This is why the food system is unreformable

Our food system has become a system of corporate exploitation, addiction and early deaths. When every incentive points exactly the wrong way, you can’t tweak the system into shape.

Last week I spent some time explaining why I wasn't writing about food systems because, as with so much, the problems seem too big to start from where we are. I suggested that as a society we're almost certainly now going to have to start to talk about the future in ways that aren't focussed wholly on what version of the present we can tweak a bit.

I want to write about this properly, but it is too big. I just can't fit it meaningfully into a single article. So what I'll do here is to try and explain why the existing system is untweakable and why there is no 'modest' reform which is going to undo the harms. That will explain why the solutions I'll put forward in another article in the future will sound so radical to some.

The reason it is difficult to write about this problem is that food is one of the most important and most complex policy areas there is. Forget even the big ticket quality-of-life issues like financial precarity, the impact of housing or the experience of crime, few things shape our quality of life more than food.

Both wealthy and poor can have their lives ruined by obesity and what it entails – and that really is only the most visible version of the fact that our bodies are much the same and they run on, well, food. You can't escape it. We shouldn't be in an obesity epidemic, but we are. That means there is something fundamentally and structurally wrong with the food system.

There is – our food system is now really drug dealers and economic termites in a race to the bottom and we are all the collateral damage.

The drug dealers I mention are both metaphorical and literal. Metaphorical in the sense that food production is now a laboratory experiment in maximising addiction at the expense of nutrition. It is not maximising the food value or even taste of Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs) which is the primary goal of the scientists but their addictiveness.

It is then important to understand how addiction works. You really have to stop thinking in terms of 'chasing a nice feeling' and think more about 'avoiding a bad feeling', all linked to a system in the brain which rewards correct predictions with a surge of a feel-good hormone/neurotransmitter called dopamine.

This is how it works; you do something and the experience of the thing you do doesn't particularly matter (smoking isn't actually nice – at first). Then the aftermath of that thing makes you feel a certain way and you learn to not like that feeling (the low you get from nicotine withdrawal). What your brain is looking for is a way to avoid that low feeling.

There are two options; wait it out and never have another cigarette, or get your nicotine levels back up again. Both of these have the same outcome, so your brain will learn that whichever you choose works. If you stop smoking at that point, you will never learn to enjoy it. Smoking will never give you the dopamine hit. If you smoke another and feel better, that is what your body will learn and so the cigarette that reverses the impact of the negative feeling will be what fires the prediction-reward hormone (the dopamine).

You learn to like smoking as a way to avoid the negative feeling that stopping smoking gives you. You will never again reach the baseline of feeling good you had before that first cigarette, but smoking more and more of them gets you as close as you can, so you come to like it, then rely on it. That's addiction.

This is why the term drug dealers is literal as well as metaphorical – because the tobacco industry has shifted heavily into the food industry in recent decades. They realised that the precise techniques they use to get you addicted to cigarettes will work with food. So that's what they do.

To understand how, you need to look at the termites. If you're not familiar which this concept, learn it. It explains most things in the modern world. An economic termite is a term for an entity which inserts itself at some point along the economic supply chain not to add value but to extract it. Think Uber – it wasn't invented to create taxis but to appropriate all the wealth from smaller taxi companies.

Economic termites are basically absolutely everywhere in western capitalism. If you were happily enjoying a swim in a river, someone will work out how to assemble a barrier round the river and charge you to swim. I mean in Edinburgh on 1 January, literally. That is a termite. Nothing gets better, you get poorer.

Think consultants, lawyers, financiers, technical intermediaries, all of silicon valley, monopolies, cartels, disrupters and then a mind-boggling host of small entities which basically can't make money unless it is by persuading the big termites that they too can be useful termites. Think of a company set up to disinfect computer keyboards at a giant call centre there to destroy high street businesses.

That's the problem with food; termites are always a race to the bottom for you. The whole point of a termite is to work out how to take the most from consumers while giving the least back. That's the poor-service-monopoly-capitalism we live with. You know you want to boycott EasyJet after your last, rotten experience of their shit but you'll never, ever be able to fly from Edinburgh to Bristol again...

“Food has become too expensive to buy in comparison to what I now always think of as ‘food substitutes’, things that look and feel vaguely like food but which bear no real comparison on the molecular level”

And what is 'the bottom' with food systems? Cheapest ingredients, highest addiction. What do cheap ingredients taste like? Terrible. So what to do? Chemically load bad-tasting cheap ingredients to trick the human body into thinking they're nice. How? Add artificial sugar, artificial salt, disgusting artificial trans fats and artificial chemical flavourings. These don't provide great nutrition, but they do create a cheap, legal high.

That high dissipates. Many of you will have awareness of the shit feeling that comes from a sugar come-down or a junk food come-down. And bingo! There you have it. Cheap products and addiction. And now, like cigarettes, your body is primed to avoid the low that this drop-off creates in you. You have quite literally been bioengineered to crave bad food.

There is so much more to this and I'm already getting towards my word count. It's not just the come-down addiction, it's loads of addictive mechanisms. For instance we appear to have some kind of innate sense of how many calories we are taking in for a given amount of work, and if we make that work easier, your body thinks you've taken fewer calories. It's why junk food is always soft – it involves so little chewing your body doesn't even think you've eaten it. Room for double pudding!

There is no escape from this dynamic in the current system. Supermarkets are an industry based on high-volume sales of low-margin goods. They need you to buy lots and lots of stuff because their markup is actually not very big. Hence the attraction of cheap, addictive products. This market fundamentally locks out quality producers – that's for the middle classes and their farmers' markets.

So supermarkets are termites which work not by taking more of your money for what you need but taking more of your money by making you buy an awful lot of things you don't need. Hence those things need to be inexpensive and make you want to buy more of them. Supermarkets are an industry sector whose core business activity is now to sell low-quality, cheap, addictive 'food substitutes'.

Here's the horror of the race; that means they have to prioritise addictive products with the lowest price, which means their suppliers need to produce addictive food at low cost. That has done remarkable things to food prices which come down and down. Except that isn't like-for-like food. Your burger bun is made from the crap that a proper flour producer sweeps off the floor because it is too poor quality for proper bread.

The technology for growing carrots has not enabled anything like the cost savings that come from halving the amount of carrot in a recipe and replacing it with soya fibre and corn syrup. Soya fibre is the crappy rough stuff that is left when you make something like soya milk or tofu. Corn syrup is a cheap chemical product made from the starch that is extracted from maize. These are mostly animal feed.

This is the point; you can trick your body into believing that leftover soya fibre and artificially-manufactured sugar syrup are the same as half a carrot, but they are not, never will be and simply won't nourish your body in the same way. You can go on adding all the chemically-produce vitamins or proteins or colourings or anything you want and all it will do is make the whole thing worse for you.

So food has become too expensive to buy in comparison to what I now always think of as 'food substitutes', things that look and feel vaguely like food but which bear no real comparison on the molecular level. Calorie for calorie an apple cannot and never will compete with a corn syrup-based apple-flavoured sweet on prince or addictiveness.

Because, fundamentally, the apple flavour comes from ethyl valorate, which is the better-known name for ethyl pentatoate which is made by “refluxing valeric acid and ethyl alcohol in the presence of concentrated H2SO”. H2SO is sulphuric acid. Ethyl pentatoate is a fuel additive that can quickly be chemically produced in large volumes. It happens to smell a little like a green apple.

From top to bottom, the food system is rigged against food. What it produces instead is cheap and addictive and very, very heavily marketed to you. You think you love it. But you can't concentrate at work and your children are going to die young almost wholly as a result of you feeding them this stuff. (When we say 'the first generation to die younger than their parents', honestly, what do you think is killing them?)

This is not a system you can tweak. You can't just price (non-addictive) apples lower through public subsidies because it'll never compete with (highly-addictive) ethyl pentatoate products no matter what you do. You can't incentivise the actual food growers inside a system fundamentally rigged against them. And you can alter the incentives for supermarkets in any possible way that will make them actually abandon their economic model.

You literally can't do anything about this no matter how much you tell yourself there must be a reform option. There isn't a reform option. It's like trying to incentivise lions not to eat gazelles. Except you can do something about it – as soon as you stop assuming it is 'this with a tweak'.

Food systems are a brilliant metaphor for why society is falling apart. They are also a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for why our food system is killing us. Our options are to accept this truth and do something about it – or die young. And I haven't even got to the marketers and lobbyists who are there to persuade you that dying young is actually your free choice as a consumer...