When you examine a package of M&M's, one of the most popular candies in the United States, you'll notice familiar components like sugar, skimmed milk powder, and cocoa butter. However, many more elements are unfamiliar: acacia gum, starch gum, palm wax, soy lecithin, and curcumin.
There are 34 components in the candy, with no fewer than 30 nations participating in supplying them. Every one has its own supply chain that transforms base substances into usable parts – cocoa into cocoa liquor, cane into sugar, oil into artificial coloring.
These ingredients then travel globally to a main manufacturing plant where they are mixed and transformed into small multicolored chocolate gems.
It's becoming better understood that agricultural networks are a major driver of the environmental emergency. Researchers can examine land clearing for farming or methane emissions from livestock. Yet the ecological footprint of highly manufactured products – like these candies – is more ambiguous and is just beginning to be understood. One reason they have been so difficult to evaluate is the very nature of UPFs: these industrially made foods include a huge number of ingredients and processes to assemble them, making it nearly impossible to monitor.
But it doesn't mean it's not important. As UPFs dominate American supermarkets and diets – 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 build a more climate-friendly agricultural system.
What We Already Understand
Although scientists are just beginning to investigate the environmental impact of UPFs, existing knowledge about them is concerning.
"The more processed foods are, the more deleterious they are to human health and the planet," stated a senior researcher. The main reason, he clarifies, is that the ingredients are so resource demanding. Once assembled, the impact expands significantly.
Consider the popular candy. The initial phase in creating the sweets is farming for chocolate beans, sweetener, dairy and palm oil.
There is well-documented that agriculture for ingredients like chocolate drives ever increasing rates of forest clearance worldwide. Since 1850, agricultural expansion has driven almost 90% of worldwide forest loss, which has been responsible for thirty percent of worldwide carbon output. Large corporations have been criticized in the past for agricultural methods in their production network, and have since developed sustainability plans, but these do not resolve that large-scale agricultural practices are, at their core, unsustainable.
Then there's, sweetener, dried dairy and palm fat – also significant carbon dioxide sources.
On top of that are the industrially made ingredients like food dyes – perhaps the signature of ultra-processing – which M&Ms contain 13 different types of. The blue candies are dyed with E132 and E133; these dyes are primarily produced in food dye manufacturing hotspots Asia, through synthetic processes of petroleum derivatives with chemical compounds, accelerated by the elements copper and chromium.
Creating soy lecithin, an ingredient made from soybean oil that's used to alter the texture of candy, requires procedures like degumming in a heated vessel, chemically isolating fat molecules, decolorization using chemical agents and dehydrating under vacuum pressure. Similarly, a sweetener, begins as corn that gets steeped in acid before being ground, divided and dried. From there, it's broken down into smaller molecules using enzymes and chemicals, and then reformed into crystals.
Although ultra-processed chocolate products are some of the worst offenders, other kinds of UPFs are taxing on the environment as well. Take for instance a well-known chip, which has 39 components. 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 created their own environmental pledges, but several such commitments are underpinned by practices that are considered greenwashing.
Consequently, researchers have begun estimating the ecological cost of ultra-processed foods.
A study calculated that well-known sweets generate at least thirteen point two kilograms of carbon equivalents per kilogram produced. With annual production of over 664 million kg in the US, this would mean that the candies emit at least three point eight million tonnes of CO2 – making up 0.1% of annual emissions in the country. However, this is only an estimate based on accessible information; the actual impact is probably significantly greater, experts say.
There's a "black box" when it comes to carbon accounting in the processed food industry, says Patrick Callery who researches how companies engage with the environmental challenge. "There is so much ambiguity as production networks get complex."
The Gaps We Have Yet to Discover
Getting an exact measure of the ecological impact of UPFs is nearly impossible, given that, definitionally, these products consist of numerous components and a high volume of opaque processes. Ingredients aren't just combined like one would do to make a home-cooked meal at home. Instead, these ingredients are altered synthetically, some parts removed, and flavors, colors or consistencies incorporated – and it's unclear what the cost of these processes are because numerous providers and parts are included.
Another reason is that every ultra-processed food are the products of food companies that have minimal motivation to reveal their environmental footprint and may not fully understand it to begin with.
For instance, large corporations do not cultivate key ingredients themselves, but instead rely on numerous growers that may not have accurate carbon accounting measures in place. This means that carbon output from large manufacturers may be underreported. Analysts noted that corporations "don't have real measurements, so they use emissions factors, which are guesses."
Specialists say that corporations provide reports on straightforward aspects like shipping, which are easier to calculate, and frequently exclude or complicate the agricultural emissions of their product. After all, reporting high emissions contradicts the objectives of large food corporations, so the complex calculations needed to determine the carbon footprint of large-scale agriculture and multi-step industrial chemical processes used to make UPF ingredients remain un-researched.
"The main point of manufactured products is profit," stated Fardet, noting that they're designed to be appealing, easy and enjoyable to eat.
"The majority of individuals in the manufacturing sector's value chain don't care about global warming from an ethical perspective, but they are interested in money," said another expert. He explains that to change these motivations, the cost of foods and ingredients would need to incorporate their effect on our global environment. But that would require official policies and financial penalties 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 grocery store hardly reflects their real impact on the planet. But to address these issues with manufactured products, more than just a few tweaks to the ingredient list are needed.
"Reducing the salt, or sugar of just a single item is just greenwashing," stated Fardet. "We need to transform the whole picture." To do that, he recommended eating more regionally produced, whole foods, which often take much less resources and transportation to create, and therefore have a significantly reduced environmental impact.
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