Connecting the Corporate Dots Across Food System Fights (and Beyond)

We’ll never solve food systems issues without a collective theory of cause that centers commercial activity. Uniting food movements starts with connecting the corporate dots across food system problems, and many other challenges facing humanity. This week, we explore what we might achieve if we link arms to fight a shared opponent.

All of us in food systems work are by now well-practiced at (and maybe even tired of) drawing food system maps to grapple with all the psychological, cultural, social, technical, and political factors that root the system in place. We map systems, lament the siloes, and pick a strategic place to put our team’s energies. We can’t individually work on it all at the same time, after all. 

Yet, we rarely name a major adversary to systems change: vested, well-funded, and coordinated commercial interests. We often miss that while we wrap our arms around parts of the system and how it all connects, corporations have had the whole picture for a long time. Our food system maps fail to show that industries have been acting on every square inch of them for centuries to entrench the status quo. 

We’ll never solve food systems issues without a collective theory of cause that centers commercial activity. While many non-profit organizations ameliorate downstream harms, we also need to work on stripping industries off their narrative and action tools that cause the issues in the first place. That fight affects us all and is located much further upstream and beyond food systems themselves.  

Individual efforts across the food system are increasingly connecting those dots, like the fact that Big Food is using the Big Tobacco playbook, which Kelly Brownell and others have been saying it for almost 20 years. After catching heat and facing increasing regulation, tobacco companies bought and grew multi-billion dollar global food businesses throughout the 1980s to mid 2000s, applying all they learned from selling tobacco to food. Recent special issues from two of the world’s most prominent public health journals – The Lancet in 2025 and the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) last week – attested to Big Food’s Big Tobacco heritage, and the health implications of all the ultra-processed foods we now eat.

In countries like the U.S., where only a tiny proportion of the population farms or grows any of their own food, the general public relies almost entirely on food producers, manufactures, and distributors for necessary sustenance. That’s a lot of power. And, as many a superhero has said, with great power comes great responsibility. 

At least it should. Except, the biggest players in the food industry don’t yet take seriously the food system’s responsibility to provide healthy, nourishing, affordable, culturally-appropriate, sustainable food for all. And too often people wave off Big Food’s corporate malfeasance as ‘that’s just how business gets done’. 

Few of us can opt out of the larger food system entirely and produce all of our own food. Within the system, few of us can make sense of what’s good for us. We drown in a sea of unverified marketing claims and confusing language on labels that lack information that is critical for us to make informed buying decisions. 

At the same time, too small a number of people can afford local, organic, minimally processed fare. We are, after all, in a system that has subsidized highly processed food in (sometime) toxic packaging full of unhealthy ingredients and chemical additives. And the corporate food industry is fighting tooth and nail to stop that from changing. 

Reminding industries of the responsibility that comes with their immense market power is at the core of some recent efforts to improve our corporate food system (and other industries too). The MAHA movement calls for more voluntary changes in the food industry, among other things. While some low hanging fruit might be addressed this way, history shows that voluntary corporate adjustments rarely last or contribute to any significant change. Instead, they often provide a halo to industries through healthwashing, greenwashing, pinkwashing, childwashing, you name it.

Reminding policymakers of their role in taming the corporate food system is another tactic for driving change.The ultra-processed food (UPF) research community has taken up this mantle. On June 3, several researchers presented their work in the AJPH special issue on the health impacts of UPFs. The session - titled ‘Big Food’s Tobacco Moment’ - connected the dots between tobacco tactics and what worked to resist them with where we are with UPFs. The editors’ main message? We have enough research to take policy action now to structurally shift the food system in the direction of health, ethics, and sustainability.

We also have enough evidence of the corporate playbook across harmful industries (within and beyond food systems) to take collective action to diminish its power. Last week, for example, we highlighted the multi-front war that companies throughout the food chain are waging in the legal space. Businesses simultaneously fights in the federal, state, and local courts to stop citizens and their representatives from speaking up and suing for harms from industrial products. Manufacturers of toxic pesticides, unhealthy fast foods, forever chemicals in food packaging, and environmentally-hazardous (and deeply unethical) animal feeding operations have all pursued legal immunity and pre-emption as part of their legal strategy. And that’s just one tactic on the lawfare side of the harmful corporate playbook.

Industries also operate simultaneously to wield hard and soft power through corporate political activity, marketing and PR, and corporate social responsibility strategies. Major corporations operate the same playbook across multiple legal, political, and social domains, and across industries (well beyond food systems). Early examples of total tactical capture of political and social processes include the slave industry, railroads, and electric monopolies in the U.S. 

If it feels like corporate nonsense across the food system and beyond comes at us, everywhere, all at once, in a deeply coordinated way, that’s because it does! Yet, the fight back is fragmented. While modern social change organizations do coordinate and collaborate, mostly we work on our own on individual factors affecting a single food system issue. Food insecurity NGOs focus on alleviating immediate hunger. Environmental groups work to clean up plastic and fossil fuel messes. Citizen health groups worry about pesticide residues and food dyes. 

But the industries involved pursue a coordinated attack against all of that. The legal immunity shield tactic is just one example. A clear case of a corporate multi-front battle.

Few food systems change organizations wage a multi-front battle of their own. There are exceptions to single-strategy organizations, of course. Food Fight USA, for instance, simultaneously works to pass laws that regulate the industry, empower consumers to make informed food choices, and works with farmers to produce healthier foods. But that’s a tall order for one organization. 

Also, the AJPH issue launched both research to push policymakers to do the right thing, and FedUP!, a project to help consumers make informed food decisions. Food Fight USA is part of that. This is the kind of coalition work we need more of.

Mostly, and for very good practical reasons, though public health, non-profit, and community organizations take one small piece of the food system pie, champion a single issue, and occasionally coalesce on a problem. Tackle pesticide immunity here. Fight against UPFs there. Work on access to diabetes drugs somewhere else. 

A lot of power is left on the table when most of us hyperfocus on a single lever. Even more is left on the table by organizations that could be working on policy issues and advocacy but do not. And the gap between research and action - between identifying problems and solving them - will never close if more researchers don’t actively support policy and culture change (the way the AJPH issue researchers did last week), including by tackling corporate disinformation constantly peppering policymakers and the public.

Eric Holt Gimenez and Raj Patel called on food movements to unite 15 years ago, but we’re still not there. Producer, consumer, and food worker battles tend to be separate. For us, one of the missing pieces for better coordination and collaboration is a shared theory of cause of food system woes. At the root of them all - whether at food production, distribution, consumption, or waste stage - are commercial determinants. So, it might be time for a network of networks working towards collective impact based on a shared understanding of the cross-food system and cross-industry corporate playbook halting progress. 

What do you think? Do you think broad-based coordination is possible? Could a shared theory of commercially determined causes help spark greater food movement alignment? What has worked for you in such coalition building? What have been some barriers? We’d love to hear from you: comment, DM, or email [email protected]