Food Fight summary

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.