by Nick Taranto
3
Eating Evolution, Part 2: The Birth of Big Food
One-liner: How did we get so disconnected from our kitchens and our food?
How did food in America get so broken? How did we go from foraging to farming to fatty liver disease? The one-line answer is this: Over the last century, a deadly misalignment has grown between the food industry’s incentives and our desires and needs as humans.
I am an avowed capitalist, and I love building companies, because I think there is no more efficient way to create the products and services that will impact and change the world.
But the food industry’s development and evolution over the twentieth century, the Industrial Food Revolution, is emblematic of how capitalism and humanity can sometimes be at odds and how success can lead to failure.
Let’s explore the last century and how we got so disconnected from cooking, and our food, and how that disconnect produced our current Flawed American Diet (FAD).
The Origins of Big Food
Up front, it’s important to understand that Big Food companies and the people who run them are not evil. These enormous companies were built over the last century to do something very important: to make safe food more convenient and accessible. Every revolution has unexpected fallout, and though definitions of safety and accessibility have shifted, many corporations have failed to keep up. Many face massive challenges to change how they operate due to consumer and shareholder demands and institutional inertia. Going from sixty to zero in a Ferrari is easy. Doing the same with an intergalactic space cruiser takes a lot longer.
For Big Food, people eating fresh food at home is an obstacle to selling more of its products. Big Food makes money by changing food culture and food traditions through developing its own rituals and traditions. For the last century, this has consisted of getting people to eat the highly processed and riskily altered provisions that Big Food became world class at making. But no one should be eating Fritos multiple times per week, let alone multiple times per day. Once you have changed people’s taste buds, you have changed the way they eat.
So who and what exactly is Big Food?
Big Food is the companies that make up the multitrillion-dollar industry that grows, raises, slaughters, manufactures, packages, and sells most of the food Americans eat. Think of Big Food as four different levels of a riskily altered food pyramid.
The base of the pyramid is Big Agriculture, or the input producers, the companies that until consolidation accelerated in the 1980s were family-owned farms. Today, this is primarily the corn and soybean megafarms of the Midwest. This base also includes the multibillion-dollar oligopoly of companies that supply all farmers with seeds and chemicals.
The input producers create and sell the stuff that Big Meat buys, the next level up the pyramid. This is another multibillion-dollar oligopoly of companies that raise, slaughter, and process most of the cows, chickens, and pigs that Americans eat.
The next level up the pyramid is the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. This is where the raw ingredients are processed and transformed into the fundamental elements of riskily altered provisions. Corn is chemically altered into high-fructose corn syrup using acid enzymes with such family-friendly names as alpha-amylase and xylose isomerase. Soybeans are refined and hydrogenated into the oil used to fry most of the fast food that is consumed in the United States.
The fast-food hustlers are at the top of the riskily altered food pyramid.
Each of these layers of the pyramid (except for the retailers at the top) is dominated by a multibillion-dollar oligopoly of companies. Economists determine that an industry is excessively concentrated when the top four companies in it control more than 40 percent of the market. In the case of food, that percentage is exceeded in beef slaughter (82 percent), chicken processing (53 percent), corn and soy processing (85 percent), pesticides (62 percent), and seeds (58 percent).1
Each layer of the pyramid is also represented on Capitol Hill by at least one powerful lobbying group. The North American Meat Institute represents Big Meat, working with each animal’s dedicated trade association (the National Pork Producers Council, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and the National Chicken Council). The American Farm Bureau Federation lobbies for the growers of commodity crops. The National Restaurant Association is the voice of the fast-food chains. CropLife America speaks for the pesticide industry.2
These lobbying groups push for legislation (or lack thereof) on their own, but they also often work together as one very powerful voice in Washington on such issues as crop subsidies or the labeling of genetically modified food. In recent years, the various layers of the pyramid have been cemented together through the appearance of a common enemy: consumers recognizing that market concentration is dangerous, especially when it comes to food. So while it is a simplification, it still makes sense to talk about Big Food as a single powerful entity.3
The ten biggest food corporations employ over seven hundred thousand people and account for almost $300 billion in annual sales.4 Almost all these companies and the brands they launched date back to the last century. Oreo, for example, now owned by Mondelez International, was launched in 1912 and has sold over five hundred billion cookies since it was introduced to cookie-craving American consumers. The scale, reach, and power of these companies is hard to fathom. PepsiCo’s sales from food alone are bigger than more than half of the GDP of the world’s countries that are recognized by the United Nations. When you add PepsiCo’s beverage sales to the mix, they are bigger than two-thirds of all countries’ combined GDPs.5 But it wasn’t always this way.
A Century of Change
The world has changed dramatically over the last hundred years. In 1915, the Great War’s battles were being fought in Europe using bayonets and single-shot rifles, where on a regular basis, tens of thousands of soldiers would die—in a single day. Electricity was just entering the mainstream, and electric refrigeration was still decades away. Fewer than 10 percent of families owned a car. Airplanes were still a highly dubious proposition capable of carrying one or two people, flying only a few miles at a time. Escalators, tea bags, instant coffee, and disposable razor blades were all cutting-edge innovations. It was a very different time and a very different world.
Thanks to advances in technology that were applied across dozens of industries, food became safer, better, and cheaper. The average American household’s spending on food went from 42 percent to less than 15 percent of annual income. In 1915, the average farmer fed about 15 people. Today, he feeds more than 120. American agriculture in the twenty-first century is a marvel of modern science and economics. The bottom line for most families is that our wealth has grown multiples faster than the price of food.6
Food is one of the most critical issues currently facing America and the world. Where we go from here will determine not only the quality and length of our individual lives but also the future of the planet as we know it.
First, if we don’t change how we produce, distribute, and consume food, eventually we will not have a planet to call home. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming is real and very dangerous. You can make all the jokes you want about cow farts, but methane is twenty times more potent than CO2. Livestock (particularly cows) produce methane as part of the enteric fermentation in their digestion, and methane makes up 30 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. And it’s not just methane and livestock. Agriculture is also one of the biggest culprits in land degradation, air and water pollution, water shortages, and loss of biodiversity.
We live on a planet of 7.3 billion people, where even today some 2 billion people do not have enough to eat. Moreover, by 2050, the total population is projected to grow to almost 10 billion people. Another billion or so people will enter the middle class in that time, radically accelerating their demand for calories in the form of meat, fish, milk, eggs, and other energy-dense foods. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations projects
that the world’s farmers will have to produce 70 percent more calories by 2050, on less land (perhaps much less land) and with less water than they do today.
The way we produce food, and the amount and way we eat today, will not scale to feed ten billion.7
Second, much of the food that is produced and distributed in America today is not aimed primarily at nutrition. When you engineer salt, fat, and sugar, foods become incredibly attractive—and addictive. The right food processing will kick off the same dopamine network that triggers cravings that are more powerful than a drug addict’s. And we see the consequences. One hundred million Americans are now diabetic or prediabetic. And type 2 diabetes, which used to be called adult onset diabetes, is now afflicting children. In 1980, you could not find a child with type 2 diabetes.
Diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and some cancers are diseases that are far more prevalent in the United States than anywhere in the rest of the world. And that’s the direct result of eating a Western diet, the Flawed American Diet (FAD).8 These are diseases that either did not exist or were much rarer prior to the advent of industrialized American farming and food production.
Our demand for meat, dairy, and refined carbohydrates drives us to consume way more calories than are good for us. Far more Americans die from overconsumption than from underconsumption (a.k.a. hunger), even while millions of our children go hungry and fill up on chips and soda. If every drop of Coke consumed per year in the United States alone was put in sixteen-ounce bottles and laid end to end, they would reach the moon and back—several dozen times.9 And those calories are in foods and beverages that cause, not prevent, disease.
Reconnect with Your Food
If you care about the world your children will inherit, and how well and long you are going to live in that world, you should probably be thinking about where your food is coming from, what’s in it, and how it is being raised or produced.
Eating fresh, real food is the best way to both connect to where your food is coming from and to ensure that you and your family are eating only high-quality, sustainable, healthy ingredients.
The current food-driven health crisis was entirely preventable. Grandma could have stopped it by sticking to her cooking (and knitting), but market forces conspired against her. We were assured that the more Spam we ate and the more Coke we drank, the healthier and happier we’d be. But the opposite truth has played out.
What do cows and Coke have in common? Beyond being a bit gassy (sorry, I couldn’t resist), they both have also been marketed heavily by Big Food, creating unnatural demand. We’re not born craving Big Macs and Sprite, but their production and distribution have been supported by government subsidies at the expense of a more earth- and waistline-friendly diet.
Eating Like Your Grandma Did Is Really Hard
A hundred years ago, every American ate locally and sustainably, because there was no other option. Even my hometown of New York was still surrounded by farms, and shipping food all over the country was a ridiculous notion because interstate highways and trucks didn’t exist, and refrigeration consisted of blocks of ice covered in sawdust. Most women of that era were discouraged from holding jobs outside of the house, so instead, they spent their days buying food in the local market and preparing it at home.10
Back in those days, before Michael Pollan and Julia Child and Jamie Oliver, there was no philosophy of food. You just ate, probably as your parents and their parents had eaten for hundreds of years. Food didn’t define you, it fueled you. There were few national brands, most foods had no labels, and there was little to no marketing. Daily vitamins and supplements had not been invented, and there were no health claims outside of the snake oil salesmen. You didn’t think about “groups” or “pyramids” or “diets” or fats, carbs, and proteins. You ate what your mom put on your plate.
Hardly anything contained more than a few ingredients, at most. Americans grew real food, and they ate real food. And again, everyone ate local, because there was no alternative. Tang, Wheaties, Snickers, Gatorade, Spam, Nathan’s hot dogs—none of these had been invented yet. Today, it’s hard to imagine American culture without these icons.
Farm subsidies changed everything. During the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt argued that nonfarmers must be taxed so that farmers, the backbone of the American economy at the time, could be supported. My family in South Dakota received these subsidies—without them, I probably wouldn’t be here today.
However, once some farmers had their subsidies, they were viewed as entitlements and were hard to take away, even when the farm crises of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl were over. Then these subsidies were used to reduce the cost of feed production, which resulted in a flooding of the market with artificially cheap products, primarily corn and soy. Many of the problems with the FAD today were created by American food policies that were developed during the Great Depression.
From the 1950s onward, President Eisenhower built the interstate highway system, trucks took the place of railroads, and fresh food began to travel farther and farther. Once-exotic produce like oranges became common in New York, California became an agricultural hub, and suburbs took over farmland. Eventually, California produced too much food to ship fresh, so it became critical to process, package, and market canned and frozen foods. Thus arrived America’s first flirtations with “fast food.” It was marketed to “modern housewives” as a way to cut down on housework. The effects of this move to convenience and industrialization are well known, and they are omnipresent in the America we know today.
From K Rations to CRAP
For far too long, cooking was women’s responsibility. There was a very clear division of labor. Even in many traditional societies where men were out hunting, women were doing the cooking. This was certainly true in the United States.
By post–World War II–era America, we no longer had tribes or extended families. Instead, cooking and eating were done at the nuclear-family level. Women found themselves alone and isolated in the kitchen for the first time in human history.
Cooking had moved from communal activity to chore.
When I lived in Java in 2006 and 2007, I would visit the local market with my host mom and her friends. We would chat with the vendors selling everything from dried chili peppers to dozens of varieties of rice to freshly slaughtered beef, where the flies competed with the housewives to see who could “steak” a claim first. She would select what she wanted along with her friends, and they would bring home the fresh provisions and spend most of the morning communally preparing dishes together for lunch and dinner. Food gathering, preparation, and cooking looked a lot like this all over the world for the previous ten thousand years.
As food preparation in the United States became more of a solitary endeavor, women found themselves spending much of their time and a lot of their day alone. The social and tribal relationship humans had to cooking for millions of years had been broken. The typical way the story is told is that the feminist revolution came, women went to work, and they stopped cooking. And that was the end of cooking in America.
But it’s a somewhat more complicated story, and Big Food played a crucial role in the downfall of cooking culture. Beginning after World War II, the commercialization of processed and shelf-stable food first invented for military applications made its way into the mainstream.
Big Food put a lot of effort into selling Americans on the processed food wonders that it had invented to feed the troops. Canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice, and instant coffee—these were the items found in the typical K ration.
The K ration was an individual daily combat food ration that was introduced by the United States Army during World War II.
It was originally intended as an individually packaged daily ration for issue to airborne troops, the tank corps, motorcycle couriers, and other mobile forces for short durations of intense movement and activity. The K ration would evolve—if you can call i
t that—over time to become the MREs that I consumed while living for weeks on end in the desert with the Marine Corps.
What was designed for durability and short-term nutrition for soldiers, sailors, and marines in combat was repackaged and marketed toward housewives as perpetual convenience.
These products changed thousands of years of food traditions. The shift toward industrial food production, accelerated food processing, and convenient consumption was a supply-driven phenomenon. Consumers weren’t at first demanding Tang, Spam, and microwave dinners. Instead, the food companies came out of World War II, with demand from the armed forces essentially gone overnight. Millions of soldiers, sailors, and marines returned to civilian life and their wives and families. Food industry executives of the late 1940s had to figure out innovative distribution and marketing approaches in order to keep selling their newly invented products, and the natural place to move those products was into people’s kitchens.11 The idea was to market new products in many different ways that would teach consumers new rituals and behaviors in order to get them to buy more and make their lives easier.
By midcentury, we were hooked on hundreds of processed-food ingredients that did not exist prior to World War II. Again, keep in mind that the major food challenge of the 1950s was safety, accessibility, and convenience. Food processing accomplished this masterfully.
This was a win for Big Food (more money), a win for the consumer (new and exciting products), and a win for society (more people getting the safely delivered calories they needed than at any point before in human history). But it turns out that there was a pernicious downside to processed food that we didn’t come to understand until it was too late.
A CRAPpy Spectrum
First, let’s define what we’re talking about. Processed food has a bad reputation as a diet destroyer. It has been roundly blamed for our nation’s obesity epidemic, high blood pressure, and the prevalence of type 2 diabetes. But processed food is more than Oreos and Cheetos, Lay’s and McDonald’s hamburgers. It may be a surprise to learn that guacamole, homemade salad, or sautéed carrots are also technically processed foods.