The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Working for the People at the Top

Dr Stuart Gillespie on ultra-processed food and corporate power

You can feel the tension in the UK food conversation almost everywhere you look. Prices keep rising, budgets keep tightening, and the quick options keep multiplying, even as we are told we have more choice than ever. The shelves are full, the supermarkets are lit up and stocked, and the system looks stable from the outside. I’ve come to realise that full shelves can hide a lot of problems.

If more and more of the food we can afford is also making us less healthy, costing the NHS billions and leaving us dependent on fragile supply chains, then perhaps our idea of food security starts to look more like a story we tell ourselves.

For this piece, I spoke with Dr Stuart Gillespie, a public health nutrition expert and non-resident senior fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. He is also the author of Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet. I wanted Stuart to be part of this series because he looks beyond the usual arguments. He isn’t interested in blaming individuals or pretending the market will fix itself.

Where power sits in the food system

When we talk about UK food security, we often start with supply shocks, trade or farming policy. But on the ground, it is also about what gets rewarded, what gets squeezed and who gets to shape what ends up being normal.

I think about a monthly farmers’ market we used to do on Elvetham Heath, opposite a big supermarket. One day a customer came to our stall and asked, plainly, why they would buy our sausages when they could buy “the same thing” for much less inside.

I never thought they were being rude. They were asking a perfectly sensible question in the food system we’ve created.

That is exactly the question Stuart keeps coming back to. What is the food system designed to deliver, and for whom?

“The global food system is still primarily organized and driven to maximise profit for shareholders. It’s a system that’s now causing more damage than it is producing benefit or value. The harms run across the board: rising obesity and type 2 diabetes, diet-related cancers and cardiovascular disease, and ecosystem degradation through deforestation, biodiversity loss and water & plastic pollution. Around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions are driven by how we produce, process, and consume food. Yet for the firms at the top, the system is working exactly as intended. It’s not a ‘broken’ food system for them, it’s ruthlessly efficient, efficient at turning cheap commodities into ultra-processed products and then into shareholder returns. And the problem is that the most profitable products are ultra-processed and the least healthy for both people and planet.”

On a farm, you learn quickly that what you measure is what you get. If the system measures success mainly in profit and volume, sometimes framed as yield, that’s exactly what the system will keep producing, even when the wider costs are ignored.

UPFs, affordability, and the structure of choice

It wasn’t the first time I’d been asked that question. In fact, it was one of the most common conversations we’d have at farmers’ markets. On the surface, the sausages looked similar. But what people were really comparing were two very different food systems.

Our pigs were raised outdoors, free to root, forage and behave naturally. We used simple, natural ingredients, and when I added honey or wild garlic, it came from nearby. The supermarket sausages came from a completely different system, one designed to produce food as cheaply and efficiently as possible.

And still, the supermarket version looked like the sensible choice, because the system has trained people to see decent food as expensive rather than valuable.

Stuart argues that ultra-processed foods are not just popular by accident. They are profitable by design, and that design is backed by concentrated corporate power.

“There’s an inner circle of a handful of huge transnational corporations (Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Kraft Heinz et al) behind which sit the asset management giants: BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, who own big chunks of these corporations and drive them to maximise profit at all costs. This is where the power lies, economic, financial, market, but also political power, as they are big enough to stop governments from regulating them via an array of tactics which I explore in my book.”

That was the hardest part of selling direct. We weren’t just asking people to pay more for a packet of sausages. We were asking them to value a completely different way of producing food, in a market that rarely rewards it.

What we miss when we picture food security

When people hear about UK food security, many picture a national question of whether we can keep enough food moving through the system to fill stomachs. Stuart is not arguing with that picture, he’s saying it is too small.

“Many would picture calorie sufficiency at a national level, having enough staple foods to fill stomachs. We need to communicate the value of dietary diversity, for health and for resilience. The need for local food economies rooted in culture, relationships and shorter diversified supply chains involving a range of actors. Food grown under conditions that protect biodiversity, soil and land health. We cannot have food security without radically reducing food inequity so that the UK population, all of us, have reliable access to affordable, healthy diets.”

Full shelves can exist alongside fragile diets and fragile household budgets. Security is not just about what is available. It is about who can reliably afford a healthy diet, and whether the way we produce food protects the conditions that make future harvests possible.

The media stories that keep us stuck

We spend a lot of time telling people to make better food choices, and not nearly enough time asking why the cheapest, most accessible choices are so often the least healthy. It’s a convenient way of framing the debate because responsibility stays with the shopper, not the food system shaping their decisions. I asked Stuart about media stories and myths that make the conversation harder than it needs to be:

“There are several and they’re linked. The myth that overweight/obesity represents individual failure, rather than being a structural/systemic problem in which, over decades, large transnationals have been permitted to flood our high streets with very cheap UPFs and junk food which are least healthy for people and planet. The erroneous notion that governments should leave markets alone, as if they’re free markets which can self-regulate (when they’re absolutely not free markets and self-regulation always fails). The mistake in thinking that regulating Big Food will dampen down economic growth, when in fact Big Food, over time, is a net drain on our economy via all the health and environmental consequences it generates. The assumption that government is not being co-opted by Big Food, when in fact they are being subjected to a barrage of counter-attacks when any sign of regulation emerges.

That’s the difference between treating the symptoms and tackling the cause. If the food system is the problem, asking individuals to try harder will only ever get us so far. Real change means creating a food environment where the healthier option is also the easier, more affordable one.

So what happens when governments finally try to step in?

According to Stuart, this is where the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. The ultra-processed food industry has a corporate playbook of tricks and tactics it uses to stop governments getting in their way. These are the ‘Deadly Ds’ he describes in his book:

• Dispute: undermine or sow doubt about the scientific evidence linking products to harm.

• Distort: shift the narrative to personal responsibility and ‘lifestyle choice’ to distract from what is being pumped into the food environment. Heavy lobbying sits here too.

• Distract: push high-profile corporate social responsibility initiatives with the left hand while the right hand keeps selling harmful products at scale.

• Disguise: speak through trade associations and front groups (there are 268 such bodies in the food world!) so the industry’s fingerprints are hidden.

• Derail/delay: use corporate litigation to actually governments. There was a big recent exposé on this by an international media coalition (highlighting 239 lawsuits in six countries over the last 15 years.) The corporations rarely win, but the main purpose is to buy time and delay any regulation.

• Dodge: shift profits and tax liabilities around the globe to minimise what they pay back into the public purse.

The point isn’t to get cynical, it’s to get better at reading what’s happening. If you can spot the pattern, you also start to notice what’s missing from the conversation, and whose interests are being protected when the debate gets steered off course.

One move government could make now

Whenever I ask people what the government should do, they usually want one simple answer. Stuart doesn’t think food systems change that way, but when I asked him what one step a UK government could take immediately, he came back to protecting children from predatory marketing.

“We have to take a whole of system view point. I am a little resistant to singling out one solution when we will get much bigger benefits by combining several. There are no magic bullets and change will take time. In the book, I describe four key policy levers – institutions, incentives, information, interests – that governments can deploy in regulating for people and planet. But if there was one thing that a government could do tomorrow it would be to clamp down across the board on aggressive predatory marketing of unhealthy products to young children. In all this, we need to remember we need to protect public and planetary health for those least able to do so themselves, and especially when they will be around the longest!”

Listening to Stuart, I kept coming back to one thought. We spend a lot of time talking about food security, but not nearly enough time talking about the kind of food system we’re actually securing.

The supermarket shelves still look full, which makes this conversation easy to dismiss.

But food systems rarely unravel all at once. They weaken gradually, one decision, one harvest and one policy at a time, until one day the cracks are impossible to ignore.

By then, we’re no longer talking about prevention. We’re talking about what we’ve already lost.

---

Links

Stuart’s Book - Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet

---

My aim with this series is to make food security feel legible and human, not just a headline, so thank you for being here. If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you especially, you’re the reason I can keep building it.

If you’re reading on a free subscription and you’d like to support the work, the simplest way is to upgrade to paid. It helps me keep doing the reading, the interviews, and the writing that sits behind these posts. And if paid isn’t possible right now, sharing this essay or replying with your own food security question still helps more than you might think. I read every response.

---

If just 5% of my readers tipped £1/$1 this essay would pay for itself in terms of time spent working on it.