When you examine a packet of M&Ms, one of the best-selling sweets in the US, you'll see familiar ingredients like sugar, skimmed milk powder, and cocoa butter. However, numerous items are less known: gum arabic, starch gum, palm wax, soya lecithin, and curcumin.
You'll find 34 components in M&Ms, with no fewer than thirty countries involved in supplying them. Each has its own production network that transforms base substances into usable parts – beans into chocolate paste, cane into sugar, oil into artificial coloring.
These ingredients then journey globally to a central processing facility where they are combined and converted into tiny multicolored candy-coated chocolates.
It is now better understood that food systems are a major driver of the environmental emergency. Scientists can examine deforestation for agriculture or methane emissions from livestock. Yet the ecological footprint of highly manufactured products – such as these candies – is more ambiguous and is just beginning to come into focus. A key factor they have been challenging to assess is the very nature of ultra-processed foods: these factory-produced foods include a vast array of ingredients and procedures to assemble them, making it extremely difficult to monitor.
But it doesn't mean it's not important. Since UPFs take over American supermarkets and eating habits – they now comprise 70% of products purchased in supermarkets, and over 50% of calories consumed – experts say that assessing their environmental toll is essential to create a more climate-friendly food system.
The Information We Already Understand
While researchers are only starting to examine the ecological effects of UPFs, existing knowledge about them is worrisome.
"The more processed products become, the more harmful they are to public wellness and the environment," stated a senior researcher. The primary cause, he clarifies, is that the components are so energy intensive. Once assembled, the impact expands significantly.
Consider M&Ms. The initial phase in producing the sweets is farming for cocoa, sweetener, milk products and palm.
There is extensive evidence that farming for components like cocoa drives consistently rising rates of forest clearance worldwide. Since 1850, agricultural expansion has driven nearly ninety percent of worldwide forest loss, which has been responsible for thirty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Major companies have been criticized in the past for agricultural methods in their production network, and have since developed environmental initiatives, but these do not resolve that large-scale agricultural practices are, at their core, ecologically damaging.
Additionally, sweetener, dried dairy and palm oil – also major greenhouse gas emitters.
Furthermore are the factory-produced components like artificial colors – perhaps the signature of ultra-processing – which M&Ms contain thirteen varieties of. The blue candies are colored with E132 and E133; these colorants are primarily produced in food dye manufacturing hotspots Asia, through synthetic processes of petroleum derivatives with chemical compounds, accelerated by the metals copper or chromium.
Producing soya lecithin, an ingredient made from plant oil that's used to change the consistency of candy, requires steps like degumming in a heated vessel, chemically isolating fat molecules, decolorization using chemical agents and dehydrating under vacuum pressure. Similarly, dextrose, begins as corn that gets soaked in chemicals before being ground, separated and dried. From there, it's decomposed into simpler compounds using biological catalysts and acids, and then recrystallized.
Although highly manufactured candies are some of the worst offenders, other kinds of UPFs are burdensome on the environment as well. Take for instance a well-known chip, which has 39 components. Corn is the main ingredient, and for every acre grown, one thousand kilograms of CO2 is released to the atmosphere. Like other corporations, manufacturers have developed their own sustainability promises, but several such promises are underpinned by methods that are considered greenwashing.
Consequently, researchers have started to calculate the ecological cost of ultra-processed foods.
A study calculated that popular candies generate at least thirteen point two kilograms of greenhouse gases per kilo produced. Considering annual production of more than six hundred million kilograms in the US, this would mean that the products emit at least 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide – making up 0.1% of annual emissions in the US. But, this is just a calculation based on publicly available data; the true cost is likely significantly greater, according to specialists.
There's a "black box" when it comes to emissions tracking in the processed food industry, notes a professor who researches how companies respond to the climate crisis. "There is so much uncertainty as production networks get complicated."
What We Have Yet to Discover
Calculating precisely of the environmental toll of ultra-processed foods is extremely challenging, since, definitionally, UPFs consist of many ingredients and a significant number of non-transparent procedures. Components aren't just mixed together like one would do to make a stew at home. Instead, these elements are chemically modified, some parts stripped away, and flavors, colors or textures incorporated – and it's unknown what the impact of these methods are because numerous providers and parts are involved.
Another reason is that all UPFs are the creations of food companies that have little incentive to disclose their ecological impact and might not fully understand it to start with.
As an example, major brands don't cultivate key ingredients themselves, but instead rely on hundreds of farms that may not have accurate carbon accounting measures in place. This means that carbon output from large manufacturers may be underreported. Experts said that corporations "lack actual data, so they use emissions factors, which are guesses."
Specialists say that corporations submit data on straightforward aspects like transportation, which are simpler to measure, and often omit or complicate the farming-related carbon of their items. After all, reporting high emissions goes against the objectives of large food corporations, so the complex calculations needed to establish the carbon footprint of large-scale agriculture and complex manufacturing methods used to make UPF ingredients remain un-researched.
"The primary goal of ultra-processed foods is profit," said Fardet, pointing out that they're created to be appealing, convenient and enjoyable to eat.
"Most of the people in the food industry's value chain are not concerned with global warming from an ethical perspective, but they are interested in profit," explained a specialist. He explains that to shift those incentives, the cost of foods and ingredients would need to include their impact on our shared climate. But that would require government regulations and economic consequences based on the true environmental cost of UPFs.
Why It Matters
At just under $2, the cost of popular candies at the supermarket hardly reflects their true cost on the planet. But to tackle these problems with manufactured products, not only a few tweaks to the component selection are required.
"Reducing the sodium, or sweetener of just one product is just greenwashing," said the expert. "We need to change the entire system." To do that, he recommended eating more regionally produced, whole foods, which often take much less resources and transit to create, and therefore have a significantly reduced carbon footprint.
Unique products that cannot be sourced locally, like cocoa items, should {make up|constitute
