Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet

International food policy analyst Gillespie (AIDS, Poverty, and Hunger) provides a dogged dressing-down of the global food system. He argues that the system is a 20th-century “anachronism” functioning exactly as initially designed—mass-producing cheap calories for huge profits, with the careless side effect of slowly killing consumers (or quickly killing them if they live in the Global South, where the fatal effects of ultra-processed food are compounded by poverty). The book’s focus is mainly on the “Big Five”—Nestlé, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, and Unilever—who control three-quarters of all food retail, run America’s largest political lobby, and each bring in more income than half the countries in the world. Gillespie’s prose is fast-paced and bare-bones, and while he occasionally gets lost in the weeds of social issues (one section is simply titled “Patriarchy”), the most propulsive chapters take an up-close look at a harrowing selection of corporate practices—from General Mills paying Instagram dietitians to post about cereal while using “body positivity” hashtags like #DitchtheDiet, to Nestlé allegedly making KitKats from chocolate harvested by child slaves (readers will be affronted to learn that, in one child slavery lawsuit, Nestlé’ “reference[d] the Nuremberg Trials extensively” in its defense). Surveying potential solutions, Gillespie makes a convincing case that a “major” structural change is needed rather than “fiddling on the fringes.” At times overwhelming in its relentlessness, this is nonetheless a massive wake-up call. (Sept.)