5. Ultra-Processed Foods, Plastics, Transport

When we talk about the future of food, we usually picture what's growing in the fields or what's on our dinner plates. But maybe we should pay a little more attention to everything happening in between. Processing and packaging consumes the largest share of fossil fuels in our food system— more than 40%. Our growing reliance on ultra-processed foods, and plastics across the supply chain is making food production more energy-intensive than ever before.

Visit the episode webpage for more resources.

This series is powered by TABLE, IPES-Food and Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

Guests

• Emma Priestland, Break Free From Plastic
• Errol Schweizer, IPES-Food
• Rachel Muncrief, International Council on Clean Transportation
• Georgina Catacora-Vargas, IPES Food

Produced by Matthew Kessler, Anna Paskal and Nicole Pita. Edited by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. Cover art by Cover art by The Ethical Agency. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Matthew Kessler

When we talk about the future of food, we usually picture what's growing in the fields or what's on our dinner plates. But maybe we should pay a little more attention to everything happening in between. Processing and packaging consumes the largest share of fossil fuels in our food system— more than 40%. Our growing reliance on ultra-processed foods, and plastics across the supply chain is making food production more energy-intensive than ever before.

Errol Schweizer
Processed foods make up at least 600 billion dollars of the one trillion dollar grocery industry.

Emma Priestland
The primary producers of plastic pollution and users of plastic are food and beverage companies. 

Rachel

A lot of marine transportation uses very, very dirty fuels

Matthew

Today, we're asking: what would it take to break up with our dependency on fossil-fueled food?

Matthew

This is Fuel to Fork, a podcast that exposes the fossil fuels in our food and imagines a future without them. I’m your guide Matthew Kessler. 

Episode 5. Ultra processed foods, plastics, and transport

This episode will probably hit closer to home for many of you. Shopping for vegetables individually wrapped in plastics, walking through your markets and seeing more options for Ultra Processed Foods options than whole foods, or watching a truck pull up to the back of a store to unload food for the day. These are much more visible. So that’s what we’ll focus on.

But I also want to acknowledge that a lot of the fossil fuels that’s used to bring food from farms to retailers comes from heating, drying, sorting, refrigeration, and lighting in warehouses and distribution centers. The solutions and tradeoffs connected to these issues are typical ones you’d hear in climate and tech conversations: use more energy-efficient appliances, electrify equipment, and ethically switch over to renewable energy. Not easy, but more thoroughly explored elsewhere. 

So let’s start with plastics in the food supply chain and ultra-processed foods.

Part 1. They’re everywhere

We’re going to have two guides walk us through how we’ve become addicted to ultra-processed foods and plastics in the food supply chain. 

Emma 

My name is Emma Priestland and I am the Corporate Campaigns Coordinator for the Global Break Free from Plastic Movement

Errol

My name is Errol Schweitzer. I've been in the food industry on and off for over 30 years.

Emma 

So Break Free from Plastic is a movement of thousands of organizations from around the world who are all fighting for a future free from plastic pollution. And our members work across the full life cycle of plastic.

Errol

For 14 years I worked for Whole Foods Market including seven years responsible for their grocery division where we hit over five billion dollars in sales.

Matthew

We're talking about fossil fuels in the food system. And with you, we're going to focus specifically on plastic. Let's first maybe talk about the extent of the challenge. Where are plastics in the food system?

Emma 

I think the more important question is where aren't plastics in the food system. In the current world that we live in, plastics are enabling a globalized, largely homogenized food system that almost anyone in the world can find the same packaged products, no matter where you are, pushed by the same multinational corporations. 

Plastics are really enabling a sort of fast food, ultra-processed food, but they're also enabling this globalised system that allows me sitting in the UK to eat asparagus in the middle of winter that's been shipped from Peru. It means that global North consumers are able to access specific foods at any time of the year, regardless of whether or not it is in season, whether it's produced locally to them. 

Matthew

Plastics are highly functional, and incredibly cheap. They increase the shelf-life of certain products, and allow them to be easily shipped across the world. Last episode we talked about how plastics are found across the farm. These large plastic sheet mulches that cover the soil help keep down weeds and help keep moisture in the soil so you don’t have to water as much. Plastics are also found in many farm inputs like pesticides and fertilizers.

Emma

And of course plastic is inside food. You know we're seeing more and more studies showing microplastics being found in seafood, in the soil that we're growing our vegetables in. So yeah plastic is really extremely prevalent and the food industry and the plastics industry are extremely closely linked.

Matthew 

Just to zoom in for a second on the hidden plastics, the microplastics, what do we know about these microplastics in our food, or in our land or in our water?

Emma 

Yeah, so microplastic research is quite interesting because we tend to find microplastics pretty much anywhere we look for them. Recently they've been found in placenta. It's passed on to babies. We're finding it in our bodies. We're finding it in the bodies of almost every animal we look. They're also even in the atmosphere. They're in the soil in huge amounts. And of course, microplastics are also all the way through the oceans. We don't know what the wider impacts are but the precautionary principle itself should say that we should be extremely worried about this.

Matthew

Maybe a good way to get into is - actually let me just ask you, what is an Ultra Processed food?

Errol 

Ultra-processed food is essentially something that bears no resemblance to what it's made of. And it's gone through so many different chemical and physical changes that you can't really tell where it came from or how it was grown.

Matthew 

I like the shorthand definition of it's something you couldn't make in your home kitchen. It has to go through some sort of industrialized equipment to get there. 

Brazilian public health researcher Carlos Monteiro and his team developed the NOVA classification. Which categorizes foods based on the extent of their processing. It distinguishes between minimally processed foods, processed culinary ingredients, and ultra-processed food products. 

In short, processed foods are altered from their original state through methods like canning, freezing, or adding preservatives like salt. Ultra-processed foods go further, containing multiple ingredients and additives like artificial flavors, colors, and emulsifiers, often they’re highly engineered and less nutritious.

Errol 

Let's start first with the concept of food processing. I like to say that food processing actually makes us human. It's one of the things that somewhere in our evolutionary history we realized we could pulverize spices and nixtamalize corn and smoke fish. Those are all forms of food processing. There's nothing to be afraid of there.

Something that we should really consider with processed foods, including ultra-processed foods - they save us time and they save us work. And we need to keep in mind that people's lives are hectic. And so a lot of this growth in processed foods comes from the fact that they fill these needs for people. So it's important not to be judgmental to people's personal consumption habits, but to instead look at these bigger structural questions.

Matthew

To explore these structural questions, we’re going to use the same line we used in the last episodes. “In order to figure out how to get us out of this mess, we need to understand how we got here in the first place.”

Part 2 - How World War II shaped today's food system

So let’s get into a bit of history, starting with Emma Preistland. 

Emma

You can really look back to that post-war period where you had a huge amount of very powerful chemical and petrochemical companies. You have a massive amount of innovation that has happened. And it's really the 50s that you start to see plastic growth and this kind of culture of disposability being pushed on consumers. And this is because these companies that had previously been, you know, generating lots of products to keep the war machine going are now looking for other avenues for their products, for their chemicals. 

Because before that, an item that you owned was something valuable. It was something to be used over and over again. It was something to be repaired and to pass on. And suddenly this new concept is introduced of “don't worry, throw it away.” And the throw away culture that we live in has - it's probably one of the most successful marketing concepts that has ever been seen. Because it's persisted from the 50s right up till now. And now as individuals we consider this to be so essential to our daily lives we find it hard to imagine what life was like before we had plastics and disposability.

Matthew

But, if we throw it away into the recycling bin instead of straight to the landfill, that would solve our problems right? Unfortunately not. Less than 15% (1-5) of the 400 millions tonnes of plastic that are used each year are actually recycled. Also, to be clear, plastics are basically a fossil fuel, composed 99% of crude oil and gas.

Emma

As the global north is kind of reaching peak plastic consumption. If you look at per capita plastic use, it kind of remains the same for years. You know, if you're a consumer in the UK or in the US, we've sort of maxed out our plastic use. So these petrochemical companies are looking for developing markets. They expect their growth, their future growth to come from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Pulling up those people to the same level of plastic consumption that we are currently dealing with. The growth in plastic is projected to triple by 2060. So imagine where we’re at now. It feels like there's an enormous amount of plastic and we're seeing serious impacts in the environment from that plastic. We’re expecting that to triple.

Matthew

I’m going to make one more argument in favor of plastics that I think we need to address as we find ways to reduce or replace it, so we can be clear about the tradeoffs. It’s a lighter material, so it’s less weight on a ship than other packaging materials. And it’s less fragile than glass. This is one of the reasons the wine industry has been opting to ship bottles in plastic. This might be an uncomfortable fact, but it also translates to lower shipping fuel costs over time. Plus, on any food product with a high moisture content, plastic is going to significantly increase that products’ shelf life. Studies have found it extends the shelf lives of some vegetables and fruits, which is one way to reduce food waste. But, there are many uses of plastic in food that are completely unnecessary and companies aren’t taking responsibility. We’ll explore this more later.

Now we’ll turn our attention to the recent history of processed foods. See if you spot some similarities in these stories.

Errol

So I guess first off we have to look at the birth, growth, development of the processed food sector. Where did it come from? And so yes, on the one hand, we've always quote “processed foods” for millennia, but the processed food industry is a very recent invention. And I actually see it as based in the wartime economy.

First in World War I and then in World War II, the US government needed to feed troops overseas and other governments too, but let's focus on the US because that's where I'm based and that's what I know the most about. The US government gave out huge contracts to manufacturers that had to make shelf stable, high quality, nutrient and calorie dense foods that could be shipped overseas and then literally taken to war by soldiers. You know, that was billions upon billions of dollars in sunk costs owned by the private sector, subsidized by US tax dollars.

And those foods, while existing on a small scale, like mac and cheese or Oreo cookies – they weren't the dominant food system that they became after the war, where it all of a sudden exploded into the consumers.

Matthew

So what happened after the war that cemented this shift. 

There were both big changes happening in society and technology. More and more women entered the workforce and fewer people were cooking at home. Alongside this trend, companies have stepped in, targeting families with products that make life easier for them in the kitchen such as processed foods and other food services. And more products became available because of refrigerators and freezers in mid-20th-century households.

Errol

Once consumers started buying their own freezers and refrigerators, everybody wanted frozen meals and frozen vegetables. Yes, processed food, but also nutrient dense, calorie dense, and not always disgusting, sometimes actually quite good.

Matthew

And there was something else going on. How did we go from nutrient dense frozen foods to the unhealthy ultra processed foods lining our grocery shelves? 

Errol

Another factor was the fact that brands started marketing themselves, creating logos and catchphrases and this advertising became a big thing after the war too to sell these processed foods to consumers and to create competition between the producers and to create advertising for the supermarkets to sell these processed foods. 

And then finally is the fact that these foods were scientifically formulated not only to meet consumer needs states, but really to become pretty addictive too, in terms of how they would add the right number of sugar and salt and fat, the right mouth feel, the right crunch and crisp and snap to the bite, so that they were craveable and desirable.

Matthew

Here’s a not so fun-fact: The same scientists who worked at big tobacco companies like Phillip Morris, were now hired by the food industry for the same purpose - making processed foods more addictive.

You might be thinking, this sounds pretty bad, but I myself only eat a little bit of these ultra processed foods. If that’s true, you’re in the minority. In the U.S. and U.K., over half of all calories consumed come from ultra-processed foods—a figure expected to reach 70% in the U.S. by 2030. In Brazil, Mexico and Chile, consumption is between 20-30% and is also expected to increase. In India, it’s currently at 10% and it’s expected to double in the next decade. 

Why does this matter? Well, there’s obviously the health implications. Study after study links excessive consumption of ultra-processed foods to negative health outcomes like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Plus, producing these foods is much more energy-intensive than whole foods. 

Errol 

So there's a lot of complications to how the processed food industry came to be and how it interwove itself into every facet of our lives, but also the fact that we kind of needed that because our lives have gotten so out of control that at least we could grab something quick and convenient to eat in between commuting, taking the kids to activities, picking them up from school, maybe going to the gym.

Matthew

Throughout history people have had busy lives - the time crunch isn't new, but I’m sure people will still recognize this reality.

Errol

I also want to point out that not everybody likes to cook. And processed foods also take that necessity out of our hands. And that the whole notion of cooking, like foodie culture has really fetishized home cooking. There's a lot of good things about it. We raised two kids and we cooked for them, we made food, we made meals. We tried to avoid a lot of ultra-processed foods, but it's incredibly expensive and incredibly labor-intensive. And I'll be frank, a lot of it fell on my wife. 

And so when we look at the labor associated with home cooking, it's still highly gendered as well. So are processed foods a vehicle for progressive social change? Well, they did save mostly women a lot of work in the kitchen as well. So I do want to point out there's some nuances here that don't fit neatly into the sort of dualism of good, bad processed foods. Like, well, there's a lot of bad here, but we also got to think about these other aspects.

Matthew

Today ultra-processed foods and plastics in our food supply chain are as obvious to our modern lives as the smart phones in our pockets. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Coming up, we look at what actually works and what doesn’t when it comes to reducing plastics and ultra processed foods in our food system.

Part 3. What are we supposed to do about this?

In the ‘where are fossil fuels on our farms’ episodes - we broke up the solution space into 3 different buckets. 1. Make the existing industrial food system more efficient, 2. replace dirty fossil-based technologies with quote “greener” ones, and 3. change the entire system. 

Well in this case, there’s an argument for expanding renewable energy to power this industrial processing equipment, but that won’t address the root cause, which is how do we stop increasing our consumption of plastics and ultra processed foods. For that, we will have to change the system. 

Georgina 

Well, ultra-processed foods is a phenomenon globally. Obviously, Latin America is not exempted from that.

Matthew

That’s Georgina Catacora-Vargas, professor at the Catholic Bolivia University, and member of IPES food, back from episode 3.

Georgina

There is a very strong economic and political structure that backs its dissemination and its consumption.

Matthew

Ultra processed food consumption is rapidly increasing in Latin America. I asked Georgina Catacora-Vargas what is being done and what can be done to reverse these trends? In every country, the context of whose eating and desiring Ultra Processed Foods is different. Speaking from Bolivia, she gave what sounded to me living in Sweden as a pretty surprising answer. 

Georgina

Eating ultra processed foods now is related to certain economic status. Because if you buy ultra processed foods, first is because you have the monetary capacity to do so. This is fueled by advertisement.

Matthew

So in Bolivia, people of higher income are eating ultra processed foods. Rather than in Sweden, when it’s usually a cheaper alternative to whole foods. Georgina says these status symbols aren’t just about food consumption, but they also connect to who is producing the food.

Georgina

Behind this there is a lot of the vision of what we have about food, about how it is produced and how it is prepared. And here it's very important to say that the work of farmers, peasants, indigenous peoples, women, the work at the kitchen and domestic and the care work are very much underestimated and undervalued. We need to redignify what is agriculture, peasant agriculture. All the care work because that's also what sustains life.

Matthew

Peasant agriculture is many things at once. In Bolivia, it's a blend of tradition, community, and deep reliance on the land—but it’s also surrounded by challenges. Poverty, access to resources, the threat of climate change. Still, these communities have been resilient. A big factor is them being able to produce what they eat. This obviously leaves them more vulnerable to severe climate events like storms or droughts, but it also had a surprising effect. They were observed to be eating a more nutritious diet than what nearby wealthier families were eating.

Georgina

And I can refer to a specific research I did myself in rural areas in my country. When families who have less income from their activities, they have more nutritious diets because they produce biodiverse vegetables and they don't have the monetary capacity to buy ultra processed foods. While in the same area, the families who have higher income, they invest more in buying ultra processed foods because that gives them a higher status in relation to what they eat. 

Matthew

I found this both eye-opening and disheartening. Changing diets is hard enough, but shifting perceptions of what's "cool" to eat? That’s a whole different challenge. 

I asked Georgina what governments can do to reverse these trends of ultra processed foods consumption.

Georgina

Yes, I think governments and policy can do a lot. First is massive education and awareness.

Matthew

Georgina says governments should use their platforms to make it known that many ultra processed foods -the sugary drinks, salty, fatty snacks, and processed meats - are in fact harmful for your health. 

Georgina

And the second thing is the active support of public policies to peasant farming and consumption of locally produced, hopefully agroecologically produced food, for instance, through public procurement.

Matthew

Right. You need good alternatives available to feed people and Georgina says these communities can help supply this demand. Public procurement covers public schools, hospitals, prisons, government offices. It’s a huge opportunity to influence the food system. As an example, just in Brazil alone, their National School Feeding Program feeds 43 million students each day.

Georgina

The providers in public procurement, the majority are, either small companies or big companies that provide processed food cheap. The system is not set to facilitate that peasants, small scale processors, artisanal processors and those who produce healthy food are part of the system and contribute to provide healthy food to children, to elders, to people who suffer from certain illnesses, etc. So here I think there are two big important things that the governments could do with high impact. 

Matthew

So awareness campaigns and focusing on public procurement are two areas where we shift food consumption away from fossil fuel dependent food. Here’s another:

Errol

The first thing we need to do in food processing is break up the big processors and the big retailers. 

Matthew

For Errol Schweizer, governments need to play a much bigger role, in a few key ways. First, by breaking up the big businesses.

Errol

Nothing that we're talking about will matter unless we do that. Take it from me, I live in that world. They suck up all the oxygen, they suck up all the capital, they suck up all the energy. If you don't break up big business, none of this matters. 

Matthew

Errol’s main argument is these businesses aren’t interested in moving away from this ultra processed food system. It’s the most profitable one. Together, five companies own the majority of grocery sales in the United States for various processed food categories. 

Errol

Across the board, whether it's beverages, snacks, soups, bread, condiments, salad dressings, chocolate bars. There's only a handful of companies that own the big chunk of sales. And they do that by having hand-in-glove relationships with retailers. Through business practices such as slotting fees, where they pay to get their products on shelf and the retailers pocket the dollars. They have deep pockets with what they call trade spend to promote and advertise their products. Trillion dollar grocery industry, maybe 250 billion is trade spent for promotions and advertising, much of it targeted towards kids and consumers who are most prone to buying processed foods for the reasons that we’ve talked about.

Matthew

So anywhere from 10-25% of the US grocery retailers budget is going into trade spend. Those are dollars working to shape your food choices.

But this is only part of the issue on how we spend money on the food system. Many studies point to the external costs that are created from the processed food industry. For example, rich countries are spending billions of dollars on health care to treat diet-related diseases. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization put out a report in 2023 that I quote “there is a very high degree of confidence that the global quantified hidden costs of agrifood systems is at 10 trillions dollars or more”.

Emma Priestland explains what this has all led to is that in some settings, eating a healthy diet has basically become a privilege. 

Emma

Unfortunately, living this way where you're only eating plastic-free, relatively local foods from your same continent is a privilege and it's expensive and it really shouldn't be. I think we could look at ways of getting prices to a point where farmers are compensated as they should be, but consumers are not having to shell out. It shouldn't be a luxury to have local, organic, safe food that isn't wrapped in a toxic chemical.

Matthew

And Errol Schweizer has a bold idea to combat this.

Errol

We need trillions in financing to go towards good food systems and systems that push fossil fuels out of the food supply. If you want people to eat healthier, if you want folks to stop committing so much of their diet and paychecks to ultra processed foods, let's start by making fresh produce free. I call it single -payer produce. It would cost a fraction of what the US spends on the military every year. Fresh produce at retail is a $90 billion category. That means the cost of fresh produce to retailers is not even $50 billion. That means If you were to subsidize the cost of fresh produce and still allow retailers to get their own markup and get reimbursed for the cost, you're talking about $50 billion. If you're wanting to subsidize the full price of fresh produce at retail for consumers, less than $100 billion. 

Matthew

100 billion dollars. That’s the same amount of money that US retailers redeem for what’s called SNAP purchases. This is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as Food stamps. It’s assistance for people who experience food insecurity in the United States. But a lot of that money goes to ultra processed foods. 

Errol

It's the second largest food access program in the world. Ten times the volume of all food banks combined in the United States. It's the most effective anti-food insecurity program in the US. Highly underfunded, highly inadequate. People complain that they're buying cheap processed foods. Well, what do you expect? Nutrient dense, stretch your dollars, calorie dense. If you want people to eat healthier, make it free.

Matthew

When it comes to plastics in food, Emma Priestland also says that governments can and should do more, but there’s a big obstacle: Fossil fuel lobbyists. Take the United Nations Global Plastics Treaty as an example. It’s currently being negotiated by representatives from 160 countries and is supported by the UN Environmental program. One of the major aims of this global plastics treaty, is to reduce single use plastic in food packaging, which accounts for 35% of global packaging production. But, there’s the lobbyists. One headline from earlier this year read, “fossil fuel lobbyists outnumbered national delegations, scientists and indigenous peoples at the plastics treaty negotiations.”

Emma 

Yeah, I mean, I was at those treaty negotiations. It's absolutely horrifying to see the lobbying that's going on. You have fossil fuel and plastic producers, representatives actually on country delegations. Like corporate capture of UN treaty negotiations is a severe problem. And we are really, really seeing this in the statements that are being said and the positions that are being taken by government representatives. So lobbying as with tobacco, as with in the climate spaces, there's a set playbook that these companies follow. And we are very much seeing this play out in the plastics world. 

Matthew

And just to really show how much plastics are a part of food, Emma Priestland tells a story about an initiative their organization runs each year.

Emma

Every year the movement that I work for finds out who the top plastic polluter is. We have a massive citizen science initiative called brand audits. We collect plastic waste from 50 plus countries around the world. And every year we find the same companies to be the top plastic polluters: Coca Cola, PepsiCo. Nestle, Mondelez, Unilever, all food and beverage producers. 

Recently, a scientific study has came out that proved for the first time that a company's plastic use is correlated to the amount of that company's plastic waste that we find in the environment. Plastic production equals plastic pollution.

And the primary producers of plastic pollution and users of plastic are food and beverage companies. There is an enormous role that these companies can play in solving our pollution issue. And at the moment, they are tinkering around the edges to look good to their shareholders and to the press and not making any substantial changes to their business model. 

Matthew

So what are the most effective measures to reduce plastic in our food system?

Emma 

Well, first of all, we need to see producers, so these massive food companies, they need to be held responsible for the plastic packaging once it has left their factories. So at the moment, you know, if you're Coca Cola, you're putting your beverage in a plastic bottle, it goes out the door, you're done. The problem is now on your consumer and on local municipalities who have to collect that plastic and they have to deal with it.

Matthew

This is all part of a strategy to shift responsibility to the consumers and draw attention away from their own polluting practices.

Emma

Actually, what we want to see is them having responsibility for the packaging through its full life cycle. This is a concept called extended producer responsibility. It's been enacted all across the world in a whole wide range of different ways. It's not really doing the thing that it should do because of the lobbying. What it should do is drive companies to reduce their plastic use. 

Coca Cola has a solution. It can have reusable refillable glass bottles. That's how it's sold its product for decades. It was the original packaging was a refillable glass bottle. They actively do not want to go back there because the cost is on them. The responsibility to collect and to wash that bottle and to refill it is on them and it will hurt their top line and cause their shareholders to be pissed off. So extended producer responsibility is a really key concept. We need to have targets that reduce plastic production. We have to go upstream.

We have to think, okay, we have a climate budget. We can only use so many fossil fuels. What is the very best use of that plastic? Maybe we'd prefer to use it in having lightweight transportation and using it in healthcare instead of candy bars and crisps.

Matthew

So there’s extended producer responsibility, targets to reduce plastic pollution, and eating more whole foods closer to home.

Emma

Returning to a way of eating and feeding ourselves that is more localized, more seasonal, that isn't relying on a global supply chain will completely allow us to reduce our plastic usage. There are some areas of plastic, I just don't know how you get rid of them. If you're completely committed to having a Mars bar in your life. I'm not entirely sure how you'd get rid of plastic packaging for that because the whole system of Mars bar production is one of a product that is able to sit on a shelf for a very long time. How do you have something that's safe to eat a year after its production if it's not wrapped in plastic? So then you need to ask more important questions like, okay, well, do I want a Mars bar that's a year old? 

I don't know. I mean, I kind of do right now, I'm hungry. In the bigger picture, we have to ask about what's important to us as a society and where are we going to be using plastic where it is most essential and it provides us with the most benefits and the least amount of harm.

Matthew

Some groups are looking at bioplastics as an alternative. Bioplastics might sound eco-friendly, but they're not without issues. So these are typically made from crops like sugarcane, corn, and potatoes, instead of being made from chemicals. But bioplastics – just like biofuels – rely on large-scale monocultures, grown with synthetic fossil agrochemicals. 

The same issues come up. There’s only so much agricultural land available to feed a growing population. So even though bioplastics and biofuels are biological alternatives to chemicals, the fact that they compete with agricultural land, and fossil fuels are still required to grow the feedstock for the production process, makes them a far from perfect solution.

But there is of course high demand. Plastics aren’t just in the packaging material in a bag of potato chips. They make up crates, bags, and containers used to transport local foods from small farms to local markets in all parts of the world. They’re in the takeaway containers for vendors on the street. Even the organic produce in grocery stores often needs to be sold in plastic so it isn’t cross-contaminated. 

 It’s a really tough issue. Plus the economics still favor plastics, which is why most food and beverage companies have replaced glass packaging with plastic in the first place. To make alternatives more viable, we need new financial incentives. We need stronger regulations against single use plastic. And we need strong policy targets focused on reuse and refill, and the infrastructure in cities and villages to support that implementation. You can’t do one without the other.

So there's scale up of the good and then there's scale down of the bad. There are some country-wide efforts to significantly reduce ultra-processed food consumption. So Chile in 2016 banned ultra -processed foods in schools and mandated front-of-label packaging. Other countries have put taxes on sugary sweetened beverages. And in 2023, this is perhaps the splashiest one. Colombia introduced a progressive tax on ultra processed foods. Do these interventions work? Do they get to the core of the issue?

Errol 

I think they're a good defensive play. I think they're a good ice bath for the processed food industry. And I think I will always support clear and transparent labeling. The other half is you need to create more and better alternatives. And that's a lot of what I've done in my career is to ensure that once you create that transparency and that education. For the punitive side, the taxation, that folks have what they need, that they're not also paying the price of it, that this should be punishing the producer. This should be ultimately steering consumers away, but also towards better stuff. And so a lot of the work that I've done and a lot of the policies that I've talked about is ensuring that we have the infrastructure, supply chains, retail formats that support as many alternatives as possible. 

Matthew

Errol wants to see a decentralized food system that has more options. When there are just a few companies, you get just a few options, driven by what’s the most profitable, rather than what’s the healthiest and most sustainable. To make alternatives competitive, Errol says that local, national and international governments need to play a much bigger role.

Coming up, we explore options to ‘green’ food transportation.

Part 4. Decarbonizing Food Transport

Matthew

When we think about where fossil fuels show up in our food, many of us think about transportation. 

Estimates range from 3% to 19% of food systems emissions come from transportation. The real number is probably somewhere in the middle. This is worth talking about, because today, 95% of global transport is powered by fossil fuels

Rachel

Each mode of transportation is going to have to decarbonize in various ways. 

Matthew

That’s Rachel Muncrief, Deputy Director at the International Council on Clean Transportation, based in Washington DC.

Rachel

We're a nonprofit and we're very mission based. And our mission, just in very simplified terms, is to essentially reduce and eventually eliminate the climate and the health impacts from the global transportation sector. 

Matthew

All modes of transportation are not made equal. We’ll first look at what’s the dirtiest to the cleanest. And how we can cut back our fossil fuel use in food transport.

Rachel

I would say by far aviation emissions are the most carbon intensive per unit of freight. So you really want to try to minimize getting things onto aviation. It’s also the most expensive. 

Matthew

Fortunately, it’s the least common way to transport food. 

Rachel

For international shipping, large, marine shipping vessels can be quite efficient. They still need to be cleaned up significantly, of course, but in terms of freight, carbon per unit of freight movement, they're clean. 

Matthew

That’s for shipping food across continents. What about within them? 

Rachel

When you're talking about sort of inland, again, marine and rail are going to be much more efficient than truck. So you really want to maximize those modes of transportation until you get to a stage where you don't have those options anymore and then put it on the trucks.

Matthew

So from dirtiest to cleanest, you’ve got airplanes then trucks, followed by trains and then ships. Some good news and bad news here. Good news first, nearly 60% of global food miles are transported by ships. The bad news is that within countries, trucks dominate food transport. In the US, it’s over 70% of food transport is on the backs of trucks. Also, on the bad news, when it comes to ships. 

Rachel

A lot of marine transportation uses very, very dirty fuels. Typically a diesel fuel, but it's a much sort of dirtier diesel fuel than is used in the on-road sector.

Matthew

So traveling by sea is on one hand the most efficient way to transport food - but on the other, the fuel is very dirty, and it has impacts beyond the burning of fossil fuels to power the ships. Transportation over the sea also disrupts marine biodiversity.

The International Council on Clean Transportation has been tracking the efforts to clean up shipping. They’re looking both at how regulation and at how technologies can help. 

Rachel

We see in the future, cleaning up marine fuel is going to be a very, very important part of sort of decarbonizing and cleaning up the global transportation sector. So that there's a few different pathways. You know, one would be around using what we would call next generation or sustainable biofuels that can be dropped into marine engines.

Matthew

We talked earlier about some of the tradeoffs around using biofuels, like the fact that we’re using agricultural land to grow fuel instead of food. Meanwhile, there is also lots of hype around what some are calling green hydrogen.

Rachel

So that could be utilizing green hydrogen, essentially hydrogen made from clean electricity. Either utilizing that hydrogen directly in the form of a hydrogen fuel cell in a ship or using that hydrogen to create other fuels that can be utilized in marine vessels.

Matthew

But these also come with the trade offs above. And as we already mentioned, hydrogen fuel is intensive, expensive and as of 2023 -  99% of its production doesn’t run on renewables.

Rachel

There are also technologies that can be sort of put on the ships to make them essentially more efficient. So obviously you have the idea of making sure that the fuels are as clean as possible, but you of course also want the ships to be as efficient as possible. So you're just burning less fuel on a per nautical mile basis. There are a number of technologies that can be sort of put on the ships to make them in a way more sort of like aerodynamic in the water or actually running ships at a slower pace. They call it slow steaming. It’s another way to actually burn less fuel. Of course, that means it takes a little bit longer time for the shipment to get there. So sometimes there's trade -offs. 

Matthew

So some technologies do exist. How do we make sure that the best ones are widely implemented? Rachel Muncrief echoes what others have been saying throughout this episode. “This is where governments can and should step in.”

Rachel

Europe put in place a regulation that essentially means that all maritime fuels are going to have to get lower and lower carbon intensities over the years. So for any ships sort of originating from European ports, the carbon intensity of fuel that they're using is going to have to decrease over time. And that's in a regulation. So we need more countries to put in place carbon intensity type regulations for marine fuel to really be successful.

Matthew

So, that’s water. How about land transport? Most automobiles currently rely on gasoline and diesel. Globally, about half of the trains run on diesel, while around 40% are electrified, though this varies significantly by country. If we switch to electric trains, trucks, and cars, we can power them with renewable energy sources like solar and wind, which can also be used to charge batteries and power equipment. 

Rachel

Moving ahead now. Looking at electrification, yes, some of these first generation electric trucks, maybe the range isn't going to be as good. Maybe there are going to be issues with the charging. Maybe there are going to be some problems. Those are things that can be solved.

The one thing that we've seen come down faster than anyone predicted is the cost of the battery. We’re now able to say with confidence that yes, we can electrify the on-road fleet in the timeframe that would align with climate targets. If we go back and even look at our cost projections from 10 years ago on our website, everyone at the time was accusing us of being too optimistic in how quickly battery costs could come down. And it turns out we were wrong in the other direction. Like we were too conservative and it came down faster than anyone really thought.

Matthew

These are all great arguments for electrification and the speed of progress, but as we’re wearing our investigative hats trying to uncover the source of things. Where do those battery materials come from?

Rachel

The big kind of elephant in the room is the battery, of course, and the battery materials that come from mining. Not to forget that when we were drilling for fossil fuels, that involved drilling and fracking and all sorts of things like that. And the big difference there that I always like to point out is fossil fuels are a one-time use. You know, you take them out of the ground, you burn them. You have to take more out of the ground.

With battery materials, you have to take them out of the ground and there is going to be an environmental impact from mining. There's no way around that. Of course, there's ways to minimize that. But you take them out of the ground, you use them and they can be recycled. There's actually a lot of work being done by people to look at how to make sure we're optimizing the recycling of the battery materials. So over time, we have to take less and less out of the ground. If we maintain reliance on a fossil fuel industry, that would never decrease. 

Sustainable and ethical mining practices are really, really important. There's groups that we collaborate with that are specifically working on regulations around those topics.

Matthew

In summary, the International Council on Clean Transportation advocates for three different ways to green global transportation.

Rachel

The avoid, shift, and improve paradigm is essentially the three main pillars of how we're going to clean up the transportation system. So avoid is just basically where possible, avoiding the transportation. Shift means shifting from a dirtier to a cleaner or more efficient mode of transportation. And improve means basically bringing new and better and cleaner technologies in to replace the older, dirtier technologies. 

Matthew

Avoid. Shift. Improve.

You may have noticed we didn’t talk about eating foods grown closer to home in the transport section. That’s because it’s pretty complicated. On one hand, you’re reducing food miles and therefore cutting back on fuel use. But shorter supply chains often involve smaller, less efficient transport loads, often carried by trucks, which could offset some of the benefits of reduced distance. 

We also just started talking about some of the challenges around electrification. Since many solutions to tackle our fossil fueled food system rely on renewable energy, we’ll do a deeper dive into this topic in this next episode.

So, what did we learn and what can we do?

For me, one of the most surprising and striking parts of producing this series was learning that 42% of fossil fuels in the food system go into processing and packaging. It’s such a huge and complex problem. The good news is that if we can address this, we’re tackling a big part of our problem with fossil fuels in our food. 

As we’ve heard from our brilliant guests, the scale of this problem requires significant government action to limit plastics in food systems, to enact regulations such as extended producer responsibility, to subsidize whole foods closer to home, to scale up renewables and more sustainable transport models, and to ensure these processes are done in ethical ways that don’t violate human rights and damage the environment.

We’ll link to some of the resources that our guests recommend on our series webpage, found at fueltofork.com/ 

And if you have any thoughts, questions, comments, please write them down or record yourself in a quiet room and send them to podcast@tabledebates.org

Next episode, we’ll tackle the last part of the supply chain, the one closest to home. Fossil fuels in our kitchens.

Chris

Kitchens are the most energy intensive part of any commercial building, and these things produce a lot of emissions.

Matthew

This series was made possible by IPES Food, Global Alliance for the future of food, and TABLE. The series was produced by Matthew Kessler, Anna Paskal and Nicole Pita. The episode was edited by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. Special thanks to Jack THompson, Robbie Blake, Chantal Clement,, Jackie Turner, Tara Garnett, Amanda Jekums, and Douglas Gollin. We’ve received funding from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Cover art and design was done by the Ethical Agency. Music by Blue dot Sessions.