🔗 Share this article

When you inspect a package of M&M's, among the best-selling sweets in the US, you'll see familiar ingredients like sugar, skimmed milk powder, and cocoa butter. However, many more elements are less known: acacia gum, dextrin, palm wax, soya lecithin, and curcumin.

You'll find thirty-four ingredients in the candy, with at least thirty countries participating in supplying them. Each has its own supply chain that transforms raw materials into usable parts – beans into chocolate paste, cane into sugar, petroleum into blue food dye.

These ingredients then travel across the world to a main manufacturing plant where they are mixed and transformed into small multicolored chocolate gems.

It is now better understood that agricultural networks are a major driver of the environmental emergency. Researchers can examine land clearing for farming or methane emissions from livestock. Yet the ecological footprint of highly manufactured products – like these candies – is more ambiguous and is only now to be understood. One reason they have been so difficult to evaluate is the very nature of UPFs: these factory-produced foods include a vast array of ingredients and processes to put them together, making it extremely difficult to monitor.

However, this doesn't imply it's not important. Since UPFs dominate US grocery store shelves and diets – they now comprise 70% of food sold in supermarkets, and over 50% of dietary energy intake – experts say that assessing their ecological cost is critical to build a greener agricultural system.

The Information We Know

While researchers are only starting to examine the environmental impact of ultra-processed foods, existing knowledge about them is concerning.

"The more processed foods are, the more deleterious they are to human health and the planet," stated Anthony Fardet. The main reason, he explains, is that the ingredients are so energy intensive. When combined, the impact expands significantly.

Consider the popular candy. The first step in creating the candies is farming for chocolate beans, sweetener, milk products and palm oil.

There is well-documented that agriculture for ingredients like chocolate drives ever increasing rates of forest clearance across the globe. Since 1850, farmland growth has driven almost 90% of global deforestation, which has been responsible for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Large corporations have been criticized in the past for agricultural methods in their supply chain, and have since developed environmental initiatives, but these do not resolve that industrial farming are, fundamentally, unsustainable.

Additionally, sweetener, dried dairy and palm fat – also major greenhouse gas emitters.

Furthermore are the factory-produced components like food dyes – perhaps the signature of intensive manufacturing – which M&Ms contain thirteen varieties of. The blue candies are dyed with E132 and E133; these colorants are mostly made in industrial color production centers India and China, via a chemical reaction of petroleum derivatives with diazonium salt, catalyzed by the metals copper or chromium.

Producing soy lecithin, an additive made from plant oil that's used to change the consistency of candy, requires steps like oil refining in a hot reactor, chemically isolating phospholipids, decolorization using hydrogen peroxide and dehydrating under reduced air pressure. And, dextrose, begins as maize that gets steeped in acid before being milled, divided and dried. From there, it's broken down into simpler compounds using enzymes and acids, and then recrystallized.

While highly manufactured candies are some of the worst offenders, other kinds of ultra-processed foods are taxing on the planet as well. Take for instance another popular snack, which has 39 ingredients. Corn is the main ingredient, and for every acre grown, one thousand kilograms of carbon dioxide is released to the air. Similar to major brands, manufacturers have developed their own sustainability promises, but several such promises are underpinned by practices that are considered superficial eco-claims.

As a result, some experts have started to calculate the environmental toll of UPFs.

One analysis estimated that well-known sweets generate at least thirteen point two kilograms of greenhouse gases per kilogram produced. With annual production of more than six hundred million kilograms in the US, this would mean that the products emit at least three point eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide – accounting for zero point one percent of annual emissions in the US. However, this is just a calculation based on publicly available data; the actual impact is likely much higher, according to specialists.

There's a "black box" when it comes to emissions tracking in the processed food industry, notes a professor who studies how companies respond to the climate crisis. "There exists so much ambiguity as production networks get complex."

The Gaps We Have Yet to Discover

Calculating precisely of the ecological impact of ultra-processed foods is extremely challenging, given that, by definition, UPFs consist of numerous components and a high volume of non-transparent procedures. Components aren't just mixed together like one would do to make a stew at home. Rather, these elements are chemically modified, some parts stripped away, and tastes, dyes or consistencies incorporated – and it's unclear what the cost of these processes are because numerous providers and parts are included.

A further factor is that all UPFs are the products of manufacturing corporations that have little incentive to disclose their environmental footprint and might not comprehend it to begin with.

As an example, large corporations do not cultivate key ingredients themselves, but instead rely on hundreds of farms that don't always have accurate carbon accounting measures in place. This means that carbon output from big food corporations may be underestimated. Analysts noted that corporations "lack actual data, so they use estimated values, which are guesses."

Specialists say that corporations submit data on straightforward aspects like transportation, which are easier to calculate, and frequently exclude or convolute the farming-related carbon of their product. Ultimately, reporting high emissions goes against the interests of major manufacturers, so the complex calculations needed to determine the environmental impact of industrial farming and multi-step industrial chemical processes used to make processed food components remain understudied.

"The primary goal of ultra-processed foods is profit," said the researcher, noting that they're created to be appealing, easy and enjoyable to eat.

"The majority of individuals in the food industry's production network are not concerned with global warming from an ethical perspective, but they do care about money," explained a specialist. He clarifies that to change these motivations, the value of foods and ingredients would need to incorporate their impact 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 cost of M&Ms at the supermarket barely represents their real impact on the planet. But to tackle these issues with ultra-processed foods, more than just a minor adjustments to the component selection are needed.

"Lowering the sodium, or sugar of just one product is just greenwashing," said Fardet. "It is necessary to transform the entire system." To do that, he suggested consuming more locally sourced, whole foods, which frequently take much less resources and transportation to create, and therefore have a much smaller carbon footprint.

Unique products that can't be sourced locally, like cocoa items, should {make up|constitute