If you inspect a packet of M&Ms, among the best-selling candies in the United States, you'll notice recognizable components like sweetener, dried milk, and cocoa butter. However, many more elements are unfamiliar: acacia gum, starch gum, palm wax, soya lecithin, and curcumin.
You'll find 34 ingredients in M&Ms, and at least 30 nations participating in providing them. Every one has its own production network that converts raw materials into usable parts – cocoa into cocoa liquor, plants into sweetener, oil into artificial coloring.
These ingredients then journey across the world to a main manufacturing plant where they are combined and transformed into small blue, red, yellow and green chocolate gems.
It is now more widely recognized that agricultural networks are a major driver of the climate crisis. Researchers can examine deforestation for agriculture or methane emissions from livestock. But the ecological footprint of ultra-processed foods – like these candies – is less clear and is just beginning to come into focus. One reason they have been so difficult to evaluate is the very nature of UPFs: these industrially made foods include a huge number of components and procedures to assemble them, making it extremely difficult to track.
However, this doesn't imply it's not important. As UPFs dominate American supermarkets and eating habits – they now comprise 70% of products purchased in grocery stores, and over 50% of dietary energy intake – specialists say that understanding their ecological cost is critical to build a greener agricultural system.
What We Already Understand
While researchers are just beginning to investigate the environmental impact of ultra-processed foods, existing knowledge about them is concerning.
"The more processed products become, the more deleterious they are to human health and the environment," said Anthony Fardet. The main reason, he explains, is that the ingredients are so resource demanding. Once assembled, the toll balloons.
Consider the popular candy. The first step in creating the sweets is farming for chocolate beans, sugar, dairy and palm oil.
There is well-documented that agriculture for components like chocolate drives ever increasing rates of forest clearance across the globe. For over a century, agricultural expansion has driven nearly ninety percent of global deforestation, which has been responsible for thirty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Major companies have been called out in the past for farming practices in their supply chain, and have since created sustainability plans, but these fail to address that industrial farming are, at their core, ecologically damaging.
Then there's, sugar, milk solids and palm fat – also significant greenhouse gas emitters.
On top of that are the industrially made ingredients like food dyes – perhaps the signature of ultra-processing – which M&Ms contain thirteen varieties of. The blue candies are colored with E132 and E133; these dyes are primarily produced in food dye manufacturing hotspots India and China, through synthetic processes of aromatic hydrocarbons with diazonium salt, accelerated by the metals copper and chromium.
Creating soy lecithin, an ingredient made from soybean oil that's used to change the consistency of candy, requires procedures like degumming in a hot reactor, chemically isolating fat molecules, decolorization using hydrogen peroxide and dehydrating under reduced air pressure. And, dextrose, begins as maize that gets soaked in chemicals before being milled, divided and dried. Afterward, it's broken down into smaller molecules using enzymes and chemicals, and then recrystallized.
While ultra-processed chocolate products are some of the worst offenders, different types of ultra-processed foods are burdensome on the planet as well. Take for instance another popular snack, which has 39 components. Corn is the primary component, and for every acre grown, 1,000kg of carbon dioxide is released to the air. Similar to major brands, producers have developed their own sustainability promises, but several such promises are supported by practices that are considered greenwashing.
As a result, researchers 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 US, this would mean that the products emit at least three point eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide – making up zero point one percent of annual emissions in the US. However, this is just a calculation based on publicly available data; the true cost is probably significantly greater, experts say.
There's a "black box" when it comes to carbon accounting in the manufactured food sector, notes Patrick Callery who researches how companies engage with the environmental challenge. "There is so much uncertainty as supply chains get complex."
What We Don't Know
Calculating precisely of the environmental toll of UPFs is extremely challenging, since, definitionally, these products consist of numerous components and a high volume of non-transparent procedures. Ingredients aren't just combined like one would do to make a stew at home. Rather, these ingredients are chemically modified, certain portions stripped away, and flavors, colors or textures incorporated – and it's unclear what the cost of these methods are because so many suppliers and components are included.
Another reason is that every ultra-processed food are the products of food companies that have little incentive to reveal their environmental footprint and may not comprehend it to start with.
As an example, major brands don't cultivate primary components themselves, but instead depend on hundreds of farms that don't always have precise emissions tracking in place. This means that carbon output from large manufacturers may be underestimated. Experts said that corporations "don't have actual data, so they use estimated values, which are approximations."
Specialists say that corporations provide reports on simple things like transportation, which are easier to calculate, and often omit or convolute the farming-related carbon of their items. Ultimately, disclosing significant carbon output goes against the objectives of large food corporations, so the complex calculations needed to determine the carbon footprint of industrial farming and multi-step industrial chemical processes used to make UPF ingredients remain understudied.
"The primary goal of ultra-processed foods is money," stated the researcher, noting that they're created to be appealing, convenient and enjoyable to eat.
"Most of the people in the food industry's production network don't care about global warming from an ethical perspective, but they do care about money," said another expert. He clarifies that to change these motivations, the value of foods and ingredients would need to include their effect on our global environment. But that would require government regulations and financial penalties based on the actual ecological impact of UPFs.
Why It Is Important
At just under $2, the price of M&Ms at the grocery store barely represents their true cost on the environment. But to tackle these issues with manufactured products, not only a minor adjustments to the ingredient list are required.
"Lowering the sodium, or sweetener of just one product is just greenwashing," stated Fardet. "We need to transform the entire system." To do that, he recommended consuming more locally sourced, whole foods, which frequently take much less energy and transportation to create, and therefore have a much smaller environmental impact.
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