Concentration and Power in the Food System: Who Controls What We Eat? By Dr. Joseph Mercola

The food supply is going to be controlled by governments and a few gigantic corporations, and who knows what the hell they’ll be feeding us. From Dr. Joseph Mercola at theburningplatform.com:

Story at-a-glance

• The trend is for fewer but bigger firms increasing their power to control what we eat; at the time Howard wrote his book, four European firms controlled the global beer market; six firms controlled the global seed market; two firms controlled food distribution in the U.S.
• Monopolies benefit corporations — not the public — reinforcing the company’s power and political clout. Many corporate executives even served, and still serve, on federal advisory committees and global trade agreement working groups
• Two-thirds of the farm commodities sold in the U.S. came from just 100,000 farms, and these middle-to-large-scale farms just kept getting bigger, in part by the way government subsidies are doled out

Most of us have little to no idea how behind-the-scenes forces control the food we buy, and the depth of the corruption involved. Philip Howard, Ph.D., author of “Concentration and Power in the Food System: Who Controls What We Eat?,” studies food system changes, with an emphasis on visualizing these trends.¹

“My motivation [for writing the book] was to uncover what’s going on, to help people understand who owns what and all the strategies these dominant firms use to further increase their power,” he says.

His work has been featured by many prominent media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune. In 2024 he is teaches undergraduate and undergraduate courses in community, food and agriculture as well as a graduate course.

He’s also an associate professor in the department of community sustainability at Michigan State University, and holds a Ph.D. in rural sociology. His two main projects in 2024² are characterizing diversity in the food system, particularly in plant seeds/animal genetics, high-protein foods and alcoholic beverages, and “bridging information gaps between food system actors, including the use of ‘ecolabels.’”

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