🔗 Share this article

If you inspect a package of M&Ms, among the most popular sweets in the US, you'll notice familiar components like sugar, dried milk, and cocoa butter. However, numerous elements are unfamiliar: acacia gum, starch gum, palm wax, soya lecithin, and E100.

You'll find thirty-four ingredients in the candy, and no fewer than thirty countries participating in supplying them. Each has its distinct supply chain that converts raw materials into usable parts – cocoa into cocoa liquor, plants into sweetener, petroleum into blue food dye.

These components then journey globally to a main manufacturing plant where they are combined and transformed into small blue, red, yellow and green candy-coated chocolates.

It is now better understood that food systems are a significant contributor of the climate crisis. Researchers can study land clearing for farming or methane emissions from livestock. Yet the ecological footprint of highly manufactured products – such as these candies – is less clear and is only now to come into focus. A key factor they have been so difficult to evaluate is the very nature of UPFs: these industrially made foods include a huge number of components and processes to put them together, making it extremely difficult to monitor.

But it doesn't mean it's not important. As ultra-processed foods dominate US grocery store shelves and eating habits – they now comprise seventy percent of food sold in supermarkets, and over 50% of calories consumed – specialists say that assessing their ecological cost is critical to create a more climate-friendly agricultural system.

The Information We Already Understand

Although researchers are just beginning to examine the environmental impact of ultra-processed foods, what's already known about them is worrisome.

"The greater the processing foods are, the more deleterious they are to public wellness and the planet," stated a senior researcher. The primary cause, he clarifies, is that the components are so energy intensive. Once assembled, the impact expands significantly.

Take the popular candy. The first step in producing the candies is cultivating for chocolate beans, sugar, dairy and palm.

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 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, fundamentally, ecologically damaging.

Then there's, sugar, milk solids and palm oil – also major greenhouse gas emitters.

On top of that are the industrially made ingredients like artificial colors – possibly the hallmark of intensive manufacturing – which M&Ms contain thirteen varieties of. The blue candies are colored with E132 and E133; these colorants are mostly made in industrial color production centers Asia, through synthetic processes of petroleum derivatives with diazonium salt, accelerated by the elements copper and chromium.

Creating soya lecithin, an ingredient made from soybean oil that's used to alter the texture of candy, requires steps like oil refining in a heated vessel, chemically isolating phospholipids, decolorization using hydrogen peroxide and dehydrating under reduced air pressure. Similarly, a sweetener, starts off as maize that gets soaked in chemicals before being milled, divided and dried. From there, it's decomposed into simpler compounds using enzymes and chemicals, and then recrystallized.

While highly manufactured candies are among the most damaging, different types of ultra-processed foods are taxing on the environment as well. Consider another popular snack, which has thirty-nine ingredients. Corn is the main ingredient, and for every hectare grown, one thousand kilograms of CO2 is released to the air. Like major brands, producers have developed their own sustainability promises, but several such commitments are supported by practices that are considered superficial eco-claims.

As a result, some experts have begun estimating the environmental toll of UPFs.

A study calculated that well-known sweets generate at least 13.2kg of carbon equivalents per kilogram produced. With annual production of more than six hundred million kilograms in the United States, 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 only an estimate based on publicly available data; the true cost is likely significantly greater, according to specialists.

There's a "unknown element" when it comes to emissions tracking in the manufactured food sector, notes Patrick Callery who studies how corporations respond to the environmental challenge. "There is so much uncertainty as production networks get complicated."

What We Don't Know

Calculating precisely of the ecological impact of ultra-processed foods is extremely challenging, since, by definition, these products consist of many ingredients and a high volume of non-transparent procedures. Components aren't just mixed together like one would do to make a home-cooked meal at home. Rather, these ingredients are chemically modified, some parts stripped away, and tastes, dyes or textures added in – and it's unknown what the impact of these processes are because numerous providers and components are included.

Another reason is that all UPFs are the products of food companies that have little incentive to disclose their ecological impact and may not fully understand it to start with.

For instance, major brands 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 "don't have real measurements, so they use estimated values, which are guesses."

Specialists say that corporations provide reports on simple things like shipping, which are easier to calculate, and frequently exclude or complicate the farming-related carbon of their product. Ultimately, disclosing significant carbon output goes against the interests of major manufacturers, so the intricate assessments needed to establish the carbon footprint of industrial farming and multi-step industrial chemical processes used to make processed food components remain un-researched.

"The main point of manufactured products is profit," stated the researcher, pointing out that they're created to be attractive, convenient and pleasurable to eat.

"The majority of individuals in the food industry's value chain don't care about climate change from an ethical perspective, but they do care about money," said a specialist. He clarifies that to change these motivations, the cost of products and components would need to incorporate their effect on our global environment. But that would require official policies and economic consequences based on the true environmental cost of ultra-processed foods.

The Reasons It Is Important

For less than two dollars, the price of M&Ms at the supermarket hardly reflects their real impact on the environment. But to tackle these issues with ultra-processed foods, not only a minor adjustments to the component selection are needed.

"Lowering the salt, or sweetener of just one product is just superficial eco-marketing," stated Fardet. "We need to transform the whole picture." To do that, he recommended consuming more locally sourced, whole foods, which frequently take far fewer resources and transportation to produce, and therefore have a much smaller carbon footprint.

Unique products that cannot be sourced locally, like chocolate, should {make up|constitute