Food Fight
From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet
By Stuart Gillespie
Category: Health & Nutrition | Reading Duration: 19 min | Rating: 4.1/5 (11 ratings)
About the Book
Food Fight (2025) explores how the global food system has evolved into a structure that fuels both human ill health and environmental harm. It traces the political, economic, and cultural forces that shaped today’s food landscape, and highlights examples of successful reforms. Ultimately, it argues for urgent systemic change to prioritize people and the planet over corporate profit.
Who Should Read This?
- Policy-focused professionals in global health and nutrition
- Environmentally conscious advocates of sustainable food systems
- Anyone concerned about diet and the planet
What’s in it for me? Fix harmful food systems with policies, evidence, and action.
Eating well shouldn’t feel like a puzzle, yet it often does. That’s because most of what shapes your choices happens upstream – through rules, incentives, and business decisions that determine what’s produced, promoted, and placed in front of you.
But these forces have unexpected consequences; they show up in health statistics and in the pressure we put on land, water, and climate. And yet, it can be difficult to get a clear picture of how the system really works and practical ways it can be redirected toward better outcomes. In this Blink, you’ll see how power and history built the food system; how ultra-processed products scaled through it; why inequality and policy inertia keep harmful defaults in place; and which tools consistently move markets. Let’s start by taking stock of the present – the cascade of harms we’re living with now.
Chapter 1: The current food system creates a reinforcing crisis of malnutrition, disease, and environmental harm
Across the world, a system built to maximize cheap calories now powers a single, self-reinforcing crisis for health and the environment. Undernutrition hasn’t gone away, while rates of obesity have surged – often in the same countries, communities, and even households. That coexistence is the double burden: too few nutrients and too many empty calories living side by side, driven by the same underlying conditions. Those conditions start early and accumulate.
When nutrition is inadequate during pregnancy and the first two years of life, children are more likely to be born too small or with early excess fat; both paths raise the risk of later metabolic disease. As those children grow up, they encounter food environments saturated with ultra-processed, energy-dense products that are cheap and heavily promoted, tilting the odds toward developing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers. A clear snapshot comes from India, where rapid urbanization and shifting food environments changed diets within a generation. From 2006 to 2021, the number of underweight women roughly halved while those overweight doubled; overweight preschoolers now exceed those who are undernourished. In the same period, snack and soft-drink sales tripled to over $30 billion as supermarkets and convenience stores expanded – patterns linked to higher ultra-processed purchases. The result is the double burden within the same communities, with hunger persisting while diet-related disease layers on top.
The human toll is mirrored in economics. Poor diets are linked to more than 12 million adult deaths annually. Malnutrition in all its forms already costs the world about $3. 5 trillion each year and could reach $4.
3 trillion by 2035, roughly 3 percent of global GDP – comparable to the shock of COVID-19 in 2020 but repeating every year. So, how did we get here? To see why a system once geared to avert famine now manufactures abundance of the wrong kind, the next step is to track how power built it – through colonial extraction, post-war productivism, and, later, a corporate order that set today’s incentives.
Chapter 2: Power dynamics across three historical regimes shaped today’s harmful, cheap-calorie food order
Over nearly four centuries, the food system passed through three major power regimes: the Colonial era from 1655 to 1943, the Cold War productivist era from 1943 to 1976, and the Corporate era from 1976 to present. Each era set incentives that still shape what’s grown, processed, and sold. Consider sugar as the template of the Colonial era. After England seized Jamaica in 1655, a triangular trade linked West Africa, the Caribbean, and Britain through plantation slavery.
Sugar was four times more profitable per acre than tobacco and helped bankroll the empire. Between 1662 and 1807, Britain transported roughly 3. 4 million enslaved Africans to the Americas, their labor converting tropical land into export cash and European calories. That model – coerced labor, monoculture, and extraction – carved deep grooves in global diets and economies. The Cold War replaced old empires with new geopolitics. US farm programs created wheat and soy surpluses that were shipped as cheap exports or food aid to allies, while the Green Revolution spread high-yield seeds, irrigation, and agrochemicals.
Global grain output more than doubled from 1950 to 1980, averting famine but hard-wiring agriculture to cheap staples and heavy fossil-fuel use. Even soft drinks benefited: during World War II, Coca-Cola was exempted from sugar rationing to supply US troops – an early sign of how state policy could favor processed products. From the late 1970s, neoliberal policies amplified corporate control. Trade liberalization opened markets while rich countries kept farm subsidies, and mergers swept through farming, processing, and retail. Industry also reframed diet-related disease as a matter of individual responsibility rather than market failure. Today, a handful of firms dominate: Nestlé’s annual sales top $100 billion, and Walmart’s revenues rival those of entire countries.
Diets are now homogenized worldwide. Half of all calories consumed come from just three crops – rice, wheat, and maize, cementing a cheap-calorie model that damages both health and ecosystems. With that power structure in place, the next act was predictable: an ultra-processed playbook targeting mothers and children that soon spread worldwide.
Chapter 3: Commercialization of infant feeding launched the playbook that normalized ultra-processed diets
The engine of today’s diet shift began with first foods. When companies turned infant feeding into a growth market, marketing budgets and political muscle converged to push formula deep into hospitals, clinics, and homes, reshaping norms in the first weeks of life. In response to mounting evidence of harm, countries agreed to the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes in 1981, but industry pushback was fierce. The US did not endorse the Code until 1994, and companies continued to pressure governments into the 2010s.
There are many examples of how health, commerce, and policy collide. In the 1970s, aggressive promotion steered mothers – often without access to clean water – toward bottle-feeding, contributing to deadly infant diarrheal disease. A later analysis linked formula expansion in low- and middle-income countries to roughly 11 million infant deaths between 1960 and 2015. Public outrage spurred hearings, boycotts, and adoption of the Code. The industry responded by shifting targets: marketing new products for older infants, young children, and even pregnant and breastfeeding women, creating a multibillion-dollar portfolio sold as specialized nutrition. That playbook matured in the digital era.
Anxious new parents are micro-targeted; influencers and “baby care” apps blur advice with advertising; and AI-driven tactics time their pitches for maximum effect. Spending is relentless – more than $3 billion a year on formula marketing – fueling a formula industry worth roughly $55 billion, even as many countries still haven’t fully adopted the Code into law. This early battleground previewed a wider shift: ultra-processed products for all ages. Using the NOVA classification, which ranks foods by degree of processing, ultra-processed means foods designed to be cheap, durable, highly palatable, and endlessly extensible.
While ideal for profit, these products are damaging to public and planetary health. But as the product portfolio expanded, corporate consolidation turbocharged its scale and therefore its impact. That impact on us as individuals depends on where we live, shop, and eat – the food environments that quietly shape our daily choices.
Chapter 4: Food environments determine everyday choices, and drive both health and environmental outcomes
The everyday places where people shop and eat do much of the heavy lifting in shaping diets. Food environments – stores, streets, screens, and the rules around them – determine what’s easy, affordable, and appealing. Start with access and price. In the UK, 3.
3 million people live in areas with no fresh produce available within a 15-minute bus trip, and staples often cost 10 percent more in small shops in deprived neighborhoods than in wealthy ones. On high streets, more than one in four food outlets is a fast-food takeaway, and the poorest districts have more than double the density of unhealthy outlets compared to the richest. Inside supermarkets, placement does the rest – snacks line the checkout, and children’s products sit at eye level to prompt impulse buys. The effect shows up in kids’ health: opening a fast-food outlet within 0. 1 miles of a school is linked to over a 5 percent rise in child obesity rates. The spillover reaches the planet.
Food systems generate roughly one-third of global greenhouse-gas emissions, enough on their own to push warming past 1. 5°C. Ultra-processed foods account for an estimated 30 to 50 percent of the food system’s resource use and environmental impacts, and emissions from these products surged by 245 percent between 1987 and 2018. Plastic packaging from big brands is everywhere; Coca-Cola alone produces about 200,000 single-use bottles every minute, yet only around 9 percent of plastic waste is ever recycled. Shocks show how unhealthy environments amplify harm. During COVID-19, low-income communities with diets dominated by ultra-processed foods faced higher risks of severe illness and death, worsening existing inequalities.
The cascade accelerates wherever healthy choices are scarce. All these patterns share a root cause: unequal power. Next, we’ll see how concentrated corporate influence and policy inaction lock in these harmful defaults – and what it takes to change them.
Chapter 5: Concentrated corporate and financial power blocks effective nutrition policy and entrenches inequality
The food system keeps generating harm because power is skewed. Inequalities put certain groups at higher risk, while a tightly held industry steers policy and public debate toward profit over prevention. In many sectors, a few firms dominate. Just five trading houses control an estimated 70 to 90 percent of the global grain market, setting prices and supplies beyond the reach of any single nation’s health policies.
And a handful of processed-food giants have annual sales larger than many government budgets. Follow the money and influence becomes clearer. Massive asset managers own big stakes across the industry. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street together hold roughly one-fifth of shares in companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Yum! Brands. They consistently vote against public-health and environmental measures, while backing bigger shareholder payouts and lobbying budgets.
This alignment rewards short-term profit and stifles reforms that would factor health or environmental costs into business models. Industry influence usually operates behind the scenes, not as headline scandal. Much of lobbying isn’t even on the public record, and officials often cycle from health agencies into food and beverage firms. At the global level, corporate actors gain influence through “multi-stakeholder” initiatives that give them a seat under the guise of partnership. The result is do-nothing politics – lofty strategies and targets with little action – even though evidence shows nutrition problems demand rules, not just reminders. These dynamics hit those with the least power the hardest.
The food sector has the world’s highest rates of forced and child labor, and it sells heavily into low-income areas where healthy options are scarce and costly, while saturating these communities with advertising that faces few restrictions. Inequity at the top leads to inequality on the ground. Changing outcomes means changing the rules and incentives. Next, let’s see what happens when governments regulate and redesign food environments.
Chapter 6: Well-designed public rules and procurement can quickly shift markets toward healthier defaults
To fix a food environment dominated by cheap ultra-processed products, governments must deploy tools only they have – setting standards, taxing harmful products, restricting ads, and shifting public procurement. A guiding principle is precaution: if a product is suspected of causing widespread harm, action shouldn’t wait on perfect proof. For ultra-processed foods, that means moving beyond education and enforcing rules that reshape what gets produced, marketed, and served. Think of three levers that work together.
Institutions can buy better, using school meal programs and hospital catering to improve nutrition and crowd out ultra-processed options. Information measures – front-of-pack warning labels and limits on junk-food marketing – guide consumers, while financial incentives like health taxes spur reformulation and influence purchasing. Each lever is backed by evidence – for example, robust school meal programs have improved children’s nutrition and even academic performance, and countries with strict warning labels and marketing curbs have seen declines in purchases of sugary, salty products. One city illustrates how effective smart policy can be. In 2019, London’s transport network banned advertisements for high-fat, high-salt, and high-sugar foods across buses, trains, and stations. Household purchases of unhealthy snacks dropped by roughly 20 percent, a change that models suggest could prevent tens of thousands of obesity cases and save over £200 million in health costs.
That’s a population-level impact from a single rule. National policies can amplify city actions. The UK’s tiered sugary-drinks levy, for instance, prompted manufacturers to cut sugar content significantly and has been linked to lower childhood obesity rates, especially among girls in poorer areas. Policies like these work because they shift power toward health. The next challenge is scaling up ambition – activating citizens, decolonizing agendas, improving transparency, and aligning finance – so that healthier food systems become the default.
Chapter 7: System change requires citizen activation, equity, mission-driven innovation, and strong coalitions
Real change happens when citizens, institutions, and markets move together. The first step is activation: treating people as citizens with agency – not just consumers – and building pressure for health-protecting rules. Community groups, advocates, and researchers can expose harms, track lobbying, and push leaders to act. This is already underway in many countries, supported by networks that help local campaigns navigate legal and political hurdles.
Power also shifts when we decolonize the narrative. Global nutrition and health still carry colonial legacies that influence who sets the agenda and who benefits. Acknowledging those histories is essential, because policies built on unequal foundations repeat the pattern. Making structural equity a deliberate design choice, rather than an afterthought, changes the frame of action. Innovation must also serve purpose, not just profit. Take chocolate: it’s a multi-billion-dollar industry, yet many West African cocoa farmers live in poverty and child labor remains widespread.
One challenger, Tony’s Chocolonely, pays higher prices for traceable beans, supports farmer cooperatives, and openly shares its methods so others can copy the model – proving that business can compete while lifting standards across a sector. Coalitions accelerate these shifts. More than 280 cities have signed the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, pledging to reform procurement, advertising, and retail rules for healthier diets, creating a global network that even national governments are beginning to heed. Finally, governance must align finance and law with public purpose – using antitrust to disperse concentrated power, democratizing corporate decision-making, implementing mandatory reporting to enforce transparency, and breaking up firms when necessary. With citizens activated, historical injustices addressed, mission-driven innovation, and strong alliances, the food system that was built for scarcity can be repurposed to nourish people and the planet. The main takeaway of this Blink to Food Fight by Stuart Gillespie is that the food system’s harms are not inevitable – they’re the result of power, incentives, and business decisions that can be changed.
Final summary
By recognizing how malnutrition, diet-related disease, and environmental damage reinforce each other, we can focus on high-impact levers: strong regulation and procurement, clear labeling and marketing rules, smart taxes, and city policies that reshape everyday food environments. Pair those with citizen action, equity-centered agendas, real transparency, mission-driven innovation, and coalitions that align public finance with public health. Do that, and nourishing people and the planet becomes practical, affordable, and within reach. Okay, that’s it for this Blink.
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About the Author
Stuart Gillespie, PhD in Human Nutrition, has over 40 years of experience in food systems, nutrition, and policy, leading initiatives like the Transform Nutrition consortium and the Agriculture for Nutrition and Health program. He has also published Nourishing Millions: Stories of Change in Nutrition and The Double Burden of Malnutrition in Asia: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions.