Should We Break Up Big Food?

Earlier this year, a scandal exploded in England when government authorities discovered—on a tip from Irish regulators—that frozen lasagna sold by the supermarket chain Tesco contained not beef, as labeled, but up to 100% horse meat. As one might imagine, an outcry ensued, first over the mislabeling and then over the fact that the horse meat had not been approved for human consumption. No one, however, has implied that the lasagna was anything other than delicious. That perhaps sums up our complicated relationship with processed food: The stuff that goes into it turns our stomachs even as it tickles our taste buds and lights up our brains. When we confront the trade-off between convenience and deliciousness on the one hand and our health on the other, we choose the former nearly every time. But are we truly at fault, or are we victims? Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his investigation of E. coli in the U.S. beef supply, would have us believe that we are subject to forces beyond our control. Moss argues that the three ingredients listed in the title of his book, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, together and in the right proportions, constitute a kind of culinary crack cocaine. The packaged-food industry worked for years to refine the formula and now uses it to compel us to stuff our faces—and fatten their wallets. Of course, this has a detrimental effect on our individual and collective health, but we return to the trough again and again because we can’t help ourselves. Moss compares the managers, scientists, and owners of the packaged-food industry not only implicitly to drug dealers but also explicitly to the Mafia. They are the puppet masters, we the puppets. Yet he finds nothing as nefarious as Upton Sinclair’s slaughterhouses or rendering plants, which produced lard that included the remains of dead workers. What he’s really writing about is a profit-driven system that readers of HBR are intimately familiar with. As an executive at Oscar Mayer put it: “The volume goes up. The revenue goes up. The costs come down. The margins go up. The returns turn from red ink to black ink. You get what we call a platform, which becomes what we call a growth engine, and it goes on from there for a long, long time.” Consumers—that is, you and I—are a piece of that system. But it’s much harder to tell the public that they are partly culpable for the state of their personal and national health (food, after all, is not crack) than it is to point the finger at Big Business, Wall Street, or the government. That fact mars the book, and it’s something Moss never addresses. And yet, with its case studies of companies like Coca-Cola and products like Lunchables, the book still adds up to a Chuck Close–like portrait of the industry, documenting the wide gap between the manufacture of food and consumers and tracing our shifting assumptions about industrial control and health and safety. While Moss’s book dwells on the current, dismal state of affairs, Melanie Warner’s Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal focuses on the origins of the problem. Driven by curiosity about a slice of American cheese that simply would not rot, Warner set out to discover where our modern diet came from. She begins the book with happy, naive food-science students, eager to make the world a better place with additives and flavors, and ends with a family that can preserve its health only by rejecting packaged foods altogether. Along the way, she covers the genesis of breakfast cereal, the “dough machinability” of mass-produced bread, the rise of soy, and one truly horrifying story about how an avocado face mask possibly became the basis of grocery store–prepared guacamole. “Chicken, it turns out, is never just chicken, something that’s doubly true of any specimen you might find at a fast-food restaurant.” Warner also recounts leaving a chicken nugget in a plastic bag in her office as part of her effort to discover the shelf life of processed food. After a few days, it basically liquefied. Why? Because it’s not so much chicken as an amalgam of other stuff that can’t maintain its integrity (interesting word, that). The question Warner hints at—Is it really chicken?—opens a broader line of questioning about our foodstuffs. Are hot dogs “meat”? Are Lunchables, well, food? Maybe. At least we can agree on a definition of peanut butter: According to the U.S. government, it must contain at least 85% peanuts. But even that represents a compromise reached in 1973 only after a dozen years of debate between Procter & Gamble—which got into the peanut butter game in the late 1950s with its acquisition of Jif and almost immediately wanted to add cheap oil and emulsifiers—and the rest of the then-independent industry, which objected and turned to the government to support a 90% standard. That story and those of the other manufacturers are exhaustively covered in Jon Krampner’s Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food. The book, scholarly yet charming and entertaining, ranges from the lighthearted (recipes and a discography of peanut butter songs) to the deadly serious (a salmonella outbreak and the use of peanut butter as a food supplement in the developing world). But the story of Jif, the category’s big winner, also neatly encapsulates the systemic problems at the heart of Moss’s and Warner’s books. With some manipulation to match consumer preferences (adding rapeseed and soybean oil, emulsifying it for smoothness, and sweetening it with a whole lot of sugar), a big and expensive marketing campaign (“Choosy Mothers Choose Jif”) to increase consumer awareness, and some scalable production and distribution muscle (we’re talking about P&G here, after all), Jif, and other processed food, will generate profits like any other product, be it tires or laundry detergent. The open questions we’re left with: Is this how we want to treat the stuff we put into our bodies? Who has the responsibility to do something—anything—about it? The answer to that first question appears to be a largely unqualified yes, but maybe the recent history of peanut butter offers an answer to the second. We’ve seen a resurgence of small, local, experimental makers. (Boston-based Teddie makes my favorite: Chunky All Natural Peanut Butter with Flaxseed.) Perhaps this is a sign of hope. When monoliths take over and aim to get us “addicted” to their product—whether we’re talking about processed food or something else—new makers can step in and serve up tastes that aren’t mass but could become so. Instead of shaking a fist at Big Food and bad health, as Moss and Warner do, entrepreneurs can change the game. Want to compete with Big Food? Make something great. In the meantime, we’re stuck trying to find a balance between what we like and what we need, supplied by an industry that is happy to give us both, in mass quantities (Now with more horse!), with no help from governments that seem functionally impotent when it comes to protecting us from threats to the commons. As for the rest of the world, companies that have made their fortunes in the United States are more than happy to export our lifestyle. It’s hard to see how things will change without a massive shift in consumer preferences.

Should We Break Up Big Food?

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