, to develop a values dashboard to monitor and communicate the performance of the food system over time.

Cost-of-profit crisis

The UK Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, announced in last month’s budget that supermarket giants will face a new ‘surtax’ – a higher rate of property tax, the proceeds from which will help support independent grocery stores who are struggling to survive.

Despite this being just a quarter of what was originally proposed (following industry pressure), it was still preceded by a threat from the British Retail Consortium that such a tax would lead to closure of 400 big stores, a loss of 100,000 jobs and food price hikes.

Apparently this was said with a straight face – at a time when profits raked in by the big supermarkets were soaring! The largest, Tesco, just smashed its record profit of over £3 billion.

‘This is greedflation at its worst – weaponising inflation in the name of fatter profits. The supermarkets are making staggering amounts of money while record numbers of British farmers are going out of business.’ [Guy Singh-Watson, Riverford founder]

95% of food consumed in the UK comes from just ten supermarkets which means we’re hostages in this drama. High-street power means supermarket giants will continue to make mega-profits – as the pain of any financial hit is offloaded to low-income households struggling to afford a healthy diet.

State of industry

The second pivotal report released last week was the Food Foundation’s annual flagship State of the Nation’s Food Industry report. This explored the progress of 37 of the UK’s major food businesses in meeting their climate and health targets, finding progress to be patchy and uneven.

Regulation is urgently needed. The report calls for government-mandated public reporting by companies of a core set of healthy and sustainable diet metrics – to level the playing field and ensure that all businesses are moving in the right direction.

The SOFI also updates the picture on corporate lobbying. Following earlier work by the Food Foundation, in which I was involved, we can see two interesting trends since the new Labour government came in July 2024.

• First, industry is meeting more with the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) than with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) – presumably making the case for industry as a ‘net gain’ generator of economic growth.

• Second, there’s been a steady rise in the number of food industry meetings over time – from 37 in third quarter 2024 to 125 in second quarter 2025 – presumably pre-empting future regulation being considered in the national food strategy.

I use the word ‘presumably’ here because we don’t actually know.

Lobby disclosure remains opaque and inconsistent. We don’t know about meetings with senior civil servants and influential spads (special advisors) and we don’t know about emails, phone calls, cocktail party conversations, meetings on the golf course.

Carpe diem

The SOFI report highlights a big challenge which is how to insulate any progress against the whims of politicians in their fleeting time in power?

Government must seize the opportunity to ensure the UK food system serves people and planet and that this new purpose is bullet-proofed across five-year electoral cycles.

‘A Food Bill – focused on ensuring that affordable, nutritious food is a mainstay of living in Britain now and in the future, and locking in improved national food security – would provide a mechanism for ensuring the transition towards a Good Food Cycle that is so urgently needed.’

The unfathomable cost of M&Ms

Getting a handle on the environmental cost of food is not easy, but it’s nigh on impossible with many UPF products with multiple ingredients.

M&Ms have 34…

…from 30 countries – each with its own supply chain that transforms the raw materials into ingredients – cocoa into cocoa liquor, cane into sugar, petroleum into blue food dye.

As an aside, there’s an interesting historical parallel here. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter on the colonial food regime in my book:

‘Sugar continued to drive the imperial project. Our craving for sweetness is a product of empire that is still embedded within the annual ritual for Christmas pudding, in which numerous ingredients came together from different colonised countries. Sultanas from South Africa, raisins from Australia, Canadian apples, eggs from Ireland, cloves from Zanzibar, demerara sugar from the West Indies, cinnamon from India and brandy from Palestine. Only the breadcrumbs were home-grown.’

More than a century later, M&M ingredients travel across the world to a central processing facility where they are combined and transformed into multi-coloured buttons.

We know more about food system’s effect on climate change, the effects of deforestation for agriculture, or methane emissions from livestock. But it’s so much harder to get a handle on the environmental impact of UPFs. Multi-ingredient industrial formulations have gone through so many complex processes, it’s almost impossible to track.

CarbonCloud in Sweden have tried though. They estimate that M&Ms emit at the very least 3.8m tons of carbon dioxide per year, probably a lot more.

Even if they could measure it, companies have little incentive to disclose their environmental footprint. As David Bryngelsson, CarbonCloud co-founder says:

‘Most of the people in the [food industry’s] value chain don’t care about climate change from an ideological point of view, but they do care about money’.

Again, to shift those incentives, the true measured value of products needs to incorporate impacts on climate. That in turn will require government regulation and financial penalties based on the true environmental cost of UPFs.

What next?

Doritos apparently have even more ingredients than M&Ms – 39 in total – corn being just one.

PepsiCo recently announced ‘Simply NKD,’ a new variant chip stripped of artificial dyes and flavors that the company views as innovation ( ‘If we can reinvent Doritos and Cheetos, imagine what’s next.’)

Which brings us to this pithy post by the excellent Mike Lee on the problem with naked Doritos.

‘What’s next is more of the same—slightly reformulated versions of the same ultra-processed products, each one stripped of whichever ingredient happens to be trending on social media that quarter, each one marketed as revolutionary while changing nothing about the fundamental business model that made these products problematic in the first place.’

Reformulation is innovation that keeps business as usual. Generating different variants is one way to keep manufacturing desire – when what’s actually being sold is pretty much the same as before. Which is why there are over a hundred flavours of Pringles.

Where next?

Another way to keep growing, to maximise profit is to expand geographically.

A recent analysis of market data from 54 countries and financial data of fast-food retailers examined trends in sales, market dominance, and financial performance.

As sales stagnate in high-income countries, firms maintain profit margins and high shareholder returns via franchising and private equity ownership. Corporations are expanding further into the global South.

The paper recommends policies to target structural leverage points – for example, democratising corporate governance, reducing the influence of private equity, and re-orienting agri-food subsidies, to drive a more democratic, sustainable and healthier food system.

UPFs and children

Last week, UNICEF released a new state-of-the-art review that builds on the 2025 Lancet Series on ultra-processed foods and human health and UNICEF’s own Feeding Profit report to consolidate evidence on UPFs and their implications for children’s nutrition, health and well-being. Chapters by multiple authors from around the world review the evidence on UPFs, sugar-sweetened beverages and commercially produced foods marketed for infants and young children – concluding with a case study from West Africa. The goal is to inform and impel action to protect children from predatory commercial forces flooding their food environments with UPFs.

On the cusp?

Time for some good news…

My 4 November post concluded thus:

‘Turning points are usually only seen in the rear-view mirror, with the benefit of hindsight. Are we in one now?’

An historic lawsuit filed last week makes me think we may be.

Filed in San Francisco Superior Court on behalf of the State of California and led by the city’s attorney, David Chiu, it seeks unspecified damages for the costs borne by local governments to treat residents whose health has been harmed by ultraprocessed food.

Ten corporations are being sued – Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, Post Holdings, Mondelez International, General Mills, Nestlé USA, Kellogg, Mars and ConAgra Brands. All stand accused of ‘unfair and deceptive acts’ in how they market and sell their UPF products, in the full knowledge they make people sick.

‘It makes me sick that generations of kids and parents are being deceived and buying food that’s not food’ Chiu told the New York Times.

Earlier this year, California passed a bipartisan bill that became the first in the US to provide a statutory definition of UPFs, and laid a foundation for banning them from schools.

The San Francisco city attorney’s office has a strong track record – with successful past lawsuits on tobacco, lead paint and opioids.

Here’s a clip of the announcement.

We watch and wait…

Best of 2025

It’s that time of the year.

First, here are my best books of the year:

Other mighty reads (not in pic) include Jennifer Clapp’s Titans of Industrial Agriculture, Keetie Roelen’s The Empathy Fix and Austin Frerick’s Barons.

Second, music. Well, it’s been a strange old year really. The only new album I’ve really listened to is Anna von Hausswolff’s brilliant Iconoclasts.

I’ve been leaning in to nostalgia, perhaps a bit too much this year, with these three: Peter Murphy (Silver Shade), Suede (Antidepressants) and The Cure (Mixes from a Lost World).

And, for all the best reasons, revisiting the legendary Gil Scott-Heron.

Here he is performing the magisterial Reagan take-down ‘B-Movie’ in 1982, the year I saw him in London.

It’s winter in America…

In this post, I review the series – the challenges posed and solutions proposed – before developing a case study of food industry engagement and highlighting a few other relevant papers.

The first paper of the series focuses on the evidence of the harms generated by our UPF-saturated diets while the following two papers focus on the necessary response – the fightback. I mainly focus on the latter.

Each paper is excellent. Together, they represent a landmark.

The damage

The first paper by Carlos Monteiro and colleagues examines the evidence for three key hypotheses: i) that UPFs displace traditional diets centred on whole foods, ii) that this reduces diet quality, and iii) that this trend and pattern increases the risk of multiple diet-related chronic diseases.

And finds:

‘The totality of the evidence supports the thesis that displacement of long-established dietary patterns by ultra-processed foods is a key driver of the escalating global burden of multiple diet-related chronic diseases.’

The fightback

The second paper by Gyorgy Scrinis and colleagues focuses on the policy response in relation to UPF production, marketing and consumption.

Crucially, they also examine policies to protect, incentivise, and support dietary patterns based on fresh and minimally processed foods, particularly for lower income households.

The policy response cannot be piecemeal or ad hoc. It needs to be bold and decisive involving concerted and comprehensive action that targets the product portfolios, marketing strategies, and sales structures of the corporate behemoths that control the global food system we have right now.

It also needs to go upstream to re-set the rules for foreign investment, and apply anti-trust regulations and restrictions on mergers and acquisitions in order to roll back corporate capture. Part of this will involve agricultural and trade policy reform to disincentivize monocultures (of maize, soy, sugar, palm oil) that supply cheap ingredients for UPF products and to incentivize and support diverse, local food systems.

The third paper (by Phil Baker and colleagues) addresses the structural and systemic challenge of radically overhauling the food system to put people and planet first.

It reminds us of something that can get lost, namely the simple fact that UPFs are extremely cheap to produce and highly profitable to sell.

The entire logic of the system – its core purpose – is not about human or planetary health, it’s about maximizing profit.

Purpose matters. Products and practices will always follow purpose. Innovation will always follow purpose. That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in.

And because UPFs are so profitable, corporations have become monolithic (choose any indicator you like) and quite adept at translating economic and financial power into political power.

The dark arts of corporate political activity are pretty well-known now. Sunlight has got in. Corporations, their front groups, multistakeholder initiatives and the researchers they fund use their power to block, delay and dilute governmental action in a strategic and global approach. (In Food Fight, I describe the five ‘Deadly Ds’ – doubt, distort, distract, disguise and dodge.)

Corporate political activity is often aided and abetted by compliant or inactive governments. Global northern governments fuel the UPF industry’s growth and profitability – often intervening on its behalf in the World Trade Organization and bilaterally through trade diplomats, to oppose UPF-related regulations of other governments.

Corporate capture goes even further – beyond markets, finance and politics into science and the media.

I thought I knew a thing or two about conflicts of interest in food and nutrition research but I was stopped in my tracks by this stat. Nearly 3,800 studies published between 2008 and 2023 disclosed funding or interests naming UPF manufacturers. Of these, a third focused on energy balance or physical activity, a known corporate scientific strategy (‘distort’) intended to shift blame away from products and corporate practices.

Do the math – that’s an average of one industry-funded study published on every working day of those 15 years!

This kind of power also translates into epistemic or discursive power – via influence on the media (mainstream and social).

Phil and his team do a brilliant job in showing what needs to be done to turn the juggernaut around – how to reduce UPF industry’s political power by protecting food governance from corporate interference, implementing robust conflict of interest safeguards (in policy, research, and professional practice), by cleaning up lobbying and ending UPF industry sponsorship and funding.

But beyond, to activate citizen and civil society power – highlighting ways to mobilise a global public health response by building advocacy coalitions, generating legal, research, and comms capacities to drive policy change and ensure a just transition to a food system in which health, equity, and sustainability prevails over corporate profit.

‘Do the right thing. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Today!’

Paper 3 includes this ‘power map’ — showing the interest group memberships of corporations. Eight corporations dominate — the largest of which, Nestlé, is a member of 137 of the 207 groups around the world.

Nestlé is the world’s biggest food company with a long history – expanding from 80 factories in the 1920s to 340 factories across 76 countries in 2023, supported by 24 research and development centres serving 188 markets.

Let’s take a look at what it’s been up to in recent months.

A recent Public Eye investigation into sugar-boosted Nestlé products being sold in Africa found that 90% of 100 Cerelac product samples in 20 countries in Africa contained added sugar. Similar products in global-northern countries contain no added sugar. On average, each analysed serving contained nearly 6g added sugar (1.5 sugar cubes) with the highest (7.5g, almost two sugar cubes) found in a Cerelac product for six-month-old babies being sold in Kenya.

Shocking in itself – but even more so in the context of similar findings over a year ago:

The amount of sugar found in products from African countries was 50% higher than those in products sold in Asia and Latin America. An open letter was sent to the corporation — concluding with the plea in the title above.

*

Here’s a recent paper on Nestlé and commercial determinants of infant health in Africa.

Nestlé sponsored the Africa Food Prize, an initiative of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, as a commitment to address nutrition, food insecurity, and hunger on the continent.

Nestlé has supported the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Food Systems, funding research on food and nutrition as well as hosting and mentoring postgraduate student

Nestlé co-funds an astroturf group (a fake grassroots organization) called ‘Americans for Ingredient Transparency’ whose goal is to lobby the US Congress to override new state laws, like California’s AB1264, which will ban the unhealthiest ultraprocessed foods from school meals.

Nestlé and Tufts University recently promoted their partnership on social media.

(I asked if Tufts has a private sector engagement policy, an institutional position on conflicts of interest. Twice. No response, just a reiteration of how proud they were.)

Going global

Any response to corporate capture of markets and politics has to be global – just like the problem and the industry.

UN agencies have a big role to play – in developing technical guidance, integrating UPF-based metrics into surveillance systems and establishing global and national targets on reducing the dietary share of UPFs.

Paper 3 makes the case for an international policy framework – like a WHO convention – to empower national government regulators. UN human rights bodies could interpret treaty provisions in relation to UPF-related harms. Though the Lancet Series focused on human health, there are huge implications of our UPF-dominated food systems for unfolding biodiversity, plastics, and climate crises.

So how is the United Nations responding?

Is it actually united in its engagement with industry – especially where potential partners are directly implicated in driving harms that relate to its mandate?

Well, the overarching UN Business Compact is limited. Why, for example, does it not include health in its list of criteria (along with human rights, labour, environment, anti-corruption, terrorism, crime, arms, pornography, gambling, tobacco)?

UN agency positions also differ quite a bit on industry engagement. Again, looking at one corporation.

UNICEF and WHO do not engage with Nestlé but UN Women, UNESCO do.

FAO’s guidelines contain exclusionary criteria including: ‘manufacturers of sugar-sweetened beverages and/or high in fat, sodium, and/or sugar foods’ but it’s not clear whether this precludes sharing platforms at policy conferences.

The CGIAR is not immune. The Chair of the Board of the CGIAR was a Board member of Nestlé for her full term. She stepped down from the CGIAR position in July, but continues in the Nestlé post.

There’s an interesting approach to compensation for the latter. Apart from the eye-watering honorarium (over $500,000 per year), half of it comes in the form of shares. Which board member would vote for anything that reduces profit, that reduces the share of its portfolio comprising ultra-profit foods?

UNICEF’s position – like that of Nutrition International – is unequivocal. Two beacons of light, highlighted here.

*

Meanwhile, Nestlé itself has had an interesting year. The CEO Laurent Freixe was fired recently for ‘a romantic relationship with a direct subordinate’ (yes, you read that correctly – ‘subordinate’).

Dalliances with ‘subordinates’ are apparently not unusual in the thin air of Big Food leadership. The CEO of McDonald’s was fired in 2019 after a consensual relationship with an employee (…later upgraded to four employees!)

I digress…but if we’re in any doubt about the future of Nestle, there’s this. The new CEO will make a ‘fresh start’ but one in which ‘everything will become faster, developing and launching new products, and renovating existing ones, to more marketing….growth is the focus.’

On purpose and partners

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) between commercial actors and governments or other non-profits have little evidence of effectiveness – though you wouldn’t think so, given the frequency they’re promoted.

A recent study interrogates the role and legitimacy of food industry actors as partners in policies to improve the food environment. Key ‘fault lines’ that emerged included: i) uninterrogated assumptions that partnerships are effective, ii) the role of exclusive social networks, iii) the voluntary nature of partnerships, iv) data ownership, v) control of narratives and vi) the centrality of political ideology.

Another recent study interrogates ‘multistakeholderism’ – the notion that global public issues should be addressed by all those who affect or are affected by an issue (as espoused recently in the United Nations Food System Summit event and process.) Like PPPs, multistakeholder governance (MSG) has limited evidence of effectiveness and a high risk of corporate capture.

This study analysed responses to WHO consultations related to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) to examine how actors construct or contest the legitimacy of MSG. Results highlighted big differences. Proponents of MSG, primarily industry-affiliated organisations, cited industry expertise and resources as key justifications, while non-profit and academic respondents tended to argue against industry inclusion in MSG, referring to conflicts of interest and potential corporate capture of the policy process. The paper concludes with a plea to WHO and other UN agencies to critically examine the evidence on multistakeholder approaches and to use unambiguous terminology when discussing them.

Industry opposition

The UPF industry – and its investors – will not take all this lying down. Several tropes have emerged over the years, including:

• Not enough evidence, more research needed

• Nova is sub-optimal – some UPFs are healthy

• UPFs and Nova are ideological constructs

• There’s nothing wrong with ‘food processing’

• Unhealthy diets are due to nutrient imbalances, not ultra-processing

• Unhealthy diets are due to poor choices, a lack of awareness, poor education

• An unhealthy diet is an individual responsibility

• UPFs are convenient

• UPFs generate economic growth

• UPFs can be reformulated to make them healthy

• We’re the experts, leave it to us.

• Nanny state regulations restrict our freedom

• The industry can regulate itself

• Regulation stigmatizes poor and vulnerable individuals who can only afford cheap UPFs

There are clear responses to each one of these – but that’s a later post!

That said, I have to mention what is surely one of the worst media articles. Somehow this one, in just a few paragraphs, manages to capture most of the above list. The journalist had clearly not even read the abstracts, let alone the papers, as she described ‘another new study’. She repeatedly conflates processing with ultra-processing before accusing anyone working to improve diets as being middle-class faddists out to stop people who are poor from buying cheap food. The ethics of this ‘let them eat cake’ position are not questioned. She conveniently ignores the repeated need to balance any regulation of harmful UPFs with policies to improve access and affordability of low-income families to a healthy diet.

This recent paper is worth checking out.

The UPF-RAN

The Lancet Series is pivotal in laying out the evidence of damage and the options to respond. But it’s also a springboard to more action. The third paper describes the launch of UPF-RAN

“A global UPF action network could build on existing advocacy and policy responses - especially those in Latin America and Africa - and bring together civil society organisations and movements, experts, UN agencies, government leaders, and donors, to pool resources, advocate for policy change, and stand up to corporate power.”

Check it out…

*

This is the first birthday of ‘FOOD FIGHT FILES’ Since last November, I’ve posted 27 newsletters, a couple every month (…though don’t hold me to it!).

I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for taking the time to dig in – and do let me know what you think.

Philipp asks ‘what, if anything, can we learn from moments in the past in which a model of life seemed to change, or had to change, in which whole societies were transformed?’

On reading Food Fight, he saw the end of World War Two as one of these moments.

I’d spent a lot of time mulling how to structure the history section – before drawing on the brilliant work of Philip McMichael and Harriet Friedmann on ‘food regimes’

Of course, there are no hard and fast ‘turning points’ when everything suddenly changes. Big changes come about as things shift below the surface, usually over decades – although these deeper forces and the tectonic shifts they cause can become visible through certain events at certain times.

As Fernand Braudel put it, turning points are the ‘crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.’

That said, here are three pivotal periods from the 20^th century…

1: Early 1900s

Well, there are actually two parts to this one — we need first to go back to the 19^th century.

In Britain, as food went from the country to cities to fuel the industrial revolution, soils became exhausted. William Gibbs however saw an opportunity on the distant horizon — 6,000 miles away. The Chincha islands, thirteen miles off the coast of Peru, were home to massive colonies of birds. As it hardly ever rained, skyscrapers of dried guano accumulated that were rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. In 1841, Gibbs struck a deal with the Peruvian government to import vast quantities to Britain.

Peru’s birds – and the Chinese indentured labourers who harvested the ‘white gold’ – were driving Britain’s imperial project. By 1850, guano was fetching $167 per kilo ($3,000 in today’s money). Gibbs became one of the richest men on the planet.

‘The House of Gibbs that made their dibs, by selling turds of foreign birds’ was a popular ditty in Victorian musical halls and London trading houses.

By the turn of the century there was nothing left — hence this headline from 1898:

Then, just before World War One broke out, two German chemists made a breakthrough. Fritz Haber discovered how to synthesize ammonia by combining atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen. Later, Carl Bosch (working for BASF) figured how to mass-produce this new fertilizer using fossil fuels.

Haber had more than his fair share of angels and demons.

At the start of World War I, the German Army requested his help in replacing explosives in shells with poison gas. Unlike his friend Einstein, Haber was a patriot, and he joined the German War Office where he set about weaponising chlorine gas (ignoring Hague Convention prohibitions). The challenge was getting the delivery system right. On 22 April 1915, he was on the front lines in Ypres. After weeks of waiting for winds – strong enough to carry the gas away from the German troops, but not so strong they would dissipate the gas before it took effect against the enemy – he supervised the dawn release of more than 168 tons of chlorine gas. A yellow cloud drifted over the land and settled on 10,000 troops, many of whom were sleeping. More than half died within minutes. Two days later, Haber supervised another chemical attack that killed over a thousand Canadians and sickened many thousands more. The Second Battle of Ypres saw casualties of nearly 70,000 Allied troops, but only half as many Germans, owing largely to Haber’s gas.

During a short visit back to Berlin, his wife Clara Immerwahr, horrified by her husband’s actions, shot herself in the head at a party held in his honour. The next day, he returned to battle, this time on the Eastern front where he led another gas attack against the Russians.

Three years later, in 1918, Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on fertilizers. The prize committee ignored his second life as the father of chemical warfare (possibly not unrelated to the fact that Alfred Nobel himself had become famous for inventing dynamite.)

In the twenties, as Hitler rose to power, Nazis turned on Haber and other Jewish scientists. He fled to England where he was shunned — before dying, aged 65, alone in a hotel room in Switzerland, a few days after repenting his career-shift from saving lives to mass murder.

The Haber-Bosch process still sustains the food base for half the world’s population, albeit with diminishing returns and major climate and environmental downsides we’ve since run into.

2: Mid-1940s

The second ‘turning point’, at the end of the Second World War, was driven by two factors.

The first, after the Great Depression in the 1930s, was the US policy to stabilise staple-food production by granting huge subsidies to wheat and soy. Surplus production was channeled to key strategic Cold War allies (Japan, Korea, Mexico, Israel, Pakistan, Egypt and Colombia) at knock-down prices, or as food aid. Koreans were taught how to make sandwiches with imported US wheat.

The second element comprised a new bundle of agricultural technologies, developed in Mexico in the 1940s, by American agronomist, Norman Borlaug, and his team of crop breeders. This package started to be exported in the 1960s, mainly to India, using agribusinesses set up in Europe to help the war-ravaged continent get back on its feet. The ‘Green Revolution’ killed Malthusian predictions of global famine. World grain output (and yields) more than doubled between 1950 and 1980.

But there was a dark side to this hyper-concentration on just three staples (rice, maize, wheat) and on calories. Diet diversity declined as nutrient-dense crops like pulses, fruits and vegetables were marginalised. Inequalities widened as only the larger farmers could fully avail themselves of the new technologies, and mechanisation removed a large source of employment for poorer farmers, many of whom moved to cities. Hunger barely changed – rising production means nothing if you can’t afford it. Millions of smallholders, who were net buyers, were hit by sharp price hikes. And then there were hidden costs – that would only become apparent many years later. The dousing of the land with chemical fertilisers and pesticides and an unsustainable extraction of groundwater that generated a raft of environmental hazards.

Still, the ‘revolution’ continued. Farms became bigger, more specialised, more mechanised and more dependent on fossil fuels. Agribusinesses grew to exploit economies of scale in transportation, manufacturing, processing, preservation and packaging.

From foxholes to TV dinners

Last month, the New York Times published this brilliant visual essay by Alice Callahan showing how America got hooked on ultra-processed food.

It highlights a lock-in that’s often overlooked, despite its enduring implications. During the war, companies devised food products for soldiers — powdered cheeses, dehydrated potatoes, canned meats, melt-resistant chocolate – using an array of new additives and packaging that could withstand wet beach landings and weeks at the bottom of a backpack.

‘When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’

At the end of the war, the food industry’s ‘hammer’ (as Mike Lee elaborates in this fascinating blog) comprised the ‘stainless-steel vats, spray-dryers, extrusion lines, and massive production facilities that had been optimized for shelf-stable, ultraprocessed foods.’

Most Americans wanted to eat well. But the vast, expensive infrastructure couldn’t sit idle. Companies had to find markets for these products and generate demand among civilians.

As Lee says ‘It’s a tragic irony: the same system that fed victory also fed the chronic diseases associated with the Standard American Diet.’

Uniting nations

The mid-1940s was also a turning point in the politics of food.

The first United Nations conference on food and agriculture (held in Hot Springs, Virginia, in mid-1943) was grounded in a conviction that freedom in the postwar period should start with ‘freedom from hunger’.

A few months later, the Bengal famine started. Driven by wartime measures and the indifference of British colonial rulers, it continued into 1944, killing 3 million Bengalis.

On 16 October 1945, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations was established in Rome to facilitate international collaboration. Eight days later, on 24 October 1945, the UN Charter came into force, marking the official birth of the United Nations. The UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) was launched in 1946 to provide aid to hungry children in Europe, before expanding into other regions and other types of nutrition and health support. In 1948, the World Health Organization (WHO) was founded, in Geneva and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly. The pivotal Article 25 read:

‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood.’

3: Mid-1970s

Thirty years later, another period of global crisis. Continuing cold war tensions, oil and food price shocks, military dictatorships in Latin America and the contested politics of newly independent nation states in Africa and South Asia – all coincided with the rise of neoliberalism.

Propelled by Thatcher and Reagan, neoliberalism was characterised by trade liberalisation, deregulation, private property rights, low tax, minimal welfare – with the role of the State pared back to ensuring the functioning of the market.

Health – and anything that determines it, like diet – was ‘on the individual’ as structural and commercial drivers were neglected.

This was the playing field for Big Food – and this is what started to happen:

When satiety blocks profit

Global food corporations have an assured market – everyone needs to eat. But by the late 1970s, market growth was beginning to hit the ceiling of our biological capacity to consume. We can only consume so much food and we get bored with the same food.

Companies responded with aggressive marketing campaigns for a wide variety of products that are capable of displacing traditional foods and being consumed in excess of need.

In the USA, this expansion was facilitated by the 1973 Farm Bill which paid farmers billions of tax dollars in subsidies to grow as much corn as they wanted, guaranteeing them a profit.

Sixteen years earlier, in 1957, Richard Marshall and Earl Kooi – two American biochemists working at the Corn Products Company – had hit upon a process for making a sweetener (high-fructose corn syrup) from the excess corn produced. It was too expensive to produce then – the 1973 bill suddenly made it commercially viable.

The Farm Bill was rocket fuel to the obesity epidemic. Staple-food production increased, portion sizes ballooned and the marketing of energy-dense junk foods became more aggressive. Sales of sugary drinks/sodas tripled in the 1970s.

After Big Food had figured how ultra-processing could drive ultra-profits, the new global food system started to bed in. Hyper-capitalism took off.

Dumping on the south

Much of the overproduction driven by the raft of monster subsidies granted to US corporations was dumped in developing country markets, undermining local producers.

Neoliberalism has been especially disastrous for countries in the Global South, driving a growth in asset wealth that far exceeds rises in salaries and wages and a major upswing in inequalities within and between countries.

In Edible Economics, Ha-Joon Chang explodes the myth that Britain and then the US became global economic powerhouses because of their free-trade and free-market policies. In fact, both countries had been global leaders in protectionism.

Any fledgling economy needs space and time for local producers to develop the capabilities to engage in higher productivity industries. But Global-South governments were progressively forced to reduce agricultural protections, import staple foods, and export high-value foods.

Big Food continued to manufacture desire, ramping up its ‘innovation’ budgets and developing myriad new products. Food scientists were tasked with diversifying portfolios to ‘add value’ (profit) to their products – which is why we now have 172 flavours of Pringles.

As economies grew, countries moved from rural, low-productivity agricultural systems focused on staples to more diversified systems including legumes and micronutrient-rich foods and on to increasingly commercialised systems, flooded with ultra-processed foods.

The Global North started to move through this dietary transition in the middle of the last century. Three generations ago. But it’s happening so much faster in the Global South. Many cities of middle-income countries (e.g. Thailand, China and India) have made the same journey in just one generation. And it’s happening at a much earlier stage of economic and social development. Both these trends – the speed of change and its earlier onset – are rendering these countries more vulnerable to downstream harms.

As transnationals captured ever-larger shares of global markets and ultra-processed food products spread across the world, obesity rates accelerated. Way more than a dietary transition, this started to look more like a heist.

*

In the last half-century, there have been other pivotal moments, including the food price crisis in 2007-8 which propelled a growing focus on connections between agriculture and nutrition.

Turning points are usually only seen in the rear-view mirror, with the benefit of hindsight.

Are we in one now?

I spent a large chunk of the grey weekend digging into Food Intelligence by Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall.

Their book was released in the US last month, a couple of weeks after Food Fight. Apart from getting up to speed with new developments in nutritional science, I was intrigued to see how our perspectives aligned or differed. Kevin had studied physics before becoming a groundbreaking researcher on nutrition, metabolism and weight gain while Julia’s a leading science journalist, focusing on nutrition and public health. On my side, I’d trained in nutrition, eons ago, before gravitating toward the political economy of food, what drives malnutrition and what to do about it.

But, first, the book…

These two sentences appear in the first couple of pages:

‘We are nothing but stardust powered by sunshine’

‘Humans increasingly resemble factory-produced fat-,sugar- and salt-filled organisms’

…which (to me) brilliantly encapsulates the challenge on our hands.

The first few chapters dive into the science of food and nutrition, exploding myths along the way. Weight gain is not actually driven by slow metabolism and there’s no real difference between low-fat and low-carb diets – a calorie in one is pretty similar to a calorie in the other when it comes to weight gain or loss. There are chapters on protein, carbs and fat before we get to gut-brain signalling (‘conducting the orchestra’) in which the roles of crucial hormonal connectors, including GLP1, are described.

In Chapter 7 we crash-land into our toxic food environment – the single biggest driver of our unhealthy eating and all that goes with it. This is where Food Intelligence meets Food Fight – the overlap in a Venn diagram of our respective books.

Having said that, this was the first time I’d ever heard of Tony Sclafani’s rats. (nothing to do with The Sopranos)

Fifty years ago, neurobiologist Sclafani was struggling to get his rats to fatten up quickly enough to inform the development of an animal model for obesity. Feeding a lard-enriched chow just wasn’t doing it. One day a colleague spilled some Froot Loops in the open space where Sclafani was working. The normal rat instinct was to try to escape…but not this time. The rat ran to the Froot Loops. Sclafani later showed how weight gain among junk food-fed rats was triple that of rats fed a standard chow-and-water diet over two months. (New York’s pizza rat clearly knew this)

“What if the food industry had been unwittingly conducting an experiment in humans, changing our food environment in ways that messed with our internal eating signals and shifting the balance point where our body weight is regulated?”

Are we like Sclafani’s rats, wandering around in our junk-food-saturated high street/rat cages?

This is a pivotal chapter that digs into the raging UPF debate.

Building on his seminal 2019 study of ultra-processed diets and weight gain, Kevin and colleagues’ subsequent work has shown that the main drivers of overeating are high energy density and hyperpalatability.

Developing and selling a wide range of energy-dense and hyperpalatable products at large scale, low price, available anywhere in convenient forms is all enabled by industrial processing.

If we add this to our knowledge of the harms of high saturated fats/sugar/salt, the target for regulation comes into view (…more on this next month when there will be several consultations on ultra-processed foods, including an EU roundtable and the launch of the Lancet Series)

We also need to remember there may be harmful ingredients in ultra-processed foods that are not mediated by weight gain.

Chapter 8 (‘Purer Food’) investigates food products and the history of regulation (if any) in the US.

At the turn of the 20^th century, the US food supply was swimming in adulterants – milk was spiked with formaldehyde (to stop it rotting), plaster of paris and chalk (to whiten it) and pureed calf brains (to mimic cream layer on top). Candies laced with arsenic, lead and copper, fake honey that was really corn syrup, flour that contained gypsum and crushed stones. And on and on.

For more, check the amazing Poison Squad story.

Over 120 years later, the US still has the GRAS loophole – an extraordinary industry self-regulation in which any company bringing out a new product simply needs to declare its ingredients are ‘generally recognized as safe.’

Yes, voluntary not mandatory. With more than 10,000 chemicals that can be added to food or used in processing, all the industry has to do is to hire an expert to give it the green light.

An industry-paid expert – with no oversight. What could possibly go wrong?

Even the notification to government is voluntary – and often not done.

On top of this, there’s the scary question of potential cumulative effects of the myriad hidden chemicals swilling around the food system? We haven’t a clue. Of the 877 GRAS notices made between 1997-2020, only one took into account cumulative effects.

(On this, here’s an update from Marion Nestle on new moves to close the GRAS loophole.)

The FDA does have a food safety budget but almost all of it targets acute food poisoning – despite the fact that ‘more Americans die every day from chronic food illnesses than from acute food poisonings every year.’

Jaw-drop moments were coming thick and fast by this time…

Like the fact that US tax law effectively incentivizes food and beverage companies to spend close to $14 billion annually marketing unhealthy products, much of it targeted to kids. This is more than twice the entire global operating budget of the World Health Organization (aside: the global advertising spending record, by any single company, is held by Nestle at $19 bn per year)

In later chapters, we move on to the wellness industry/scam. We learn that the value of the personalised precision nutrition market ($12 billion in 2022) is likely to quadruple by the end of the decade — and that the vitamin market is already worth $150 billion, similar to the global market for ‘healthy snacks.’ And we learn there are more than 85,000 products (weight loss aids, muscle builders, brain boosters, protein supplement, precision hacks) which do not need to be certified as either safe or effective to be sold. In the US, supplements cause more than 23,000 emergency department visits every year.

So, we have an entrenched toxic food environment that’s harming people and planet, and we have rampant profiteering by unregulated transnationals in the market for food, nutrition, health and this thing called ‘wellness.’

The overhaul that’s long overdue will need to be driven by a set of actions from many sides and many actors.

Policy responses and interventions proposed in Food Intelligence mostly align with those discussed (and, to a lesser extent, implemented) elsewhere.

The overarching imperative is to radically shift the balance in our food system so that industry can no longer rake in huge profits while making us sick. This of course requires government to set the guardrails and re-set the rules of the game.

Taxation has a big role. Not simply taxing harmful products and practices, but using the tax dividend creatively to improve access and affordability of healthier diets, especially among low-income households.

There’s a lot more – for government, for citizens, for industry, media, research. We need to pull all the levers, press all the buttons. We’ve had the revelation…now the revolution.

Of course, I’ve just skimmed the content. Food Intelligence is a fabulous book that’s perfectly timed, both globally and nationally, especially given the turbulent times in the US.

Crossing boundaries

Returning to entry points, angles and perspectives...

For me, a huge strength of nutrition lies in its fundamental interdisciplinarity. Well, it’s not just inter- but trans-disciplinarity. I’ve worked with teams made up of almost as many disciplines as there were team members. Economists, political scientists, anthropologists, nutritionists, health folk, policymakers, programme designers – all focused on addressing food insecurity, injustice and malnutrition. Working together, they don’t stay in their silos for long…they cross boundaries and gain insights from different perspectives shared.

In contrast, many of us have grown tired of the loud (online) voices who bang on about food products and practices being the sole domain of food scientists: ‘leave it to us, we’re the experts….now run along.’

It’s not just because many such ‘experts’ are being supported by a food industry that’s profiting from the status quo, it’s because the challenge demands the involvement of all of us. At some time, in some way.

So, I’m 100% behind Thursday’s World Food Day ‘hand in hand’ theme (…er, well, so long as conflicts of interest have been addressed)

On the road

If you’re in or around Canterbury next week and feel like a chat about how we all play our part in overhauling dysfunctional food systems, come along to this!

Or, in London this Friday, for the Interdisciplinary Food Systems Teaching and Learning (IFSTAL) annual lecture at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (tickets here).

My first presentation at the School was 43 years ago, during my MSc – when I unsuccessfully tried to quell my nerves with a double-whisky beforehand.

Bad move. This time, I’ll wait…

It’s nearly seven years since the first EAT Lancet report was published in early January 2019, back in those halcyon pre-pandemic days. Hailed as a landmark report, a large slice of the backlash it unleashed, we now know, was choreographed by Big Meat.

Less than two weeks later – too close really – another big Lancet Commission report was launched – this one on the Global Syndemic of obesity, undernutrition and climate change.

This again called for a radical overhaul of our food system, but the two reports were quite different.

I was more taken with the syndemic report than the EAT Lancet dietary prescription. It seemed so much more grounded in the real world, as it grappled with the commercial and political drivers of food system dysfunction.

The EAT Lancet report (1.0) seemed to duck politics, inequity and injustice. It spoke of a Great Food Transformation that would be achieved by public health information, education and better intra-governmental coordination, by sustainable intensification of agriculture, prioritizing production of healthy foods, by better management of land and oceans and by halving food loss and waste.

The word ‘corporate’ did not appear in the report – not once – nor did the word ‘commercial’ or ‘justice’.

Why does it matter?

We’re living at a strange time in history when both extreme wealth and extreme poverty are increasing – a dynamic that, as the 2019 syndemic report stated, is being driven in part by the global food system itself. We now know it destroys a lot more than it creates ($5 trillion more, in fact).

Globally, since 2020, the richest 1% have grabbed two-thirds of all new wealth ($42 trillion) – twice as much as the bottom 99%. In 2022, 95 food and energy corporations more than doubled their profits (making $306 billion and paying out $257 billion – 84% – of that to shareholders)

In the 1980s, a typical CEO was paid 20 times more than the average worker. By 2016, he or she (usually he) was paid 129 times more. In 2019, the CEO of Taco Bell, Mark King, was paid close to $4 million in salaries and bonuses – around $2,000 per hour – whereas a shopfloor worker earned $14 per hour.

Some recent stories of frontline food workers – like these from India, southern Spain and California – are appalling.

Fast forward seven years, we now have a second report (EAT Lancet 2.0) that is far more grounded in the political and commercial realities – that recognizes any real transformation is impossible without addressing food injustice.

Justice is now one of three priorities - with health and environment — all crucial.

The report has five sections:

1. an update on the evidence on diet and health and the outlines of a planetary health diet (PHD)

2. an update on evidence on environmental effects of food production systems, across nine planetary boundaries.

3. an investigation of food justice with regard to nine social foundations

4. an analysis of the consequences of a food systems transformation, and

5. a proposal of a set of 8 solutions and 23 actions to ensure access to, and demand for, healthy, sustainable, and just food systems for all.

Food justice and human rights in general were downplayed throughout the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) process, so it’s heartening to see the way in which healthy diets are seen not only as a fundamental right, but a shared responsibility here. The report also tackles lock-ins due to power imbalances and corporate capture that pervade the food system from farm to fork.

Justice is seen as having three core elements (that align with earlier work by the Committee on World Food Security’s high-level panel):

1. a fair distribution of resources, opportunities, capabilities, benefits and burdens.

2. the power to make decisions, freedom and political voice and representation.

3. recognitional justice, in terms of societal structures and norms (all participating as equals)

Justice and human rights (to food, a healthy environment, decent work) are inter-related and inter-dependent:

Goals, solutions and actions are summarised well in the report:

The Commission calls for the development of transformative roadmaps via five steps:

1. establish context-specific bundles of actions and policies

2. set and track targets that enable collective action and transparent accountability

3. build coalitions of diverse actors

4. identify and address barriers to change

5. unlock financial resources for transformation.

Concluding:

‘Finally, our Commission positions justice as both a central goal and a driving force for food systems transformation. Food systems cannot be just without ensuring the Planetary Health Diet (PHD) is affordable and accessible to all, and without substantially reducing transgressions of planetary boundaries. Justice is also necessary to overcome the deeply entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. In this sense, justice is not only an outcome of food systems transformation, but a prerequisite for enabling it.’

Overall, a lively read (…as are these commentaries by Thin Lei Win and Mike Barry )

‘If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies’

Not bedtime reading…

This cheery book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares is as disturbing as it sounds. Super-intelligent (generative) AI – if and when it’s developed – would most likely figure we’re getting in the way and get rid of us…eventually.

Yes, we set the goals for AI but it will pursue them in ways we cannot foresee, which doesn’t bode well…for us.

The book uses some intriguing examples – one of which is about our radically altered food environments.

Natural selection meant that humans who could get hold of energy-dense foods in the ancestral environment would be more likely to survive and more likely to pass on their genes. We evolved to eat sugar, fat and salt from fruits and meat. But the food in our ancestral environment is a tiny fraction of all possible things that could be formulated to be eaten. Over time, as we figure things out, we generate many more edible options, in ways our ‘ancestral training’ never took into account. We create fake foods that satisfy our cravings for sweetness or saltiness without any of the nutritional qualities that gave rise to this desire in the first place.

How could we predict we would now have 172 varieties of a fake potato sludge called Pringles that humans crave? That no longer conferred a survival advantage but instead made us ill and killed off too many of us, too soon.

The problem is we don’t know how superAI works. It’s not like a computer program which is designed or engineered – it will be grown which means it will move beyond our control. Even if we can nudge it to ensure our own survival, we don’t know how it will respond or what will happen along the way…whether its own quirky preferences will diverge from ours. If we then try to control it, it could turn on us, using technology we can’t yet imagine (Aztecs had never seen “sticks that can make you die” – guns – until the Spanish invaded).

But then again…he says, looking for the upside…history is also full of perceived existential threats that never materialized, like Malthus and Y2K. Yudkowsky himself once claimed that nanotechnology would destroy humanity ‘no later than 2010.’

Tim Berners Lee also has a book out – a memoir – which I’m looking forward to (I used to cycle up and down the Jura mountains in the early 90s, while he was down the road at CERN, inventing that strange WWW thing!)

His view? ‘The time to decide the governance model for AI was yesterday.’

Truth fight

To wrap up, here’s a fascinating conversation between Maria Ressa, Yuval Noah Harari and Rory Stewart on ‘how to life a good life in difficult times.’

Especially this, from Harari:

‘I think that more people need to realise that we have to do the hard work ourselves. There is a tendency to assume that we can rely on reality to do the job for us. That if there are people who talk nonsense, who support illogical policies, who ignore the facts, sooner or later, reality will wreak vengeance on them. And this is not the way that history works. So if you want the truth, and you want reality to win, each of us has to do some of the hard work ourselves: choose one thing and focus on that and hope that other people will also do their share. That way we avoid the extremes of despair.’

Which reminded me of this from the late, great Jane Goodall:

‘The greatest danger to our future is apathy’

‘Til next time….

History has just been made. By stealth. Having tripled in a single generation – an evolutionary nanosecond — child obesity has overtaken underweight around the world. That’s 188 million school-aged children and adolescents (one in ten) at risk of life-threatening chronic disease.

New analyses from a disturbing UNICEF report Feeding Profit, released earlier this month, highlight the scale of overweight and obesity:

• how it’s now overtaken underweight as the primary manifestation of malnutrition among school-age children and adolescents globally (one in five with overweight, one in ten with obesity)

• how it’s affecting every region of the world, with LMICs showing the steepest rise

The capture of markets and diets by the ultra-processed food (UPF) industry:

• the frightening proportion of child diets that derive from UPFs (with levels so high they constitute ‘staple’ foods)

• the saturation of food environments (schools as well as retail markets) with UPFs, especially in poorer communities

The way the industry uses its power – economic, political - to drive profit:

• the pervasive and predatory nature of marketing, especially digital

• the unethical practices of the UPF industry in polluting policy discourse and hampering marketing controls (70% government officials and civil society reps in 24 countries identified this as a major barrier)

And the inadequate policy and legislative response by most governments (with some notable exceptions like Brazil, Chile, Mexico)

In effect, this ‘double burden’ is being placed on the shoulders of children the world over by transnational corporations and their investors who privilege profit above all else...and by governments who have consistently failed to prevent them from doing so.

Why do we tolerate this?

At the turn of the century, when this graph starts, we started to look into this new phenomenon called ‘the double burden of malnutrition.’

We had a lot to learn…or at least, I did.

Like the graph, it was a steep learning curve. We had underestimated the challenge of overweight/obesity – and we hadn’t really understood what was driving the accelerating trend.

In the last decade, this has changed. The penny’s dropped. Not only do we know a lot more about the drivers of the problem, we’re learning faster about what works in response – as more and more experiences are shared – and we see many other interventions and initiatives with big potential.

Kudos to UNICEF for bringing this report together, shining a light on the particular effects on children with some powerful new analyses – and for charting the way ahead so compellingly.

The market and financial power of Big Food is well known…but the way in which this power is translated into political and epistemic power, much less so.

Deadly Ds

I have long been interested in the wide palette of tricks and tactics that UPF corporations use to infiltrate policy processes to stall governmental regulation (for some reason, they all seem to start with the letter D!?)

Back in early 2022, on World Obesity Day, UNICEF launched a series of webinars on children’s rights to healthy food environments. The first one involved speakers from Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI), WHO and myself in which we explored the corporate playbook. It was a great session that led to this excellent brief.

I devoted a chapter (The Dark Arts) to the Ds in Food Fight, illustrating each tactic with vignettes (there are many) — and they’ve been expanded and extended in the UNICEF report (see Spotlight 8).

Similar tactics are used to disrupt health and climate policy, many have been adapted/adopted from those used decades ago by Big Tobacco. Of course, they all overlap and interact in time and space – but the overarching purpose stays the same.

Turning things around

From the problem and its drivers, the report moves on to the important segment, highlighting a set of legal or policy measures that governments can and should mandate to protect children from unhealthy food environments

They’re listed on the left axis of this extraordinary graph.

I boil these down to four ‘Ins’, as mentioned in my last post. To recap:

• Institutions: Governments have budgets to procure healthy foods (and restrict ultra-processed foods) for government institutions, including schools, hospitals, and clinics. School feeding is a potential “win-win-win.” It’s both a nutritional and an educational intervention (kids who are not hungry are better able to learn and engage.) In addition, when linked to local farmers who practice organic, low-carbon farming, it can help protect the planet and support local livelihoods.

• Incentives: Governments have the power to tax harmful products and practices, including taxes on soda and junk foods. Taxes work. But it is crucial for the government to earmark the tax dividend to subsidize healthy diets for low-income families e.g. by using vouchers, food stamps, cash transfers or price subsidies.

• Information: Governments can use informational interventions (physical and digital), including front-of-pack labels and ingredient lists on products, while also reining in predatory marketing and advertising of unhealthy foods, especially to children.

• Interests: Governments need to banish conflicts of interest from advisory and regulatory bodies, including dietary guideline committees, and clean up lobbying by enforcing detailed and transparent disclosure and locking the ‘revolving door’.

These actions are universal. A recent blog by Catherine Conlon, for example, applies them to Ireland. And while they all apply to children, there’s a fifth which I now think should be made explicit because it’s so crucial:

• Infants: legal measures relating to the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes, including complementary foods.

As well as highlighting actions for governments (which are central), the report delineates roles for other actors:

This is a good time to point to two exemplars in setting out clear principles of engagement with the food industry.

Back in 2023, UNICEF released programme guidance comprising 10 parameters to be applied as a minimum common standard across all their programmes. These included the commitment for UNICEF to advocate for the food and beverage industry to be excluded from public policy making, to avoid all partnerships with UPF industries and to bar UPF corporations from UNICEF-led business platforms.

Earlier this year, Nutrition International also unequivocally nailed its colours to the mast. As Joel Spicer, NI’s President and CEO said: ‘The commercially-driven proliferation of UPF represents a clear and present threat to human health and global efforts to end malnutrition.’

Southern plunder

In terms of progress in turning things around, what’s shockingly clear from Fig 28 above is that we are nowhere near where we need to be. The UPF industry has not only captured markets, it has a stranglehold on food politics.

For over half of the recommended actions, coverage among low-income countries is virtually zero!

As high-income countries are belatedly starting to tackle this challenge, corporations are turning to LMICS, especially sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where regulations are often absent. This shift is further amplified by the increasing access of populations in the west to GLP-1 drugs which are changing food preferences there, reducing the appeal of junk/UPFs.

Like the climate crisis, low-income countries are likely to be hit hardest while being the least-responsible for driving the problem. Yet another slice of global inequity.

Words matter…but so do images

Before we leave this, I want to reiterate a question/plea made by D’Arcy Williams of UNICEF (who will become the CEO of BiteBack 2030 next month)

When will the media stop using stigmatizing clickbait photos alongside articles about childhood obesity?

Headless/naked kids with their bellies being measured, kids on scales or with their skinfolds being grabbed, kids gorging on junk food. What makes it worse, as Williams says, is that UNICEF provided outlets with high-quality, non-stigmatizing photos that highlighted the real story.

To some extent this is another symptom of industry epistemic power – the power to influence the story – in this case to perpetuate the tired old ‘blame the greedy, under-exercising consumer’ narrative.

Bits and bobs

Some stuff I came across recently, while trying/failing to be offline on a small island.

Lobbied Labour. The Labour Party in the UK are still trying hard to show it’s different to the Tory party. In terms of lobbying – according to this blog by Sarah Woolnough and Jennifer Dixon, the CEOs of the King’s Fund and Health Foundation – nothing much has changed.

‘There is a very real risk that [the NHS] will collapse under the weight of avoidable illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses that are intimately associated with poor diet, drinking and smoking, and also largely preventable, unless the government acts boldly on these huge threats to the public’s health.’

Sugar, sugar. In April 2024, Public Eye and IBFAN released a report showing how Nestlé was adding sugar and honey to infant milk and cereal products sold in many poorer countries. Not only did this run completely counter to international guidelines, it also encapsulated the gross hypocrisy and double standards of the corporation. Similar products in Global-North countries contained no added sugar. The highest amount found – 7.3 grams per serving (nearly two whole sugar cubes) – was detected in the Philippines in a product targeted at six-month-old babies. A recent paper by E.W. Dumbili et al digs deeper into this story.

Siphoning the south. A paper by Meghna Goyal and colleagues that sheds more light on corporate capture of agri-food systems and the widening inequalities it drives. This century, as agri-food systems have become hyper globalized, the farm share of food-system income has dropped, while post-farmgate sectors capture the majority of income. They find that i) agricultural production has increasingly shifted to the global South, ii) global food-system income is increasingly captured by post-farm activities in the global North, and iii) a substantial share of this income accrues in low-tax jurisdictions. More evidence of deep inequities in a food system that’s siphoning economic returns away from agricultural producers in the global South.

F.I. Tomorrow sees the publication of an eagerly-awaited new book Food Intelligence by Kevin Hall and Julia Belluz who recently wrote this lively opinion piece for the New York Times. I particularly liked the proposal that UPFs that don’t meet the FDA definition of ‘healthy’ should be considered as recreational substances and aggressively taxed. And there’s this about MAHA (Make America Healthy Again):

‘MAHA leaders may decry the evils of the health care system and promote their own products as an alternative, but did everyone fail to notice that the $6 trillion-plus wellness industry grew alongside rates of chronic disease? Obesity and diabetes are not the result of weak willpower and poor choices. We shouldn’t expect investing in more of the same hacks will have different results.’

More MAHA. Speaking of Big Wellness, here’s a mindblowing short video that describes the ‘MAHA funnel’ linking up a set of conspiracy fantasies with the demonization of doctors and health care (including anti-vax) and the brazen promotion of supplements and hacks that a gang of key influencers are invested in. Phew…

Fortunately, I then came across this powerful article by Raj Patel on the real roots of unwellness. As he says, under MAHA, Americans are encouraged to make themselves healthy again. The administration isn’t helping:

‘The toxic corporate food environment itself will remain largely unchanged, save for cosmetic differences: by the end of next year, a few petroleum-based colorings will be removed from food products, bringing the United States a bit more in line with the rest of the planet. But that kind of regulation is the exception, not the rule.’

Patel ends on an inspirational note, citing the ‘pieces of a united front’ that are coming together including the public grocery movement and ‘legions of ordinary citizens’ fed up with being unable to access quality food.

That’s all for now….here’s a sunset from a small island:

*

On 22 August, I was on a panel discussing food, health and obesity as part of the Scottish Parliament’s Festival of Politics. The session Junk vs Jabs: our relationship with food – chaired by Emma Harper MSP – included chef, Gary Maclean and Professor Alexandra Johnstone of the Rowett Institute.

Apart from it being a great session, with a lively Q&A, it chivvied me into digging into the rapidly-accelerating literature.

We can look at this from two perspectives – people and profit.

1 People

First, let’s consider the individual user of GLP-1 receptor agonists – semaglutides (Ozempic, Wegovy) or tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound).

The drugs clearly work – they reduce the quantity of food consumed (by 500 kcals per day), the frequency of eating and snacking and there’s evidence of a shift in dietary preferences towards healthier options. Users say ‘food noise’ fades away. The drugs seem to neuter our ‘industrial palate.’ Weight loss is significant, especially on tirzepatide (up to 25% body weight), mental health and self-esteem restored and we can expect long-term benefits via declines in diet-related chronic disease incidence.

Some individuals experience side-effects, but for most, these are not serious. There are potential concerns in the long-run with certain micronutrients and potential muscle mass loss, partly fuelled by reduced protein intake. If the meds are stopped, most people put on most or all of the weight lost within a year (which means these drugs need to be viewed like statins as a potentially life-long treatment.)

Of course, they’re not a panacea to obesity-associated ill-health. Our Scottish panel dismissed that notion within seconds. We will never see vast swathes of people living with obesity on these drugs. They’re more like a firebreak…or a valuable remedial tool in the toolbox. Their effectiveness and the extraordinary growth in demand (doubling in 2024 in the UK) really shows just how successful the ultra-processed food industry has become to get us addicted to products that harm our health.

One of the biggest challenges is equity and sustainability (both geographic and socio-economic)

People from low-income families are more likely to be living with obesity, more likely to benefit from these drugs but least likely to be able to access and afford them. Low-income country populations don’t have affordable access.

So, like so much else, this is an issue of social justice.

2 Profit

With profit, it’s a bit ‘Kong vs Godzilla’, as Big Pharma steal profits from Big Food.

We’ve seen mega shifts and pivots before.

At the turn of the century, we saw how the tobacco industry pivoted to food when its core business was threatened. Big Tobacco bought up food companies and set about manufacturing a new array of addictive ultra-processed products using the vast library of colours, flavours and additives they’d figured could be repurposed for food products. Between 1988 and 2001, foods produced by tobacco-owned companies, like Kraft, General Foods, Bird’s Eye (owned by Philip Morris) and Nabisco and Oreo (owned by R. J. Reynolds), were 29% more likely to be classified as hyper-palatable (due to high fat and sodium content) and 80% more likely (due to high carbohydrate and sodium) than foods produced by other companies.

For decades, the fossil fuel industry has treated our food system as an escape hatch. A simple bag of crisps/chips depends on a system of monocultivation of potatoes that in turn requires vast amounts of synthetic fertilizer and pesticides, irrigation, farm equipment – all of which depend on fossil fuels. Then there’s the energy cost of processing – sorting, washing, trimming, slicing, blanching, frying, seasoning – and the plastic packaging, with all that requires. And finally, the fuel cost to transport millions of plastic bags to supermarkets, stores and vending machines.

Companies grab a slice of competitor profits – or they just buy the competitor.

Bayer (a pharma company that makes drugs to treat Non Hodgkin's lymphoma) bought Monsanto, which makes glyphosate, a pesticide implicated in its aetiology.

Corporations can profit first from the sale of harmful products and then again from the sale of the antidote.

An excerpt from ‘Food Fight’

Heinz bought Weight Watchers in 1978 for just $72 million. Unilever were a bit slow off the mark: they had to pay $2.3 billion in 2000 to buy SlimFast. Nestlé then bought Jenny Craig in 2006 in what the Nestlé chairman cited as a landmark in their transition into a ‘nutrition, health and wellness company. Ultra-processed ‘slimming foods’ had names like ‘Lean Cuisine’ and ‘Hot Pockets’. Nestlé now sells chewable multivitamins to be taken after bariatric surgery for obesity.

The British diet industry alone is worth £2 billion a year – about the same amount the NHS spends on A&E. This is dwarfed by the $60 billion annual revenues of the US diet industry. Then there are all the foibles, fads and fears to be catered to, each a new opportunity for companies to grow market share. Low-fat, low-carb, high-protein, gluten-free. Health scares are both threat and opportunity for the food industry.

In 2021, after more than a century of promoting its sweet products, Coca-Cola advertised its new flagship ‘Zero Sugar’ by highlighting something it no longer has. The junk-food cycle continues to spin inexorably, as transnational titans exploit any new chink of competitive advantage they can find to grow their bottom line.

With GLP1 drugs, Big Pharma is reaping rewards from the bad seeds sown by Big Food.

In fact, both are making huge profits – one by producing and selling products, the other by treating the harms driven by their over-consumption. Modern medicine patches up bodies broken by the same system that produces the medicine – the dark side of circularity.

‘Privatise profit, socialise cost’ is alive and well

We pay many times over for unhealthy diets – the cost of (food) products, the cost of the ill-health they cause over time, the cost of the emissions used in producing them, the cost of the environmental harms of packaging – and then the cost of the remedy.

Corporations meanwhile profit many times – from driving the problem, selling the cure and then from marketing a whole new array of products that help with any side effects caused by taking the cure.

One by-product of the explosion in uptake of GLP-1 drugs could be a reverse-engineering of the food system. To some extent. Food environments may become less saturated with junk/ultra-processed foods as companies pivot away from their manufacture.

Big Food is terrified of pension fund managers and shareholders divesting in their stocks, driving down share prices. It’s scrambling to address some big questions:

• When food purchases drop, which products are ditched? What replaces them?

• If we don’t act, who will steal our market share?

• How do we protect our shelf space?

• How do we respond to shifts faster than our rivals?

• If demand for ‘nutrient return per bite’ is enhanced, how do we adapt?

The UPF industry is already adapting to this new world by developing products that are more acceptable to GLP1 users. We can see the changes already. Demand is building for protein shakes, meal replacements, fortified bars and reduced-portion snacks. Supplements will get a boost.

Nestlé’s Vital Pursuit, for example, is a new product…

‘intended to be a companion for GLP-1 weight loss medication users and consumers focused on weight management in the US. The products are high in protein, a good source of fiber, contain essential nutrients, and they are portion-aligned to a weight loss medication user's appetite.’

Then there’s Oikos Fusion – a whey, leucine, & vitamin D concoction designed to help build and retain muscle mass during weight loss (encased in a black plastic bottle that looks like the contents were meant for a car!)

Restaurants are serving mini-meals and tiny tasting menus.

Some food companies may even be experimenting with compounds that make GLP1 drugs less effective though they won’t tell you.

And so the cycle turns...

Geographically, as GLP1s roll out in higher-income countries, we can expect to see Big Food ramp up activity in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia where few people will have access to them.

At root of these profit-driven cycles and shifts is our largely unregulated hypercapitalist system – propped up by politicians who still consider it the only way to achieve the holy grail of never-ending economic growth.

Within this, there’s the problem of oligopolies and monopolies – corporate capture – that always ends badly for citizens.

Eli Lilly – which actually has a monopoly on tirzepatide (Mounjaro) in the UK – has just hiked its price by over 60%. Hundreds of thousands of people are affected, many of whom will be forced to curtail treatment. The effects (both physical and mental) are likely to be huge.

As Henry Dimbleby recently said – the main sector pushing the health (people not profit) line is the insurance industry as they are the ones who have to pick up the costs of health harms and/or GLP-1 drugs.

Prevent and treat

Some said, “Put a fence ’round the edge of the cliff,”
Some, “An ambulance down in the valley.”

Joseph Malins, 1895

To deal with anything that causes widespread ill-health, we need to prioritise large-scale prevention (the fence) while ensuring accessible and affordable treatment for those who need it (the ambulance).

The notion that we just need more ambulances (GLP1s as panacea) is an abrogation of responsibility. Healthy food environments are the policy and legislative fences that prevent public harm. Building them is the job of government. They’re needed for those who don’t have any other recourse – individuals who are socio-economically vulnerable and marginalized. Again, it’s about food and health justice, which means social justice.

Both prevention and treatment require strong governmental action, just as they do for any other health condition.

So, how do we arrive at health policy that’s driven by health concerns, not profit. What should politics do?

First, we still need the four ‘Ins’:

1. Institutions: Governments have budgets to procure healthy foods (and restrict ultra-processed foods) for government institutions, including schools, hospitals, and clinics.

2. Incentives: Governments have the power to tax harmful products and practices, including taxes on soda and junk foods. Taxes work –especially when governments earmark the tax dividend to subsidize healthy diets for low-income families e.g. by using vouchers, food stamps or cash transfers.

3. Information: Governments can use informational interventions (physical and digital), including labels and ingredient lists on products, while also reining in predatory marketing of unhealthy foods, especially to children.

4. Interests: Governments need to banish conflicts of interest from advisory and regulatory bodies and dietary guideline committees – as well as cleaning up lobbying by enforcing transparent disclosure.

Then, if needed, there’s the nuclear option, to address entrenched corporate capture (the three ‘Ds’).

1. Disperse: decentralise and redistribute concentrated corporate wealth and power (using antitrust/competition law to prevent and break up monopolies.)

2. Democratise: compel corporate decisionmakers to take into account interests of all actors (e.g. via diverse representation on corporate boards).

3. Dissolve: complete revocation of privileges, if and when corporations fail to disperse or democratise.

With regard to GLP1 drugs, we need more research on long-term consequences and on what causes users to stop treatment. We need to investigate equity and sustainable access and we need to improve the healthiness of food environments so that drugs are not the default response to obesity and diet-related ill-health.

To inform policy, we need a full and proper assessment of the costs, effects and benefits of drugs at all levels, over the long term.

To end, here’s the last para from a great Substack post by Tom Watson who knows a thing or two about politics:

If I were a new young MP, I’d jump at this. Start with action. Write to the Secretary of State today and publish the letter. Ask for a statement when Parliament returns the week after next. Meet patient groups this week and take their stories into the public domain. Ask the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to open a market study into glucagon like peptide 1 (GLP 1) supply, pricing, distribution and exclusivity. Ask the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to set out the route for safe competitors. Keep going until the price signal looks like competition, not control. There are at least 500,000 people in the UK who will thank you.

*

Postscript: ‘Food Fight’ was launched in the US on Tuesday and selected as a Next Big Idea Club must-read book for this month.

In the last few months, I’ve had a lot of travel time which means a lot of time to read (train) or listen to music or podcasts (car).

Which is how I came across this: The People vs. McDonald’s

At first, I couldn’t see how this story could be carried over multiple episodes but by the sixth instalment, I was bemoaning its imminent end.

I briefly mention the amazing double act of Helen Steel and David Morris in Food Fight – though I was really only capturing the headlines. Like the court case at its centre, the series goes well below the surface, digging way deeper than McDonald’s had expected.

In a nutshell…

In 1986, members of London Greenpeace, published a leaflet entitled ‘What’s wrong with McDonald’s?’

It claimed McDonald’s was exploiting workers, destroying rainforests, torturing animals, and selling and promoting food that made people sick.

McDonald’s went on the attack – the company arguing the claims in the leaflet were untrue and defamatory. They demanded a public apology and an immediate block on publication and distribution of the leaflet.

Steel, a gardener, and former postman Morris – both on benefits at the time – refused.

The ensuing trial of McDonald’s Corporation vs Steel & Morris (the 'McLibel Two') was the longest in English history. McDonald’s hadn’t ever thought it would go to court – let alone draw huge media attention that shone a spotlight on its dodgy modus operandi, sparking other protests against the company.

The case propelled issues of obesity, diet-related chronic disease, rainforest destruction, predatory advertising to children, animal cruelty, worker exploitation, plastic pollution – and the role of large corporations driving them – into the mainstream.

It’s a story packed with intrigue and incident -- including a key role for a young barrister who decades later became prime minister and covert ops on the part of a shady state-run outfit called the SDS.

*

In the mid-80s, Steel and Morris were part of a London Greenpeace group that protested outside McDonald’s London headquarters, distributing this leaflet.

The activist group held regular meetings. The fact that they occasionally attracted new people, didn’t raise suspicion – the more support the better.

Some of these enthusiastic new members however turned out to be private investigators hired by McDonald’s to spy on Greenpeace. As part of this, they were tasked with finding the addresses of the more active members, including Steel and Morris. One of them did this by offering to mail baby clothes to Morris’ infant son.

A few days later, both Steel and Morris were ‘doorstepped’ and served libel writs. These were SLAPP writs – strategic litigation against public participation – designed to scare them away. The intention was not to bring them to court, it was to stop the leaflet and quell further protests. The big chill tactic.

McDonald’s knew that under UK libel law, there was no recourse to legal aid for the defendants and they knew Steel and Morris were poor. ‘Cease and desist’ would surely work…they thought.

But they had underestimated them. The couple refused to back down.

Enter a young barrister who for years had been infuriated by the unjust UK libel law. He agreed to provide Steel and Morris with pro bono legal support. His name – Keir Starmer.

Under this libel law, incontestable evidence was required to prove the truth of the leaflet’s claims. Steel and Morris had just three weeks to assemble evidence and witness statements. This was the pre-internet early 90s – they had a fax and a phone. Many long distance calls over scratchy lines to the US, Brazil, Costa Rica and other countries followed.

Three weeks later, the couple presented the judge with a list of 65 witnesses on a scrunched sheet of A4 paper. The McDonald’s team was stunned, arguing the list was not acceptable. The judge said he would accept it even if it had been written on the back of a sugar packet.

Campaigns and benefit gigs were organised to raise funds to keep the leaflet in circulation.

The judge decided the case would be heard by him alone, deeming a jury incapable of understanding scientific evidence. After four years involving 28 preliminary hearings, the case was set for June 1994.

It lasted three years. Over 313 days of evidence and legal back-and-forth, there were many bizarre statements including McDonald’s claims that

• dumping waste was a benefit because it would fill in hazardous empty gravel pits

• Coca-Cola was nutritious because it contained…water

64 days of the trial was devoted to nutrition – interrogating the evidence that high fat, salt, sugar was unhealthy. The most heated exchanges concerned McDonald's claim (contained in their 'Nutritional Guide') that 'every time you eat at McDonald's you'll eat good, nutritious food'.

Its executives explained that 'nutritious' simply meant that the food 'contained nutrients' !

Steel asked Dr Sidney Arnott, McDonald 's expert witness on cancer if it was

'reasonable' to say that 'a diet high in fat, sugar, animal products and salt and low in fibre, vitamins and minerals is linked with cancer of the breast and bowel and heart disease'.

Arnott replied:

'If it is being directed to the public, then I would say it is a very reasonable thing to say. But if it is directed towards the scientific community, then I think one would be a bit more careful in the language which one is using.'

Morris then pointed out:

'That is actually a quote from the London Greenpeace Factsheet which is the subject of the libel action.'

Another big fight was on the packaging dumped outside its stores. McDonald’s insisted that if each of the one million daily customers brought a soft drink, no more than 100-150 cups would be discarded on the street. He was then shown photographs of 27 items of McDonald's litter on a stretch of pavement outside a single store.

McDonald's vice-president was asked about a 'recycling' project in Nottingham before admitting that the waste collected in the bin had been dumped, not recycled. All waste ended up as litter on the streets or in landfill, apart from one small pilot scheme in Manchester.

In August 1994, McDonald's asked Steel and Morris to settle, out of court. So long as they committed to never criticise the company in public, and stop the leaflet, the case would be dropped.

They refused.

Four of the private investigators who had infiltrated Greenpeace meetings testified in court for McDonald’s – but one turned. Fran Tiller who had done a nutrition course, while spying for McDonald’s, testified against the corporation.

More followed. The defendants quoted a statement by an actor who had originally played Ronald McDonald:

'I brainwashed youngsters into doing wrong. I want to say sorry to children everywhere for selling out to concerns who make millions by murdering animals.'

At the dawn of the internet in 1996, the McLibel Two’s support network launched www.McSpotlight.org

The judge took months to reach a verdict. Judgement day was set for 19 June 1997. In a report over 900 pages long, the results were mixed but Steel and Morris had successfully defended half of all claims in the leaflet, including those on animal cruelty and exploitation of children.

As Helen Steel said – the real loss would have been if we hadn’t fought it.

The case had backfired for McDonald’s – what had been intended to chill future claims ended up chilling the corporation itself.

As the podcast wound down, the words of Thom Yorke in Just (recorded in 1995 as the case was being heard) kept playing in my head:

‘You do it to yourself, you do…you and no-one else’

Two years after the verdict, Steel and Morris sued the police after it emerged that private investigators from McDonald's had been provided with information from the police national computer that had helped them bring the libel case in the first place.

In 2005, a documentary film, McLibel, was made and has since been viewed by over 25 million people. The leaflet is going strong, in 27 languages, distributed worldwide and downloadable off the web.

This seemed to be the end of the podcast…but there was a sinister twist.

In the midst of the courtroom drama, Helen Steel's boyfriend John Barker had disappeared.

At this point, the story moves into a very dark space. John Barker wasn’t his real name – it was the name of an 8-year old boy who had died years ago. Steel’s boyfriend had assumed a dead child’s identity when he was recruited to the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) – a secret undercover unit of the British police tasked with infiltrating activist groups.

In 2016, twenty years after he’d disappeared, Steel tracks him down to Australia and confronts him (real name – John Dines) at Sydney airport as he is waiting to welcome new recruits from India to be trained in the dark arts. It’s mindblowing.

A final bizarre footnote was the revelation that some of the Greenpeace leaflet had actually been written by Dines.

Fast forward three decades….

Earlier this year, a BMJ Investigation by Sophie Borland reported on how McDonald’s continues to challenge local council attempts to stop it flooding their high streets with fast-food outlets, claiming their stores promote ‘healthier lifestyles’

Customers could walk or cycle to their restaurants – the company elaborated – they could order salad and coffee and the kids could use the climbing frame (invariably situated next to the exhaust pipes of the cars lining up, engines running, at the drive-by window.)

Decades on from ‘The Leaflet’, local fights continue…

And in the month when the global plastic treaty talks broke down, the toxic relationship between Big Food and Big Plastic continues to thrive. A recent Lancet review highlights how plastic pollution has worsened with 8,000Mt now clogging up our land and water, leaching into soil and our bodies. In the UK alone, 1.7 billion pieces of plastic packaging are thrown away every week – many originating from McDonald’s which is second only to Coca-Cola in polluting power.

Back in February 2023, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri wrote a short brief in which he distinguished four forms of violence that beset our food system:

• Bodily harm involving the denial of access to food.

• Discrimination, inequality and social exclusion.

• Ecological violence including biodiversity loss, water and plastic pollution, greenhouse-gas emissions

• Erasure in which ancestral farmland and herding, fishing, foraging conditions are destroyed and food sovereignty violated.

A year later – five months after the appalling 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas – he wrote about Gaza:

‘We have never seen a civilian population made to go so hungry so quickly and so completely…intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime.’

That was 16 months ago.

Fakhri is surprised we’re now surprised at what’s unfolding: ‘I have been repeating it and repeating it and repeating it, I feel like Cassandra.’

And yet we’re still locked into a phase of hollow rhetoric and inaction for which ‘the politicians and corporations have no excuse.’

Designed and directed…

What’s unfolding is intentional.

Alex de Waal, who has worked on humanitarian causes around the world for over 40 years stated on Democracy Now that he has never seen such a ‘minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today.’

A week ago, British surgeon Nick Maynard who works in Gaza, spoke about fellow doctors having formula feed in their luggage confiscated by Israeli border guards, ‘every carton, very specifically the formula feed...none of it was allowed in.’

In an earlier interview, he had spoken of an apparent clustering of different types of shooting injuries on different days at the hospital where he worked ‘as if a game is being played’ along with appalling levels of malnutrition.

This was, by the way, the same week that UK police arrested an eighty-three year old retired priest who dared to protest about it.

The maths of famine in Gaza are simple – every calorie, every nutrient consumed must be brought in from outside. Israel knows exactly how much food is needed. Its own data shows it has been starving Gaza.

Humanitarian organisations have been asking for 62,000 metric tonnes of dry and canned food to meet basic needs for 2.1 million people each month – 1kg of food per person per day. Between March and June, Israel allowed in just 56,000 tonnes, less than a quarter of Gaza’s minimum needs for that period.

It’s a planned famine.

While the Israeli government frames the starvation as a catastrophe caused by logistics, this blog by Sikandra Kurdi and IFPRI colleagues, published on Monday, tells a different story.

On the same day, IPES-Food released this statement:

‘Mass starvation is deliberately being used by Israel as a tool of genocide against the Palestinian people. The intentional denial of food and water in Gaza is a crime against humanity, a violation of the international human rights to food and water, and a breach of humanitarian law. IPES-Food fully condemns the actions being taken by Israel and the governments and corporations around the world fueling the deliberate and systematic weaponization of food and water against the people of Palestine.’

Last week, a Lancet commentary by the Standing Together for Nutrition Consortium highlighted the moral failure that more than 1·2 million people are currently living in Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) phase 5 (catastrophe) famine conditions – the most extreme food insecurity level there is – in Gaza, Sudan, South Sudan, and Yemen.

The ST4N commentary goes on to summarise the multiple forms of damage across generations and the fact that undernutrition is not only a consequence of conflict but a seed of future conflicts, if a whole generation continues to be traumatized.

In The Guardian, Nesrine Malik reminds us that children die first and that

‘all you need to see to know that what is happening is a crime that requires immediate action is the bones of a child sticking out of its thin skin, while the food it needs is being blocked by Israeli soldiers.’

We’re in suspended animation – with repeated promises of action that never comes.

UN, famine and the latest ‘call to action’

I went back to the history of famine and of the UN as I was writing ‘Food Fight’

The first United Nations conference on food and agriculture was held in Hot Springs, Virginia, in April 1943. Drawing on the League of Nations’ work and Theodore and Eleanor Roosevelt’s conviction that freedom in the postwar period should start with ‘freedom from hunger’, the focus was largely on food production though access to food was highlighted in the statement that, ‘poverty is the first cause of malnutrition and hunger’.

A few months later, the Bengal famine started. Driven by wartime measures and the indifference of British rulers, it lasted for several months, killing 3 million Bengalis. The UN had to step up. In 1945, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations was established in Rome to facilitate international collaboration. The UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) was launched in 1946 to provide aid to hungry children in Europe, before expanding into other regions and other types of nutrition and health support. Two years later, in 1948, the World Health Organization (WHO) was founded, in Geneva.

That same year, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly with the pivotal Article 25 that stated:

‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood.’

Fast forward nearly eight decades…

The UN has just wrapped up another food conference – the United Nations Food Systems Summit + 4 Stocktake – held in Addis Ababa, with three thousand delegates. The aim was to track progress on food systems transformation, four years after the original food systems summit.

The UNFSS process continues to be controversial. Many argue that not a lot has changed in terms of governance, transparency, trust, active participation of rights holders in decisionmaking and accountability since the 2021 summit.

Over 300 business delegates turned up in Addis, while civil society groups again boycotted the event, stating it ‘legitimises corporate control and turns a blind eye to the geopolitical food and hunger crises’.

The latter charge refers to the failure of the UNFSS+4 programme to mention what’s happening in Gaza and other places where food is used as a weapon of war.

Amina Mohammed, UN deputy secretary-general was quoted in Addis as saying she was most worried about Palestine and ‘there’s absolutely no reason today why we should be seeing children and people starving in what is quite clearly a manmade event.’

The UN itself has been hit hard – on top of tens of thousands of Gazans, Israel has killed a record number of UN staff since 7 October 2023.

Yesterday, the UNFSS+4 nine-page Call to Action was released. What does it have to say about the weaponising of hunger and starvation in Gaza?

Well, there’s this:

‘People’s access to food in conflict zones is highly constrained and – in some instances – attempts to access humanitarian relief has led to injury and death.’

A bloodless sentence that could have been written any time since the UN was founded.

That’s it.

How can we talk about food systems transformation without discussing food justice? And how can we discuss food justice in the world today without directly addressing one of the most intentional and extreme violations of the right to food in recent times – one that we’re witnessing on our screens, day after day?

IPES-Food again:

‘It is impossible to separate food systems transformation from the larger struggles for liberation and self-determination… Justice requires the full realization of Palestinians’ right to self-determination, right to food, rights to water and sanitation, right to remain in and return to their territories, and right to use the land, rivers, and coast to build food sovereignty.’

Going back to Fakhri’s taxonomy of food systems violence, it’s hardly surprising they overlap and intersect. They have common roots. Underpinning the four forms – starvation, exclusion, environmental degradation and erasure – we see the violence of silence, hollow words, corporate plunder and political inaction.

A political act

Just as we cannot ignore injustice and human rights violations we cannot speak of food systems transformation without the preservation of food cultures.

They’re all connected.

For Sami Tamimi, preparing the food of his Palestinian homeland is an act of resilience

‘As a chef and writer this is a political act, a way to show young Palestinians who weren’t born there the deep emotional connection we have to the land, to the food of our land, and how Palestine used to be.’

Born and raised in the Old City of Jerusalem, Tamimi grew up foraging in the surrounding hills with his parents for herbs, berries and greens for his mother to prepare simple vegetarian dishes. In 1997 he moved to London where he met Yotam Ottolenghi, who had grown up in the Jewish part of the Old City. Together, they went on to open several restaurants and co-author bestselling cookbooks.

Tamimi’s latest book Boustany harks back to his grandparents’ ‘boustan’ (garden) in Hebron on the West Bank, ‘a vibrant, lush space filled with fruits and vegetables which my grandfather meticulously tended all year round’.

As food writer Gilly Smith puts it in this interview: ‘His Palestinian garden is about more than recipes; it’s about ‘weaving together the stories, memories and emotions that each dish encapsulated’ for him. Check out the podcast.

Eight months ago, I started this newsletter with a post about power.

Power is a lead character in ‘Food Fight’

For years, it’s been the elephant in the room in discussions about food system transformation. Huge and silent, bypassed…most people found a way to navigate around it.

If it is mentioned at all, we tend to see phrases like ‘managing power dynamics’ or ‘navigating power asymmetries’ in documents and statements. Less common, we may see ‘addressing power’

I hardly ever see an explicit statement of intent to actually CHANGE the balance of power in food systems.

Words matter – they’re the lifeblood of stories, the source of epistemic power.

Development and aid discourse is replete with co-opted and sanitised phrases and concepts – that’s not new. It’s so much easier to talk about managing things rather than changing them.

When it comes to tackling the commercial determinants of health or nutrition:

• There’s the idea that conflicts of interest can be managed — they cannot, they need to be avoided

• The idea that disclosure is enough — it is not (so long as the conflict remains).

• The idea that companies can best regulate themselves. They cannot/will not – they need to be regulated by governments.

• The idea that all ‘stakeholders’ in the food system want the same thing. They do not. Yes, many seek to maximise nutritional and health status but many others seek to maximise profit. Two goals that don’t sit well together.

We need to be more specific in our language and ditch clichés and slogans.

Which is why a recent paper by Dori Patay and colleagues is such a great and timely contribution. Check it out.

Finally, we can start to get beyond the co-option of ‘food system transformation’ language to suggest concrete approaches to drive real change.

So much energy is spent discussing what is really 'first-order' change – “surface-level adjustments to minor parameters, without fundamentally altering underlying structure or system dynamics”.

This is not transformation, it's tweaking at the margins – piecemeal incrementalism that just serves to maintain business-as-usual.

We need to go deeper to drive and enable:

• Second-order changes – structural shifts that alter the underlying dynamics and behaviours in the system.

• Third-order changes – shifts in actors’ mindsets, values and relationships that lead to profound and systemic transformations

*

There’s a second analogy about elephants in rooms – this one involves blind men, each one of whom believes, after touching one single part of the elephant, that he has figured out what it is.

It’s a parable about mental models or mindsets. As the Patay paper says, this is what we need to change if we are to get to real, sustained transformation.

To me, the acid test in any discussion of transformation is whether three Ps are all being taken seriously:

• Purpose – profit…or people and planet?

• Power – what forms, who uses it, for what purpose?

• Process – what is actually happening (actions not words)?

Are things about to change?

The UNDP has a new Food and Power initiative with a white paper and 5-page brief and a report of a meeting held in Wilton Park, UK, expected next month.

Later this month, there is the UN Food Systems Summit + 4 Stocktake in Addis Ababa. Power is not on the main agenda and a proposal for a side event was not approved. This doesn’t bode well.

But let’s hope the positive energy from the UNDP initiative and this week’s webinar (organized by the UN Food Systems Coordination Hub, featuring the brilliant Jennifer Clapp), can be carried through to the main event. We’ll see….

Undocumented

Most discussions of power imbalances focus on the monumental power held by a few transnational corporations. Many millions of frontline workers who have very little power are overlooked.

There are so many stories. Here are three (the first two extracted from ‘Food Fight’)

1. Almeria. A large swathe of southern Spain is under wraps. Visible from space, the world’s largest concentration of greenhouses, covering 32,000 hectares (20% larger than Birmingham), produces 3.5 billion kilos of fruit and veg per year. Almeria’s plastic sea is the workplace of a displaced army of undocumented migrant workers who toil away without protection, in 40°C of heat and extreme humidity, surrounded by pesticide-coated crops. Over 120,000 men and women live, work and die here. Most of them come from West Africa, mainly Ghana and Senegal. Every day, a boat brings 30–40 new workers – over 12,000 every year. Others come from within Europe if their host countries crack down on migrants. Workers sleep in crowded camps, often without electricity and basic sanitation. They may only work a couple of days a week – for just 35 euros per day – but have to stick around for the next opportunity. It’s hazardous work -- one in three workers suffer from symptoms of pesticide exposure (neurologic disorders, headaches, paraesthesia, tremors), and many suffer from depression. If they can no longer work, they remain trapped in the settlements with nowhere else to go. Much of the harvest ends up on supermarket shelves in the UK. Here are the costs of our cheap year-round fruit and veg that that we don’t see – paid by people who we don’t see, who work in hothouses, way down the food chain. Out of sight, underpaid, unknown.

2. Beed is an impoverished district in southern India that’s home to 82,000 sugar-cane workers. Girls and young women, some of whom have been pushed into illegal child marriages, who cut cane all day in forced labour for sugar mills run by companies who supply Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Up to one in three of them have had hysterectomies in order to keep working to pay off advances made by their employers (if they can’t work, they have to pay a fee). In March 2024, I read about this horror in a New York Times article. Over a year later, this Guardian article says the Indian health department is "closely monitoring the welfare of sugar cane labourers." Just monitoring?! No mention was made of the companies.

3. California. The third story comes from a Food Fix report on a raid by US federal agents (ICE) on a farm in California, which is terrifying. As Helena Bottemiller Evich concludes:

There’s a saying in U.S. agriculture: You either import your workforce or you import your food. This is not to defend the system we have – it’s been in desperate need of reform for a very long time – but I really wonder if ICE understands that they are playing with fire.

UK step forward

On 29 June, the UK Health and Social Care Secretary, Wes Streeting announced the requirement for all large food companies to report on the healthiness of their food sales.

The key part of this – unlike pretty much everything that’s gone before – is this will be mandatory reporting with the intention for mandatory targets to follow.

As Anna Taylor whose Food Foundation has been valiantly pushing for this for years says: “We are starting to see some real momentum now”

Wes Streeting also said:

“If everyone cut their calories by 215 calories a day, which is the equivalent of a bottle of Coca-Cola, we would halve obesity. It feels like an enormous challenge but actually the right steps in the right direction can be transformational.”

On 29 June, NESTA praised Streeting (on Bluesky) for adopting the policy they developed.

(Over two years ago, I wrote about the NESTA model (10% less junk is still junk) mentioning Kevin Hall’s pioneering work and suggesting the need to look at ultra-processing, not just HFSS…and certainly not just calories.)

Last week, Hall responded to NESTA’s Bluesky post:

“While I’m happy that our 2011 mathematical model was used by NESTA to estimate the step reduction in daily calories would be required to address obesity in the UK, I wish they had read our later studies. Unfortunately, a constant intensity intervention to reduce calorie intake typically results in exponential waning of the effect over time (not a sustained step reduction) and will therefore only result in about 20% of the weight loss they predicted.”

Later, he posted to say he’d had a productive meeting with NESTA:

“I strongly believe that policy interventions targeting the food environment are exactly the right approach. But when the promised effects of such policies are overstated and fail to materialize, public trust erodes. Fortunately, NESTA agreed to work with me to implement our updated model and provide more realistic estimates.”

Good outcome.

To me, this is yet another illustration of the need to move well beyond calorie-counting and linearity to get out of the mess we’re in. Our UPF-flooded food environments are a product of a systemic failure – which we need systemic solutions, recognizing plurality and diversity.

Nonetheless, things do seem to be happening…let’s see what emerges on the national food strategy…

Across the pond

Helena Bottemiller Evich (of Food Fix fame, referenced above) and Theodore Ross have just launched a lively new podcast called Forked

And here’s more on MAHA from Marion Nestle and Kevin Klatt. While swirling stories about food dyes and seed oils have grabbed headlines, systematic havoc is being wrought on science, on aid and on food assistance.

On the latter, Tracy Kidder’s New York Times essay on the new era of hunger pulls no punches.

Fighting talk

After weeks of criss-crossing the UK, I became becalmed in another heatwave last week. The last event in Bradford – my first time in the city – was fascinating. My talk was in the City Hall – a sprawling edifice built off the back of the city’s wool empire. This was followed by book signing in the nearby Wool Exchange (now Waterstone’s) which looks like this!

Last week, ‘Food Fight’ was shortlisted in The New Scientist as one of its ‘Best Books of 2025 So Far’ along with a punchy review. I quite like the way it hops between categories – food, health, society, environment, politics – but this was the first time I’ve seen it in ‘popular science.’

The same day it was listed in the US as a ‘must read’ book by the Next Big Idea Book Club for which I am very grateful…and very surprised! Civil Eats has also added it to their summer reading list. The US edition is out the day after Labor Day on 2 September.

One of my favourite recent podcast chats was with Kelly Brownell of Duke University. Kelly’s work has been hugely influential on (among other things) drawing the parallels between the tactics adopted by Big Food and Big Tobacco and how the former learnt from the latter.

And before that, it was great to have had the opportunity (thanks to the wonderful Christina Vogel) to speak at a City St George’s Food Thinkers webinar. I’ve long been a fan of this series, which always seems to be one level up.

As I can attest, having scrambled to field the barrage of incisive questions at the end!

See you in late July!

We all know wealth inequalities are off the scale. But the way people who have contributed the least to the climate crisis are paying the most – with their lives and livelihoods – is really the crime of the century.

The climate crisis generates food crises and malnutrition via global heating, the increased severity and frequency of heatwaves, droughts, flooding, crop failure, reduced quantity and quality of crop yields, higher food prices, reduced access to water and sanitation, increased food-borne and other infectious diseases and civil disorder.

That’s on land. Higher sea temperature, ocean acidification, reduced oxygenation, bleaching of coral reefs also hit marine resources.

The Lancet Countdown on Climate Change and Health has shown that the global land area affected by extreme drought has jumped from 18% in 1951–60 to 47% in 2013–22. More heatwave days and droughts has been associated with 151 million more people experiencing moderate or severe food insecurity in 2022 compared with 1981–2010 (across 124 countries). Extreme heat impacts on agriculture workers led to $863 billion of lost income in 2022.

It’s two-way….

Food systems generate one-third of all man-made greenhouse-gas emissions – the second biggest emitter after the fossil-fuel industry. Manufacturing and packaging are energy-intensive and highly polluting. Soaring global demand for cheap ingredients to manufacture ultra-processed/ultra-profitable foods leads to rapid deforestation, soil degradation, massive biodiversity loss, species extinction and air, water and plastic pollution.

Thirty-two billion single-use plastic bottles are floating in the ocean. That’s four for every person on this planet.

These vicious cycles are extraordinarily inequitable.

The wealthiest 1% are responsible for double the emissions of the poorest 50%. A billionaire emits a million times more carbon than the average person. The amount of energy used by an adult in sub-Saharan Africa per year is less than an average American fridge.

But it is the world’s 2.5 billion farmers, forest-dwellers, herders, fisherfolk, indigeneous peoples — who contribute least to this crisis — who will suffer most from its effects.

On Monday, I spoke about equity at the London Climate Action Week LCAW 2025 as a panelist in this Climate and Health event at The Conduit — along with Hannah Pathak, Azadeh Farajpour Javazmi and Alejandro Guarin.

Equity has three pillars – fair share, fair play and fair say.

We tend to just think of the first pillar – fair shares. And indeed, our 2021 review, on climate, nutrition and equity, showed this bias was mirrored in research.

We need a stronger focus on justice (fair play) and on inclusion (fair say).

Fourteen years ago, Rob Nixon wrote:

How do we bring home -- and bring emotionally to life -- threats that take time to wreak their havoc, threats that never materialise in one spectacular, explosive cinematic scene?

Slow-burn problems – like climate change and malnutrition – are the hardest ones for us to solve. Especially when they become intertwined.

There are occasional ‘explosive cinematic scenes’ like a forest fire, a collapsing glacier, a flash flood – but more often the drip, drip of attritional damage, hour after hour, day after day, fails to generate urgency. A mass violence that doesn’t look violent.

Most of this harm is being perpetuated by large corporations who have so much power, they can even control language and the stories that are told.

All these terms, for example, have been invented and propagated by industry to deflect attention from the harms they cause, and to point the finger at us:

• litterbug, carbon footprint, nanny state, lifestyle, climate change (not climate crisis), global warming (not global heating).

There are many more. In this way, transnationals shape the world of the possible and the impossible, the blameless and the guilty.

On Tuesday, Genevieve Guenther, author of ‘The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It’ wrote about the need to discuss catastrophic risks when communicating about the climate crisis.

Rebecca Solnit has said ‘every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis’

We need more stories of change – of how individuals, groups, movements have tackled climate/food/health inequity and injustice.

They’re out there!

Here are some – from Indonesia, South Africa and the United States — that aim to use food as the hook to report on different aspects of the climate crisis.

And lest we become ground down, it’s worth remembering that big impacts and their high costs also reflect the potential pay-off of turning things around. The net benefits of achieving a food system transformation have been estimated (by the Food Systems Economic Commission) to be up to an astonishing US$10 trillion a year (8% of global GDP in 2020).

*

IPES Food have just followed their brilliant podcast series with this Fuel to Fork report that asks the big question – what it will take to get fossil fuels out of our food systems? I thoroughly recommend a read of the full report.

Postscript: Breaking news…one hundred private jets have safely landed near Venice in time for the wedding of the chair and the vice chair of this organisation that’s dedicated to…er, fighting the climate crisis.

‘The elephant hawkmoth caterpillar is a bit of a thug. Large and brown, it has what looks like reptilian scales. On the back of its head are two blotches which mimic eyes to scare away birds. In my childhood obsession with lepidoptery, I was fascinated by this creature. But the big drama happens later, when its pupa cracks open and a pink and green thing of wonder emerges. Beast to Beauty. Complete transformation. The moth is radically altered from its crawling avatar – different purpose, different capability, different function.’ [Food Fight, p295]

Fight the power

I was lucky to attend an excellent webinar the other week: ‘Power and Resistance in the Food System’ Three inspirational speakers — Jennifer Clapp, Molly Anderson and Haroon Akram-Lodhi — all of whom have had a major influence in food systems theory and practice.

It was packed with wisdom and insight. I’ve been puzzling about how we change things…really change things…as anyone who has reached the last section of ‘Food Fight’ will see.

At 57 minutes in, Haroon Akram-Lodhi shows a fascinating table from a pivotal 2011 paper by Eric Holt-Giménez and Annie Shattuck.

What I really like is the way it provides a paradigmatic structure that captures the core challenge. The original paper suggests the corporate food regime is not only sustained through big business-as-usual, it’s indirectly being maintained by the Reformists. Many reformers (in the 2nd column) have appropriated the language of transformation, when they’re not really interested in it at all.

The first two columns work together very well…and have done so, for many years. Which is one big reason why the Corporate Food Regime — nearly half a century old — is still stronger than the Food Movement (columns 3 and 4).

In their paper, Holt-Giménez and Shattuck speak of the ‘double movement’, back and forth, in which Reformists seek to smooth over the sharp edges and damage caused by neoliberalism which ultimately helps to maintain it.

‘The Reformist path out of the current food crisis is through a social re-stabilisation of the corporate food regime on the one hand and the further application of technology and global markets on the other’

Part of the problem for the food movement, on the other hand, is that Progressives and Radicals don’t work together so well. Akram-Lodhi argues it is essential they figure a way to do this, suggesting it is the Radicals who need to ‘give ground’ to draw in the Progressives.

*

Last year, Vivica Kraak and Kim Niewolny published a review of food system governance frameworks and models to develop a typology for social change movements to transform food systems.

Here’s the typology they developed.

Again, it revolves around the same four political ideologies:

• Neoliberal, Reformist, Progressive, Radical

….which in turn relate to four different paradigms:

• Maintain, Reform, Transition, Transform

…and ultimately, four different strategies to drive social change (final row).

Finally, we start to break through the clichéd repetition, the appropriation of language and begin to see what’s really needed.

Why it matters

And in case we need reminding why we need to truly transform food systems, we have more ammunition in the form of another excellent paper by Jennifer Clapp and colleagues, just published in Food Policy.

Corporate concentration and power in food systems manifests in interlocking ways to shape markets, material conditions, policies and politics — to keep the status quo.

Not good for people’s agency, not good for the planet.

Mad as hell (MAH)

Just came across this great blog by the inimitable Jess Fanzo.

I loved the way she uses classic 70s films as a prism. A rich vein of music also ran through that decade — my memories of the turbulence of adolescence are all soundtracked.

Inspired by this, as I was making a mess of what should have been an easy task (varnishing a few square metres of decking…how hard can it be?), I revisited the 70s songs that spoke to the eternal challenge when confronted with insanity and injustice:

Fight or flight?

It started with Bowie:

• All the Madmen, Hang on to Yourself, Life on Mars?, Five Years, Rebel, Rebel, Heroes

And his pal, Iggy:

• 1970, Raw Power, Lust for Life, The Passenger, Don’t Look Down

The Clash, of course:

• Should I Stay or Should I Go?, Complete Control, London Calling, Safe European Home, Clampdown, I Fought the Law, Stay Free

And so many other ‘fight or flight’ classics, including Gil Scott-Heron (The Revolution will Not be Televised), Marvin Gaye (What’s Goin’ On), Bob Marley (Get Up, Stand Up), Isley Brothers (Fight the Power)…not to be confused with the immense ‘Fight the Power’ by Public Enemy (‘most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps’), The Stranglers (Something Better Change, Straighten Out, No More Heroes), The Fall (Hit the North, Lost in Music), Joy Division (Shadowplay, Atrocity Exhibition, Atmosphere (‘don’t walk away…in silence’), Gang of Four (At Home He Feels like a Tourist), Killing Joke (Requiem, Wardance), Magazine (The Light Pours Out of Me, A Song from Under the Floorboards), Heaven 17 (We Don’t Need this Fascist Groove Thang), Only Ones (Another Girl, Another Planet), Siouxsie and the Banshees (Spellbound)

OK, that’s enough misty-eyed nostalgia…back to varnishing..

[Footnote: I wasn’t actually aware of the ‘mad as hell’ quote by Peter Finch…though I had run into MAH by the Chemical Brothers which spectacularly reprised it]

‘Despair is a Luxury’

To end with some radical hope…

I’ve just finished this wonderful collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit, having recently attended a lively ‘in conversation’ event with her and Caroline Lucas at the Brighton Festival.

Solnit’s been writing about hope for more than twenty years…like a seasoned boxing coach ‘tending to the spiritually and politically exhausted citizen…’

I read with a red pen, picking out lines, but gave up…there are so many.

‘Despair’s cheerleaders offer the same message that institutions all around us do: that we are powerless, that power resides in the few, at the center, at the top. Part of the resistance must consist of refusing to believe them, and that can be reinforced by better versions of history and theories of change.’

If you think there’s no point or nothing’s changed, remember:

‘…even when the rock’s on the bottom of the pool, the ripples are still spreading’

Now, more than ever…

See you at the end of the month!