The Food Industry is Making Us (and the Earth) Sick

Since we’re no longer hunters and gatherers – nor largely agrarian – the vast majority of modern society completely relies on the global food system to survive. The sheer fact that the food industry feeds billions of people each day is pretty remarkable. However, there’s a darker reality that lies underneath our immaculately table-clothed dinner tables: corruption. And this corruption is making us and the planet sick.

It’s not just processed foods, fast food, buttloads of added sugars, or poor diets that are making us sick, though obesity and other health risks are certainly public health issues. Nope. The food supply system itself is often a cause for gut-pretzeling concern.

From mislabeling seafood and nutrient-depleting soils to bribery schemes and market manipulation, the food industry doesn’t pass inspection when it comes to ethical and sustainable practices. Here are five key problems of the food industry, all served with specific examples of its hard-to-digest corruption.

The Food Industry Is Rampant with Fraudulent Food

Sure, you may be aware that canned tuna is albacore (a species of tuna) and not sashimi-grade bluefin tuna. Aside from this distinction, you’d be pretty stunned regarding the rampant practice of mislabeling seafood to increase prices. According to a TIME Magazine article, the U.S.-based conservation group Oceana conducted DNA studies on various types of seafood.

In this fairly recent study, scientists found that almost half of the salmon sold was mislabeled, with 69% of the mislabeling concerning selling farm-raised salmon as wild-caught salmon. (If you’ve ever seen videos of salmon farms, you’d understand why paying the higher price of wild-caught salmon is worth it.) They also found instances of “snapper” being a different type of fish entirely and found imported crabs in Maryland crab cakes.

However, food fraud isn’t limited to the seas. In 2013, one of the most infamous cases of mislabeling involved horsemeat being sold as beef in Europe. After discovering horsemeat in 1650 pounds of Ikea’s popular Swedish meatballs, investigators ultimately uncovered a complex network of unscrupulous suppliers and processors across multiple countries.

From cheaper olive oils being passed off as extra-virgin olive oil to forged wine bottles spilling swill and sold as rare vintages, the food industry doesn’t provide enough oversight, deceiving consumers and undercutting legitimate producers in the process.

Bribery Helps Regulators Swallow Unethical Practices

When it comes to corruption, within any industry, bribery is typically part of the prix fixe menu. The “big food” industry is no different. A restauranter bribing a health inspector for a high grade is an example, but more egregious bribery occurs when large companies bribe regulators and government officials to secure lucrative contracts, bypass safety concerns, and push out competition.

One large-scale bribery scandal occurred in Bolsonaro’s Brazil in 2017 when JBS — the world’s largest food processing company — admitted to paying millions in bribes to health inspectors. Unfortunately, for the rest of the world, Brazil is the largest exporter of beef and the fourth largest exporter of pork. The company had also spent nearly a decade bribing more than 1,800 Brazilian politicians to secure subsidized loans.

In the U.S., we tend to sane-wash the idea of “bribery” with the term “lobbying.” If you’ve ever wondered why the FDA allows certain chemicals and additives into our food — while other countries don’t – look no further than a philosophy bending to lobbying whims.

The U.S. adheres to a Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) approach, which relies on the opinions of experts, to determine if something is safe or not. To note, it’s perfectly fine if these “experts” are associated with food corporations. The European Union actually tests new chemicals and additives before allowing their populace to consume them.

From synthetic food dyes linked to behavioral changes in children to titanium dioxide, which is linked to lung cancer, there are plenty of food additives that are legal in the U.S. and not abroad. Lobbying helps U.S. policymakers to “generally recognize” these additives “as safe,” even when nutrition research indicates otherwise.

Needless to say, the standard American diet is already reliant on ultra-processed foods, leading to an increased risk for chronic illness, but when this food also includes a suspect ingredient list (usually to colorize or preserve), it’s both a nauseating and mind-numbing concept to think about.

Mix Corrupt Ingredients to Create Food Safety Violations

Bribery and food fraud deserve their own designating courses, but these two food industry problems are also the key ingredients to food health and safety violations. If you can’t provide any oversight or pushback on corruption, then you certainly can’t set or enforce any trustable standards of food safety.

The pursuit of profit at the expense of consumer health and safety is the throughline with all of this. As evident in the rotten meat scandal in Brazil (the investigation was aptly named “Operation Weak Meat”), food companies have been known to cut corners on quality standards and control to reduce costs.

From the Blue Bell Creameries scandal that created a listeria outbreak in 2015, due to unhygienic manufacturing facilities, to Jack in the Box’s E. coli-related deaths in the 90s, there’s no shortage of examples of food safety violations harming consumers. Often, when food safety violations occur, investigations reveal corruption and regulatory failures – or, as stated, key ingredients.

Environmental Impact and the Dirtier Business of the Food Industry

The food industry’s unquenchable quest for cheap ingredients has resulted in environmental degradation and exploitation on a massive scale. From illegal and over-fishing practices, which have led to the near-collapse of natural fish stocks, to rainforest deforestation to allow for livestock farming, the food industry is a major contributor to our planet’s worsening health.

There are plenty of examples of large-scale agricultural practices harming Earth (it contributes around 23% of total greenhouse gas emissions), but if you dig a little deeper, there’s something else that “big ag” affects: the soil.

In recent years, gut health has received a lot of attention – and for good reason. Your gut health affects every aspect of your overall health, and your gut biome affects your gut health. Gut biome are tiny bacteria and organisms that help your stomach function correctly. Guess where gut biome comes from? Food. Guess where food gets its biome? The soil.

We recently interviewed regenerative farming advocate Ed Bourgeois concerning big agriculture’s effect on soil health. It’s astonishing. Fertilizing practices and irresponsible tilling have deteriorated the health of our soil dramatically. Due to the lack of biome in the soil, fruits and vegetables simply don’t provide the same nutrients anymore – or adequate biome to our stomachs. To learn more, check out the fascinating interview with Ed Bourgeois.

Stuck with the Bill: Market Manipulation in the Food Industry

While you may not be aware, only a handful of companies run the global food supply: Nestlé, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, and Mondelez to name a few.  Walking into a grocery store, you’re met with an illusion of choice, but it is definitely an illusion. Did you know Nestlé actually owns Gerber Baby Food and Hot Pockets? Or that Unilever owns both Ben & Jerry’s and Slim Fast? Probably not.

Concentration of power in the hands of a few corporations will always lead to monopolistic practices. “Inflation” is a term thrown around a lot, and this is by design. Inflation implies that higher prices are due to market forces. However, these corporations continue to make record profits year after year.

If higher prices were due to inflation, these profit margins would reflect these market forces – they don’t. Higher prices that continue to correlate with higher profits is sheer market manipulation. Unfortunately, since only a handful of companies are calling the shots, we’re stuck with the bill. From the higher costs of food to the cost of our personal and planetary health, it’s all a pretty sickening situation.