The industrial food system is often treated as a symbol of everything people distrust about modernity: too processed, too corporate, too artificial, and too detached from land and labor.
That critique obscures one of the greatest achievements in human history: modern food production has made food cheaper, safer, more abundant, and more varied than ever before.
In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, Adam Omary speaks with political scientist Jan Dutkiewicz about his new book Feed the People: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How We Can Make It Even Better. They discuss the great achievements of the industrial food system, the panic over processed foods, nostalgia for preindustrial agriculture, and how to make food healthier and more sustainable without giving up the system that feeds us.
Below is an edited and abridged transcript featuring some highlights from the interview.
I’m pleased to be joined today by Jan Dutkiewicz, an assistant professor of Political Science at the Pratt Institute and co-author of Feed the People: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How We Can Make It Even Better.
You open the book with this food paradox. What is the paradox?
The paradox is that the American food system has never been better, and it’s never been worse.
The American food system is incredibly abundant. It produces delicious and potentially very nutritious foods at scale within a relatively strong regulatory state. But there are problems. The way we produce food has large environmental externalities, it’s not always great for labor, and it’s not always optimally distributed.
The point of the book is to see how we can address those externalities while leaning into the things about our food system that work.
You got on our radar through your article in The Free Press, “In Defense of Processed Foods.”
Processed foods have been a subject of major controversy recently, particularly with our health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the broader Make America Healthy Again movement. But processed foods, you argue, aren’t the evil that they’re made out to be.
The fact that foods are processed doesn’t tell us much about them. It doesn’t tell us what’s been processed. It doesn’t tell us how it’s been processed. It tells us nothing about nutrition. So, the fact that food processing has become a synonym for unhealthfulness has created a lot of confusion.
One thing I really want people to take away from the book is that the category of “ultra-processed foods” is super new. It comes from a Brazilian public health schema that emerged in the late 2000s called Nova, which is just the Portuguese word for “new.” Basically, these public health researchers wanted to create an epidemiological tool to assess the average diet quality of a given population to correlate health outcomes with dietary patterns.
The way they decided to do that was to create four categories of food. Unprocessed foods are Nova 1. Basic household ingredients like salt, sugar, honey, and oil are Nova 2. Nova 3 are foods that you could create in your kitchen by combining ingredients from 1 and 2, such as pasta, tinned marinara sauce, and what have you. And then you get this category called Nova 4, or ultra-processed foods, which consists of anything that you can’t make in your kitchen, such as foods that use industrial processes to do things like extract or isolate parts of food. They then decided that ultra-processed foods were a primary driver of morbidity, which is true if you conflate all ultra-processed foods with junk food. But that category also includes things like plant-based burgers, baby formula, highly processed vegetables and fruits, and protein shakes. So, the category is really not fit for purpose. We should be focused on the nutrient quality of individual foods, not on how much they have been processed.
Historically, food processing has actually massively improved nutrition. The ability to isolate vitamins and put them into foods allowed us to address malnutrition problems that once affected huge populations. In the early 1900s, something like 70 percent of all children in New York City public schools suffered from rickets, which is a vitamin D deficiency. When the United States drafted for World War I, as many as 30 percent of all drafted men were rejected from service because of physical unfitness, in part due to malnutrition. Pellagra, which is caused by vitamin B3 deficiency, killed hundreds of thousands of people in the South. So early food science and processing—adding iodine to salt, enriching bread, pasteurizing and enriching milk—saved countless lives.
Today, we look back to the past with rose-tinted glasses and say things like “Well, I don’t necessarily want the packaged product. I want things that come from a real farm, from the soil.” In reality, when food production was scattered, small-scale, and poorly regulated, before modern science, transportation technology, and processing, nutrition outcomes for the average American were much worse.
Across the 20th century, there were all of these massive developments. You mentioned improvements in food safety. There have also been large improvements in raw agricultural output. What’s the rough timeline of these developments?
As we enter the 20th century, you’ve got the birth of the industrialization of food processing and food transport with the introduction of long-distance and refrigerated rail, and the centralization of storage in places like Chicago. Following that, you’ve got the rise of superior petrochemical-based fertilizers, superior pesticides and herbicides, and better irrigation technologies. Then, we had the birth of modern plant science. At first, this consists of very meticulous crossbreeding. The famous example is Norman Borlaug’s development of dwarf wheat, which was a more robust and higher-yielding variety of wheat designed to benefit from the industrial systems I just described: fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and high levels of irrigation. From there, we become more proficient at crossbreeding plants and eventually genetically modifying them to achieve particular ends.
Thanks to all this innovation, we’ve seen tremendous increases in yields per acre for staple crops. For the first time in human history, we produce more calories and protein than the average person needs, which is an incredible achievement. Many civilizations before ours have been brought down by a few bad harvests. Now, we have a food system that is relatively robust. There can be shocks, but the shocks don’t short-circuit the entire system.
The COVID pandemic was a good example of that.
Exactly. Other than in a few key industries—for instance, meat production, because meat processing is so labor-intensive—global food production was not seriously disrupted.
Of course, there are still areas in the world that face food insecurity. How much of the excess calories is concentrated, say, in wealthy countries like the United States, where we might see a lot of food waste?
Food waste is very tricky. The largest share of food waste is household food waste; people throwing out food that’s going bad or that they no longer want. Addressing household food waste at the policy level is very difficult. I will say, though, that if you’re thinking about food waste in the sense of poor use of calories and protein within the food system, the elephant in the room is meat production. The average animal that we eat will consume far more calories and protein over its lifetime than it actually yields.
There’s an interesting tension between two concepts you introduce in the book: the meat austerity view you just articulated, and what you call democratic hedonism, or pursuing food because it is pleasurable.
Many people might be willing to pay more and tolerate the waste because meat is tasty.
This is a fundamental question. So much food discourse shies away from the basic pleasures people get from eating. The Michael Pollans and Wendell Berrys of the world basically say that if you enjoy an industrial diet, you’re suffering from false food consciousness, and you would be far happier eating heirloom tomatoes from the farmer’s market. Well, that’s an empirical question, and I think lots of people genuinely prefer burgers and Doritos.
People who make arguments for veganism from an ethical standpoint will say, well, the pleasure you get from meat should not outweigh the suffering of animals. But even if you buy that argument—and I personally buy that argument—it hasn’t done a lot to minimize meat consumption.
We think that a central principle of making a better food system is providing people with food that they enjoy, and that reforms to the food system should maintain access to that pleasure even as we address negative externalities. We spend a chapter directly focusing on the meat question. All peer-reviewed research points to the fact that people in high-consuming countries like the United States need to eat less meat if we’re to have a more sustainable food system. How do you do that? Well, you can tell people to eat less meat, but I think that giving alternative proteins another chance or long-term investment in cellular agriculture could potentially achieve that goal while preserving the pleasure people get from food.
Throughout your book, I kept coming back to these interesting psychological issues at play with how we approach food.
There’s been a lot of discussion about evolutionary mismatch, particularly when it comes to the obesity crisis. We have an innate taste for high-fat, high-sugar foods that were rare in our ancestral environments, and now, when they’re hyper-plentiful, it’s easy to go overboard. You don’t usually see the same evolutionary logic applied to meat. It makes sense that ancestrally, even for hunter-gatherers, meat would be relatively rarer and account for, in most societies, only a minority of total calories.
I think that’s absolutely right. Part of our abundant food system is that there’s an abundance of things that we probably should eat less of. There are some well-tested policies, such as sugar taxes, that could marginally increase the cost of things we know are bad for us. We can try to steer diets to be healthier or more resource-efficient.
There’s another elephant in the room, which is that, in the United States, unhealthy foods are often subsidized indirectly through subsidies and SNAP benefits.
In the United States, unlike in Europe, farmers don’t get direct cash handouts. Subsidies are mostly indirect in the form of things like crop insurance. The government supports cheaper crop insurance, especially crops that can be produced at large scale, like wheat, corn, and soy. I think it would be a good idea to get rid of subsidies for any food that isn’t used for human consumption. If something gets burned for ethanol or ground down for animal feed, it shouldn’t be subsidized because it doesn’t advance nutrition or lead to more efficient land use. I also think that, to the extent that there are farm-level subsidies, they should apply to any crop for human consumption, including crops grown in smaller quantities.
We also need to think about subsidies that send signals to producers. When it comes to government spending, those come from SNAP and school lunches.
School lunches are a much-maligned part of the American foodscape, but in the wake of the Obama administration, school lunches have actually become relatively healthy. What gets reimbursed by school lunches is an incentive to producers, and under the new guidelines, a lot of that is actually fruits and veggies, which is great.
SNAP has been attacked because it doesn’t restrict what you can spend money on. Somewhere around 10 percent of SNAP money gets used for soda. The argument in favor of doing away with soda from SNAP is that the government is basically subsidizing the Coca-Cola Corporation and incentivizing poor nutritional outcomes. On the other side, food security activists will say that the point of SNAP is to address food insecurity by stretching household budgets, and if you remove soda from SNAP, people receiving SNAP will probably still buy soda, they’ll just use the scarce funds that SNAP is meant to protect. That’s an empirical question that should be tested.
How would you say the USDA is currently performing?
I am reticent to talk about what’s happening because it’s in such flux. Earlier, we would have said, well, surely they’re going to crack down on glyphosate. Instead, they’re supporting glyphosate production. It’s very mercurial.
I will say that a big part of public health related to the food system isn’t the content of what people eat, but the regulation of food production. A lot of that is being hacked away. Most recently, there was a really good piece in Vox by Kenny Torella about the push to simultaneously increase line speeds at chicken slaughterhouses and also reduce oversight for things like products tainted with salmonella.
When it comes to the new nutritional guidelines, I think it’s more show than substantive difference, other than the foregrounding of red meat and protein. If you look at the rest of those guidelines, they’re still saying Americans should eat more fruit, veggies, and whole grains.
Occasionally, you see a high-profile case of a contaminated ingredient in a large production chain. Maybe it’s contrarian, but when I see that kind of news, I feel pleasantly surprised. Every single day, we’re feeding millions of people across the whole country, and only rarely, maybe once a year or less, do we see high-profile incidents of something going wrong.
Absolutely. The fact that a tainted food scandal makes the news shows you how rare it is. And again, it’s because the industrial principles we have in our food system create food that is remarkably safe.
It shocks me sometimes the extent to which people critique the modern food system when you can go to the average supermarket and get a bounty of food for a relatively low price and not worry about whether or not it will make you sick.
It’s valid to critique the environmental impact of food production and to seek to reduce it. It’s valid to try to address remaining food insecurity. I just think that once we identify those problems, we have to think about ways to address them at scale. In much American food writing, even people who identify the problems correctly point towards these anachronistic, non-scalable solutions. So rather than saying, for instance, that addressing food insecurity just means more SNAP benefits or better school lunches, they’ll start talking about how every school lunch needs to contain regeneratively fed beef.
Similarly with individual diets, there’s this obsession with bodily purity and supplements. A few years ago, it was gluten. Now there’s the question of protein and processing. And these things shift with the tides. What I find unfortunate is that these neuroses tend to push people away from fantastic technological innovations. We see this in the complete reticence to eat genetically modified organisms, even though many genetically modified organisms are very beneficial technologies.
The rainbow papaya in Hawaii was genetically modified to protect it from the ringspot virus, which threatened the state’s entire crop of papayas. All the genetic modification does is make it possible to grow papaya in Hawaii. That papaya is delicious and healthy. Arctic apples from Washington state have been genetically modified to not oxidize as quickly, which reduces food waste and keeps them crunchy and looking good after they’ve been sliced up.
You also see this with critiques of plant-based meats like Impossible Burgers. People will panic about their ingredient lists, completely missing the fact that all this processing is pretty benign, and that peer-reviewed research shows that a soy-based Impossible Burger is actually heart-healthier than a red meat burger. So, a lot of this has to do with scaremongering, which takes advantage of both relatively low levels of scientific literacy and this idea that food should be pure and come from the land.
There’s also an argument that in the effort to make produce bigger and higher yielding, the nutrient density has gone down. How do we think about that tradeoff?
We should talk about that on a product-by-product basis. I don’t think we see that tradeoff in staple crops. The wheat we get, if we eat it as whole wheat, is super nutritious. We do see some minor variation in the quality of nutrients between small-scale and large-scale production of produce. Many people will also say they prefer the taste of the farmer’s market tomato to the hothouse tomato at Trader Joe’s.
I have nothing against people going to the farmer’s market, but we can’t pretend that these perceived losses of flavor or a tiny bit of nutrition outweigh the fact that it’s only large-scale industrial production that makes produce, meat, and staple crops widely available at any time of year.
