When you inspect a packet of M&Ms, one of the best-selling candies in the US, you'll notice familiar ingredients like sweetener, dried milk, and chocolate fat. However, numerous elements are less known: gum arabic, starch gum, carnauba wax, soy lecithin, and curcumin.
There are 34 components in M&Ms, with no fewer than thirty nations involved in providing them. Each has its own production network that converts base substances into ingredients – beans into chocolate paste, cane into sugar, petroleum into blue food dye.
These components then travel across the world to a main manufacturing plant where they are mixed and converted into small blue, red, yellow and green chocolate gems.
It's becoming more widely recognized that food systems are a significant contributor of the climate crisis. Scientists can examine land clearing for farming or greenhouse gases from animals. But the ecological footprint of highly manufactured products – such as M&Ms – is less clear and is just beginning to be understood. One reason they have been so difficult to evaluate is the very nature of ultra-processed foods: these factory-produced items include a huge number of ingredients and processes to put them together, making it extremely difficult to track.
But it doesn't mean it's unimportant. As UPFs take over American supermarkets and eating habits – they now account for seventy percent of food sold in grocery stores, and over 50% of dietary energy intake – specialists say that understanding their environmental toll is essential to build a greener food system.
What We Know
While scientists are just beginning to investigate the environmental impact of UPFs, existing knowledge about them is worrisome.
"The greater the processing foods are, the more deleterious they are to human health and the environment," stated Anthony Fardet. The main reason, he clarifies, is that the components are so energy intensive. When combined, the impact expands significantly.
Consider M&Ms. The initial phase in creating the candies is farming for cocoa, sweetener, milk products and palm oil.
There is well-documented that farming for ingredients like chocolate drives ever increasing rates of forest clearance across the globe. Since 1850, agricultural expansion has driven nearly ninety percent of global deforestation, which has been responsible for 30% of worldwide carbon output. Large corporations have been criticized in the past for agricultural methods in their supply chain, and have since created sustainability plans, but these do not resolve that large-scale agricultural practices are, at their core, ecologically damaging.
Additionally, sweetener, dried dairy and palm fat – likewise major carbon dioxide sources.
On top of that are the industrially made components like artificial colors – perhaps the signature of ultra-processing – which M&Ms contain 13 different types of. The blue candies are dyed with artificial blue dyes; these colorants are mostly made in food dye manufacturing hotspots Asia, via a chemical reaction of aromatic hydrocarbons with chemical compounds, catalyzed by the elements copper or chromium.
Creating soy lecithin, an ingredient made from plant oil that's used to alter the texture of candy, requires steps like oil refining in a hot reactor, extracting fat molecules, decolorization using hydrogen peroxide and dehydrating under reduced air pressure. And, a sweetener, begins as corn that gets steeped in acid before being milled, divided and dried. Afterward, it's decomposed into simpler compounds using biological catalysts and acids, and then reformed into crystals.
Although ultra-processed chocolate products are among the most damaging, other kinds of UPFs are taxing on the environment as well. Consider another popular snack, which has thirty-nine components. Corn is the main ingredient, and for every hectare grown, one thousand kilograms of CO2 is emitted to the atmosphere. Like major brands, producers have developed their own sustainability promises, but several such promises are underpinned by methods that are considered superficial eco-claims.
Consequently, some experts have begun estimating the ecological cost of UPFs.
One analysis estimated that popular candies generate at least thirteen point two kilograms of carbon equivalents per kilogram produced. With yearly output of over 664 million kg in the United States, this would mean that the candies emit at least three point eight million tonnes of CO2 – accounting for zero point one percent of annual emissions in the US. But, this is just a calculation based on accessible information; the actual impact is probably significantly greater, according to specialists.
There's a "black box" when it comes to carbon accounting in the processed food industry, says a professor who studies how corporations engage with the environmental challenge. "There exists so much uncertainty as supply chains get complicated."
The Gaps We Don't Know
Getting an exact measure of the ecological impact of ultra-processed foods is nearly impossible, given that, by definition, these products consist of numerous components and a high volume of opaque processes. Ingredients aren't just combined like one would do to make a stew at home. Instead, these elements are altered synthetically, certain portions stripped away, and flavors, dyes or textures added in – and it's unknown what the cost of these methods are because numerous providers and components are included.
Another reason is that all UPFs are the products of manufacturing corporations that have little incentive to reveal their environmental footprint and may not comprehend it to start with.
As an example, large corporations don't farm primary components themselves, but instead rely on hundreds of farms that may not have precise emissions tracking in place. This means that emissions from large manufacturers may be underreported. Analysts noted that corporations "lack real measurements, so they use emissions factors, which are approximations."
Researchers say that corporations submit data on straightforward aspects like shipping, which are easier to calculate, and frequently exclude or convolute the farming-related carbon of their items. Ultimately, reporting high emissions contradicts the objectives of large food corporations, so the complex calculations needed to determine the carbon footprint of large-scale agriculture and complex manufacturing methods used to make UPF ingredients remain un-researched.
"The primary goal of ultra-processed foods is money," stated Fardet, pointing out that they're created to be attractive, easy and pleasurable to eat.
"Most of the people in the manufacturing sector's value chain are not concerned with climate change from an ideological point of view, but they do care about money," said a specialist. He clarifies that to change these motivations, the value of products and components would need to incorporate their effect on our global environment. But that would require official policies and financial penalties based on the true environmental cost of ultra-processed foods.
The Reasons It Matters
At just under $2, the cost of popular candies at the supermarket barely represents their true cost on the planet. But to address these problems with ultra-processed foods, not only a minor adjustments to the ingredient list are needed.
"Lowering the salt, or sweetener of just one product is just superficial eco-marketing," stated Fardet. "We need to change the whole picture." To do that, he suggested eating more regionally produced, whole foods, which frequently take far fewer resources and transit to create, and therefore have a significantly reduced environmental impact.
Specialty goods that can't be sourced locally, like chocolate, should {make up|constitute
