Nutrition expert, Stuart Gillespie, tells The Mint the food system is killing more people than hunger ever did and radical change is needed to end the carnage.
In his book, Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet, Stuart Gillespie, lays out how a handful of giant corporations have turned what should be nourishment into a machine for profit, disease and ecological breakdown – and why tinkering at the edges will not cut it.
Speaking to The Mint, Gillespie starts with the scale of the damage. The Food Systems Economic Commission has estimated that the global food system now generates around US$15 trillion a year in health and environmental harms – about 12% of global GDP.
For the firms at the top, the system is working exactly as intended.
“This global food system is now causing more damage than it is producing benefit or value,” he explains. The harms run across the board: rising obesity and type 2 diabetes, diet-related cancers and cardiovascular disease, and ecosystem degradation through deforestation, biodiversity loss and water & plastic pollution. Around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions are driven by how we produce, process, and consume food.
Yet for the firms at the top, the system is working exactly as intended. The problem is not a “broken” food system, Gillespie argues, but a ruthlessly efficient one – efficient at turning cheap commodities into ultra-processed products and then into shareholder returns.
The most profitable products in this system are the least healthy for both people and planet. Ultra-processed foods, sugary drinks and junk snacks deliver high margins and repeat sales. So the core business model of Big Food is structurally at odds with public health and planetary survival.
And the real power often lies a step above the supermarket shelf. Behind the household names – Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Kraft Heinz and the rest – sit the asset management giants: BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and other financial behemoths that own big chunks of these companies and vote, relentlessly, for maximising returns. Proposals to improve the “healthiness” of corporate portfolios are regularly voted down at annual general meetings.
Nestlé’s sweet tooth – for other people’s children
If this sounds abstract, Gillespie’s stories make it brutally concrete. Nestlé, the world’s biggest food company, has long been a poster child for aggressive and harmful marketing. The infamous infant formula scandal – where breastmilk substitutes were pushed in conditions that made safe feeding almost impossible – has been linked to millions of infant deaths over the decades.
The children of the global South are still being lined up as future diabetics so that profit targets can be hit today.
You might think that is historical. It isn’t. Recent investigations show that Nestlé adds sugar to infant and children’s products marketed in Asia and Africa, while selling versions without added sugar in Europe and North America. The children of the global South are still being lined up as future diabetics so that profit targets can be hit today.
This is not a rogue exception. It is the logic of a system in which corporations must keep growing, by selling more into new geographies and inventing ever more “variants on the same theme”. That is how you end up with 172 types of Pringles and countless KitKat flavours, all engineered to manufacture desire and drive overconsumption.
How power protects itself
How do food giants get away with this? Gillespie has a simple framework for the corporate playbook: the “deadly Ds” – tactics to convert economic power into political power and keep governments out of their way.
- Dispute: undermine or sow doubt about the scientific evidence linking their products to harm.
- Distort: shift the narrative to personal responsibility – it’s all about individual “choice” and “lifestyle”, never about what is being pumped into the food environment. Heavy lobbying sits here too.
- Distract: push high-profile corporate social responsibility initiatives with the left hand while the right hand keeps selling harmful products at scale.
- Disguise: speak through trade associations and front groups – Gillespie notes 268 such bodies in the food world, with Nestlé paying into 171 of them – so the industry’s fingerprints are hidden.
- Dodge: shift profits and tax liabilities around the globe to minimise what they pay back into the public purse.
This playbook is heavily borrowed from Big Tobacco. It also operates at the geopolitical level. In 2004, the US government, acting in effect as the enforcement arm of its food corporations, successfully neutered a World Health Organization attempt to set international standards on healthy diets and physical activity, ensuring words like “sugar” and any critique of corporate practices were stripped out. Similar pressure has been used in trade forums to prevent countries like Thailand from tightening rules on sugary products.
Governments on the wrong side
If this all sounds like corporations versus the state, reality is more depressing: governments have, by and large, taken the side of industry. They have bought the story that Big Food is a growth engine not to be touched, regardless of the long-term economic costs.
Gillespie points to emerging work – such as the recently published “Net Gain or Net Drain?” report – showing that ultra-processed food is a drag on economic performance once you account properly for healthcare costs, lost productivity and premature deaths. One UK estimate put the cost of junk food addiction at £268 billion per year, two-thirds borne by individuals and households, the rest by the NHS and care services.
But that burden accrues slowly and invisibly. This “slow violence”: unfolds over years, not in one dramatic crash or oil spill. Politicians can ignore it, or pass the problem to the next government. The result is a captured policy environment in which public health measures are watered down, delayed or quietly abandoned.
The problem is not just the level of sugar, salt or fat; it’s the entire package, including additives, textures, and the way these products are designed to be over-consumed and to displace nutritious whole foods.
The UK’s own retreat on restrictions for junk food marketing and multi-buy promotions is a case in point: faced with corporate pushback and the mantra of “growth”, ministers have repeatedly rowed back.
Can you tax your way out of junk?
What about the sugary drinks tax, often touted as a rare public health success? Gillespie acknowledges its importance, especially where revenues are recycled into health-promoting programmes. But he is clear: we cannot “reformulate our way out” of an ultra-processed food system.
Companies respond to sugar taxes by tweaking recipes – often swapping sugar for artificial sweeteners – but the underlying ultra-processing remains. The problem is not just the level of sugar, salt or fat; it’s the entire package, including additives, textures, and the way these products are designed to be over-consumed and to displace nutritious whole foods.
Instead, he argues, we need a broader “fiscal seesaw”: taxing harmful products and upstream subsidies that feed into ultra-processed foods, while using the revenues to make minimally processed, nutritious food more affordable – especially for low-income families. Polluter-pays principles should apply to Big Food just as they are beginning to apply to carbon.
Is capitalism the real problem?
At this point, the conversation edges into uncomfortable territory: is the food system the issue, or capitalism itself? After all, the dynamics Gillespie describes – relentless growth, shareholder primacy, regulatory capture – are not unique to food.
In any case, “business as usual” is not an option.
He does not leap to a simple “overthrow capitalism” conclusion. Instead, he poses a harder question: can companies make profits in ways that are genuinely pro-people and pro-planet, within a re-engineered food system that rewards minimally processed, nourishing foods rather than junk? If not, then the economic paradigm itself is on trial.
In any case, “business as usual” is not an option. On current trajectories, we will miss climate goals and see diet-related disease continue to soar. New pharmaceutical fixes like weight-loss injections may help some individuals but do nothing to transform the toxic food environments that keep generating ill health.
Local food as resistance – and opportunity
Not everything in Food Fight is downstream doom. Gillespie sees real promise in the growth of local and territorial food systems, as is happening close to him in Sussex.
His book pays less attention to land and farming than to corporate power and consumption, but he acknowledges the potential of local food economies rooted in culture, relationships and shorter supply chains. Examples from Brazil show what is possible when state policy aligns: school feeding programmes that buy directly from local farmers, prioritise low-carbon organic produce, and pair meals with cooking classes in schools. That is health, climate and rural livelihoods all reinforced in one stroke.
By contrast, a Brazilian colleague looking at Britain was struck not only by the spread of snacks and junk food on our streets, but by the apparent loss of shared meals themselves. Ultra-processed products are not just reshaping our bodies and landscapes; they are eroding food culture and family life.
From plunder to purpose
Gillespie’s core argument is simple and radical: we need a different purpose for the food system. Instead of maximising returns from selling harmful products, the organising purpose should be to “nourish people and planet”. That implies a new set of rules and incentives, enforced by governments that see through the corporate playbook rather than parroting it.
Why is there no “Just Stop Junk” to match “Just Stop Oil”? Perhaps because the harms are slower and less visible; perhaps because food is intimate and political in a way that makes confrontation harder. But Gillespie senses a shift: growing public anger about unhealthy high streets, and a dawning realisation that what we are being sold as “choice” is in fact manufactured dependence.
Whether that anger can be organised into a movement strong enough to take on Big Food – and the financial giants behind it – is an open question. But as Food Fight makes clear, the status quo is not just unsustainable; it is lethal.
For the full interview see here.
