When you inspect a packet of M&M's, among the best-selling candies in the US, you'll see familiar components like sugar, skimmed milk powder, and chocolate fat. However, numerous items are less known: gum arabic, dextrin, palm wax, soy lecithin, and curcumin.
You'll find 34 ingredients in M&Ms, and no fewer than thirty countries participating in supplying them. Every one has its distinct production network that transforms raw materials into usable parts – cocoa into cocoa liquor, plants into sweetener, oil into artificial coloring.
These components then travel across the world to a central processing facility where they are mixed and converted into small blue, red, yellow and green candy-coated chocolates.
It's becoming better understood that food systems are a major driver of the environmental emergency. Scientists can examine deforestation for agriculture or greenhouse gases from animals. Yet the environmental impact of ultra-processed foods – such as these candies – is less clear and is just beginning to come into focus. A key factor they have been challenging to evaluate is the inherent complexity of ultra-processed foods: these industrially made items include a vast array of components and procedures to assemble them, making it extremely difficult to monitor.
However, this doesn't imply it's not important. As UPFs dominate US grocery store shelves and diets – they now comprise seventy percent of food sold in supermarkets, and over 50% of dietary energy intake – specialists say that assessing their ecological cost is critical to create a more climate-friendly agricultural system.
What We Know
Although researchers are only starting to examine the environmental impact of ultra-processed foods, existing knowledge about them is concerning.
"The more processed products become, the more harmful they are to public wellness and the planet," stated Anthony Fardet. The main reason, he clarifies, is that the ingredients are so resource demanding. When combined, the toll balloons.
Take the popular candy. The first step in creating the sweets is cultivating for cocoa, sweetener, dairy and palm.
It has been extensive evidence that agriculture for components like chocolate drives consistently rising rates of forest clearance worldwide. Since 1850, farmland growth has driven nearly ninety percent of global deforestation, which has been responsible for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Large corporations have been called out in the past for agricultural methods in their production network, and have since created environmental initiatives, but these fail to address that large-scale agricultural practices are, at their core, unsustainable.
Additionally, sweetener, dried dairy and palm oil – likewise significant carbon dioxide sources.
On top of that are the industrially made components like artificial colors – perhaps the signature of intensive manufacturing – which these candies contain 13 different types of. The blue candies are colored with E132 and E133; these dyes are primarily produced in industrial color production centers Asia, through synthetic processes of aromatic hydrocarbons with diazonium salt, catalyzed by the elements copper or chromium.
Creating soy lecithin, an ingredient made from soybean oil that's used to alter the texture of chocolate, requires procedures like oil refining in a heated vessel, chemically isolating fat molecules, decolorization using hydrogen peroxide and drying under reduced air pressure. And, dextrose, begins as corn that gets steeped in acid before being ground, separated and dehydrated. Afterward, it's decomposed into simpler compounds using enzymes and chemicals, and then recrystallized.
While highly manufactured candies are some of the worst offenders, different types of ultra-processed foods are burdensome on the environment as well. Consider a well-known chip, which has 39 components. Maize is the primary component, and for every hectare grown, one thousand kilograms of CO2 is released to the air. Similar to other corporations, manufacturers have created their own sustainability promises, but several such promises are underpinned by practices that are considered greenwashing.
As a result, some experts have begun estimating the ecological cost of UPFs.
One analysis calculated that well-known sweets generate at least thirteen point two kilograms of carbon equivalents per kilo produced. With annual production of more than six hundred million kilograms in the United States, this would mean that the candies emit at least 3.8 million tons of CO2 – accounting for zero point one percent of yearly carbon output in the US. However, this is only an estimate based on publicly available data; 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, says a professor who studies how companies engage with the environmental challenge. "There is so much ambiguity as supply chains get complex."
What We Have Yet to Discover
Getting an exact measure of the ecological impact of UPFs is extremely challenging, given that, by definition, these products consist of many ingredients and a high volume of opaque processes. Ingredients aren't just mixed together like one would do to make a stew at home. Rather, these elements are chemically modified, certain portions removed, and flavors, dyes or consistencies added in – and it's unclear what the impact of these methods are because so many suppliers and parts are included.
Another reason is that all UPFs are the creations of food companies that have little incentive to reveal their ecological impact and may not comprehend it to start with.
For instance, large corporations do not farm 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 large manufacturers may be underestimated. Analysts noted that corporations "lack actual data, so they use estimated values, which are approximations."
Researchers say that corporations submit data on simple things like transportation, which are simpler to measure, and often omit or convolute the agricultural emissions of their product. After all, disclosing significant carbon output goes against the objectives of major manufacturers, 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 un-researched.
"The primary goal of ultra-processed foods is profit," stated the researcher, noting that they're designed to be attractive, easy and pleasurable to eat.
"Most of the people in the manufacturing sector's value chain don't care about climate change from an ideological point of view, but they do care about money," explained a specialist. He explains that to shift those incentives, the value of products and components would need to incorporate their effect on our global environment. But that would require government regulations and economic consequences based on the true environmental cost of UPFs.
The Reasons It Is Important
For less than two dollars, the price of M&Ms at the supermarket barely represents their true cost on the environment. But to address these issues with manufactured products, not only a few tweaks to the ingredient list are needed.
"Reducing the salt, or sweetener of just one product is just superficial eco-marketing," said the expert. "We need to change the entire system." To do that, he suggested consuming more locally sourced, unprocessed items, which often take much less resources and transportation to create, and therefore have a much smaller carbon footprint.
Specialty goods that can't be sourced locally, like chocolate, should {make up|constitute
