Food Companies Suck

As the last post mentioned, the beverage market is dominated by a select few mega-companies like coca-cola. As you might imagine, this is exactly the case for pretty much any processed food item you can buy in the average grocery store. Marion Nestle mentioned in a lecture she gave at UW earlier this quarter that only about 10 different companies manufacture all the packaged food available at your average supermarket. Scary! With all the different brand names and types of food sitting on the shelves at the grocery store, it seems like we’ve got such an array of choices! But we certainly don’t have much of a choice in who our food dollars are supporting. Looking at a list of which companies own which brand names is like looking at a giant family tree. Even the major organic labels are owned by the same huge food companies, so if you’re trying to support better business practices and smaller companies, you can't really do it at the average supermarket at all. These types of organic labels tend to source food from farms that do the bare minimum to meet organic standards- basically just industrialized agriculture sans synthetic fertilizers and agrochemicals. Although eliminating the agrochemical inputs certainly helps, such practices are a far cry from sustainable, or even "environmentally friendly."

In her lecture, Marion Nestle shared a story from a trip to a small, and incredibly isolated village in India. She was astonished to see bags of lays potato chips and other highly processed foods for sale there, give how difficult it must have been to transport them there and how expensive they were relative to the average income of the local townspeople, for whom a bag of chips would cost an entire week’s salary. People buy them, she was told, because they are considered something similar to a delicacy. That food companies try desperately to sell their barely-food products to the people who need it, and can afford it, the least, just to make a little more money is a perfect example of the exploitative nature of capitalism and globalization. Only these forces could possibly create such a ridiculous situation in which people all over the world, even in the most isolated places, can, and will, buy crappy food, and in doing so, manage to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, all at the exact same time. 

Posted by Mollie Tarte