When you inspect a packet of M&Ms, one of the most popular candies in the United States, you'll notice familiar ingredients like sugar, skimmed milk powder, and cocoa butter. However, many more items are unfamiliar: acacia gum, starch gum, carnauba wax, soy lecithin, and E100.
You'll find thirty-four components in the candy, with no fewer than thirty countries participating in providing them. Every one has its distinct supply chain that transforms base substances into ingredients – beans into chocolate paste, plants into sweetener, oil into artificial coloring.
These components then journey globally to a central processing facility where they are combined and converted into small blue, red, yellow and green candy-coated chocolates.
It's becoming better understood that agricultural networks are a significant contributor of the climate crisis. Scientists can examine deforestation for agriculture or methane emissions from livestock. Yet 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 challenging to evaluate is the very nature of UPFs: these industrially made items include a huge number of components and procedures to put them together, making it nearly impossible to monitor.
But it doesn't mean it's unimportant. As ultra-processed foods dominate American supermarkets and eating habits – they now account for 70% of food sold in supermarkets, and more than half of dietary energy intake – specialists say that assessing their environmental toll is critical to build a greener agricultural system.
What We Know
Although scientists are only starting to investigate the ecological effects of UPFs, what's already known about them is worrisome.
"The greater the processing products become, the more deleterious they are to public wellness and the planet," stated a senior researcher. The primary cause, he explains, is that the ingredients are so resource demanding. Once assembled, the toll expands significantly.
Take M&Ms. The initial phase in producing the candies is farming for chocolate beans, sugar, dairy and palm oil.
It has been extensive evidence that agriculture for components like chocolate drives consistently rising rates of deforestation worldwide. For over a century, agricultural expansion has driven almost 90% of worldwide forest loss, which has been responsible for 30% of worldwide carbon output. Large corporations have been called out in the past for farming practices in their production network, and have since created environmental initiatives, but these do not resolve that industrial farming are, fundamentally, ecologically damaging.
Then there's, sugar, dried dairy and palm oil – also significant greenhouse gas emitters.
On top of that are the industrially made ingredients like food dyes – possibly the hallmark of ultra-processing – which these candies contain thirteen varieties of. The blue candies are dyed with E132 and E133; these dyes are primarily produced in food dye manufacturing hotspots India and China, via a chemical reaction of aromatic hydrocarbons with chemical compounds, accelerated by the elements copper or chromium.
Creating soy lecithin, an ingredient made from plant oil that's used to alter the texture of chocolate, requires steps like oil refining in a heated vessel, extracting phospholipids, bleaching using chemical agents and drying under vacuum pressure. Similarly, a sweetener, starts off as maize that gets steeped in acid before being milled, separated and dehydrated. Afterward, it's broken down into smaller molecules using enzymes and acids, and then reformed into crystals.
Although highly manufactured candies are some of the worst offenders, other kinds of UPFs are taxing on the environment as well. Consider another popular snack, which has 39 ingredients. Corn is the main ingredient, and for every hectare grown, one thousand kilograms of CO2 is emitted to the air. Like other corporations, producers have developed their own environmental pledges, but many of these commitments are underpinned by practices that are considered greenwashing.
As a result, researchers have started to calculate the ecological cost of UPFs.
A study calculated that well-known sweets generate at least 13.2kg of carbon equivalents per kilogram produced. Considering yearly output of more than six hundred million kilograms in the United States, this would mean that the products emit at least 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide – making up zero point one percent of annual emissions in the US. However, this is only an estimate based on accessible information; the actual impact is probably much higher, according to specialists.
There's a "unknown element" when it comes to carbon accounting in the manufactured food sector, says a professor who researches how companies engage with the environmental challenge. "There is so much uncertainty as supply chains get complex."
What 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 many ingredients and a significant number of opaque processes. Ingredients aren't just combined like one would do to make a stew at home. Rather, these ingredients are altered synthetically, some parts removed, and flavors, dyes or textures added in – and it's unknown what the cost of these processes are because numerous providers and components are involved.
A further factor is that all UPFs are the creations of food companies that have little incentive to disclose their environmental footprint and might not fully understand it to begin with.
For instance, large corporations don't cultivate key ingredients themselves, but instead rely on numerous growers that may not have accurate carbon accounting measures in place. This means that emissions from big food corporations may be underestimated. Experts said that corporations "lack actual data, so they use emissions factors, which are guesses."
Researchers say that corporations submit data on simple things like shipping, which are simpler to measure, and frequently exclude or complicate the farming-related carbon of their items. Ultimately, disclosing significant carbon output goes against the interests of large food corporations, so the complex calculations needed to establish the carbon footprint of industrial farming and complex manufacturing methods used to make processed food components remain understudied.
"The main point of ultra-processed foods is profit," said Fardet, noting that they're created to be attractive, easy and pleasurable to eat.
"The majority of individuals in the manufacturing sector's value chain don't care about global warming from an ideological point of view, but they do care about profit," said another expert. 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 economic consequences based on the true environmental cost of ultra-processed foods.
The Reasons It Matters
For less than two dollars, the cost of popular candies at the supermarket barely represents their real impact on the planet. But to tackle these problems with manufactured products, not only a minor adjustments to the component selection are needed.
"Lowering the salt, or sugar of just one product is just greenwashing," stated the expert. "We need to change the entire system." To do that, he recommended eating more locally sourced, unprocessed items, which often take far fewer resources and transportation to create, and therefore have a much smaller carbon footprint.
Specialty goods that cannot be sourced locally, like chocolate, should {make up|constitute
