If you inspect a packet of M&M's, among the best-selling candies in the United States, you'll notice recognizable ingredients like sugar, dried milk, and chocolate fat. But, numerous elements are unfamiliar: acacia gum, dextrin, palm wax, soy lecithin, and curcumin.
You'll find 34 ingredients in M&Ms, and no fewer than 30 countries involved in supplying them. Every one has its own supply chain that converts raw materials into usable parts – cocoa into cocoa liquor, cane into sugar, petroleum into blue food dye.
These ingredients 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 food systems are a significant contributor of the environmental emergency. Scientists can study deforestation for agriculture or greenhouse gases from animals. But the ecological footprint of highly manufactured products – like M&Ms – is less clear and is just beginning to be understood. A key factor they have been so difficult to assess is the inherent complexity of ultra-processed foods: these industrially made foods include a vast array of components and procedures to put them together, making it extremely difficult to track.
But it doesn't mean it's unimportant. As ultra-processed foods take over US grocery store shelves and diets – they now account for seventy percent of products purchased in grocery stores, and over 50% of calories consumed – experts say that understanding their environmental toll is critical to create a greener agricultural system.
What We Already Understand
While researchers are just beginning to investigate the environmental impact of ultra-processed foods, what's already known about them is concerning.
"The more processed products become, the more harmful they are to human health and the planet," said a senior researcher. The primary cause, he clarifies, is that the ingredients are so energy intensive. When combined, the impact balloons.
Consider M&Ms. The initial phase in creating the candies is cultivating for chocolate beans, sugar, milk products and palm.
There is extensive evidence that farming for ingredients like cocoa drives consistently rising rates of forest clearance worldwide. For over a century, farmland growth has driven nearly ninety percent of global deforestation, which has been responsible for thirty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Large corporations have been called out in the past for farming practices in their production network, and have since developed environmental initiatives, but these do not resolve that large-scale agricultural practices are, at their core, unsustainable.
Then there's, sugar, dried dairy and palm fat – also significant greenhouse gas emitters.
On top of that are the industrially made ingredients like food dyes – possibly the hallmark of ultra-processing – which M&Ms contain thirteen varieties of. Blue M&Ms are colored with E132 and E133; these dyes are mostly made in food dye manufacturing hotspots Asia, through synthetic processes of aromatic hydrocarbons with chemical compounds, accelerated by the metals copper and chromium.
Producing soy lecithin, an additive made from soybean oil that's used to alter the texture of chocolate, requires procedures like oil refining in a hot reactor, extracting phospholipids, bleaching using chemical agents and dehydrating under reduced air pressure. Similarly, dextrose, starts off as maize that gets steeped in acid before being ground, separated and dried. Afterward, it's broken down into simpler compounds using enzymes and acids, and then reformed into crystals.
While highly manufactured candies are among the most damaging, other kinds of UPFs are burdensome on the planet as well. Consider a well-known chip, which has 39 components. Corn is the main ingredient, and for every acre grown, 1,000kg of CO2 is released to the air. Like major brands, producers have developed their own environmental pledges, but many of these promises are supported by practices that are considered superficial eco-claims.
Consequently, researchers have begun estimating the ecological cost of UPFs.
One analysis estimated that popular candies generate at least 13.2kg of greenhouse gases per kilogram produced. With yearly output of over 664 million kg in the US, this would mean that the candies emit at least 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide – accounting for zero point one percent of yearly carbon output in the US. However, this is just a calculation based on accessible information; the actual impact is likely much higher, experts say.
There's a "unknown element" when it comes to emissions tracking in the manufactured food sector, notes a professor who researches how corporations engage with the environmental challenge. "There exists so much uncertainty as production networks get complex."
The Gaps We Don't Know
Getting an exact measure of the environmental toll of ultra-processed foods is extremely challenging, given that, by definition, UPFs consist of many ingredients and a significant number of opaque processes. Components aren't just mixed together like one would do to make a stew at home. Instead, these elements are chemically modified, certain portions removed, and flavors, dyes or consistencies incorporated – and it's unknown what the cost of these processes are because so many suppliers and parts are included.
Another reason is that every ultra-processed food are the products of manufacturing corporations that have minimal motivation to reveal their environmental footprint and may not comprehend it to begin with.
For instance, large corporations don't farm primary components themselves, but instead rely on numerous growers that may not have accurate carbon accounting measures in place. This means that carbon output from big food corporations may be underestimated. Analysts said that corporations "lack real measurements, so they use emissions factors, which are guesses."
Researchers say that corporations provide reports on straightforward aspects like shipping, which are simpler to measure, and often omit or complicate the agricultural emissions of their items. After all, disclosing significant carbon output contradicts the objectives of major manufacturers, so the complex calculations needed to determine the environmental impact of large-scale agriculture and multi-step industrial chemical processes used to make UPF ingredients remain understudied.
"The primary goal of manufactured products is profit," said the researcher, pointing out that they're designed to be attractive, easy and enjoyable to eat.
"The majority of individuals in the food industry's production network are not concerned with climate change from an ideological point of view, but they do care about money," said a specialist. He explains that to shift those incentives, the cost of products and components would need to incorporate their impact on our shared climate. But that would require official policies and economic consequences based on the true environmental cost of ultra-processed foods.
Why It Is Important
For less than two dollars, the cost of M&Ms at the grocery store hardly reflects their real impact on the planet. But to address these issues with ultra-processed foods, more than just a few tweaks to the component selection are needed.
"Reducing the sodium, or sweetener of just one product is just greenwashing," said Fardet. "We need to transform the whole picture." To do that, he recommended eating more regionally produced, whole foods, which frequently take far fewer resources and transportation to produce, and therefore have a significantly reduced environmental impact.
Unique products that cannot be obtained nearby, like chocolate, should {make up|constitute
