What Happened to Food in America?
By Sadie Jane Mayhew
In 1869, a local Philadelphia produce merchant wanted to find a way to preserve vegetables and fruits to transport, store, and be attainable in winter months as well. He wanted to find a way to make vegetables more attainable and accessible for families and lower-income individuals. The merchant ended up finding a new way to do this and partnered with an icebox maker to open a small canning operation in Camden, New Jersey. They successfully preserved the short growing season in tin, so a family could still get tomatoes, vegetables, and preserves through a Northeastern winter without paying for the spoilage that made fresh produce a seasonal luxury. For nearly three decades, Anderson & Campbell, later the Joseph A. Campbell Preserve Company, canned vegetables, jellies, and mincemeat. This became wildly popular amongst American families, restaurateurs, and with popular demand, they wanted to expand canned nutritious vegetables and fruit products across America.
Everything changed in 1897, when a young company chemist named John T. Dorrance figured out how to condense soup by removing most of its water before canning it, then reconstituting it with a fresh can of water at home. The result was cheaper to ship, cheaper to store, and cheaper to sell. Campbell's first tomato soup went for just a dime a can, and it stayed under a dollar until 2012, making it one of the most affordable meal items for millions of families for over 100 years. Condensed soup made Campbell's a household name, and the company spent the next century becoming one: it introduced the red-and-white label in 1898 (an executive liked the colors on Cornell's football uniforms), sponsored Andy Warhol's most famous canvas in 1962, and expanded far beyond soup. Today the company, renamed the Campbell’s “soup” Company in 2024, also owns Pepperidge Farm, Swanson, Prego, V8, Pace, and, after a 2017 deal worth nearly $5 billion, Snyder's-Lance, whose portfolio includes Kettle Chips, Cape Cod, Pop Secret, and Snyder's of Hanover pretzels.
It is, in other words, a straightforward and common 20th-21st century American success story of major businesses: a small, humble idea turned to a national household name. What is less straightforward is how the company, and the industry it represents, got from "a way to keep vegetables edible in February" to a November 2025 scandal in which one of its own executives was recorded, in a lawsuit-generating audio clip, describing Campbell's products as made for "poor people" and disparaging its chicken as alleged "bioengineered meat." The executive, Martin Bally, then a vice president in the company's IT department, was fired after the recording surfaced; Campbell's called his comments "vulgar, offensive and false" and said its chicken comes from long-standing, USDA-approved suppliers. But the episode, arriving the same week families were shopping for Thanksgiving, crystallized a broader unease that has been building in American food culture for several years: a sense that the food on grocery shelves is not what it once was, that the companies making it know this, the wealth gap being at a record high while millions of American families are scraping by on major holidays only able to afford low quality foods with few alternatives, are the ones being mocked, humiliated and laughed at by the people who are selling it them.
Many corporate food giants once may have had humble beginnings, yes. Basic ideas and recipes designed to be mass-produced to sell in grocery stores across the country and eventually the world, bringing in mass profits and eventually being bought out and sold to even bigger food giants, slowly losing their innocence from the beginning of their story. This is a classic American story. And one that is now a horror story filled with corruption, disease, and mistrust.
The Roll-Up
The Bally recording was not an isolated embarrassment. In February 2024, Kellogg's chief executive, Gary Pilnick, suggested on CNBC that cash-strapped families facing high grocery prices might consider eating cereal for dinner, calling it "quite affordable”; a comment that triggered a boycott campaign and comparisons to "let them eat cake," not least because Pilnick made the remarks from outside a resort where rooms often start around $600 a night. Both moments fed a recurring narrative: that ordinary Americans have felt squeezed by food prices which, by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's count, have risen faster than overall inflation for much of the past several years. The executives running the country's largest food companies have occasionally said the quiet part out loud.
If billionaires telling American families to eat a box of over processed sugary breakfast cereals as a full meal for dinner, (a family size box of Kellog’s Frosted Flakes can cost up to $12 by the way), while our government’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)’s solutions to desperate and hungry Americans inflation costs is to make sacrifices of downsizing meals citing ‘healthy’ standard examples like “a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one additional item.”
Humorously as almost always these days as a way to combat chaos, the internet clapped back showing examples of what that actually looks like and while visually mocking back the absurdity of government officials giving this advice in the irony of living in a country giving trillions away to foreign countries and the military, all while most individuals in the Government who work for the American people, are taking home regular bonuses and millions a year. All the while, the government has been rolling back and cutting food safety standards (increasingly since 2024), giving major food corporations ways to mass-produce their products cheaper by adding more chemicals and bypassing previous safety guidelines and inspections. Worse, cuts to the FDA mean quality checks are not being conducted, which leads to contamination in factories, ending up on our grocery shelves, and bringing food-related illnesses into our homes.
That unease sits atop a decades-long pattern of consolidation that has reshaped the shelves of the ordinary American supermarket. Since the 1990s, large conglomerates have systematically acquired the small, "better-for-you" brands that grew up to compete with them: General Mills bought the organic mac-and-cheese maker Annie's Homegrown for $820 million in 2014; Hormel, the maker of Spam, bought the antibiotic-free deli meat company Applegate Farms for $775 million in 2015, along with the natural peanut-butter brand Justin's; Kellogg bought the whole-grain cereal brand Kashi in 2000 and the protein-bar company RXBAR for roughly $600 million in 2017. The pattern that followed Kashi is instructive: according to trade coverage in Food Dive, the brand grew sales at a 42 percent annual clip in its first eight years, then saw sales fall 35 percent between 2010 and 2014, after Kellogg folded its sales operations into its own. Longtime customers frequently report that a beloved "healthy" label tastes different, costs more, or disappears from shelves within a few years of being acquired. This is a cycle that food-industry analysts have watched repeat itself, brand after brand, for a generation.
Sixty-Seven Years of "Generally Recognized as Safe"
The chemistry of the American pantry has a specific origin point, too. In 1958, Congress created a regulatory category called GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) that let manufacturers determine, largely on their own, that new ingredients were safe without a full premarket review by the Food and Drug Administration. That 67-year-old loophole is now at the center of a rare bipartisan-flavored alliance: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and David Kessler, who ran the FDA under two presidents in the 1990s, have both called for it to be narrowed, arguing it allowed manufacturers to flood the market with additives such as corn syrup, maltodextrin and dozens of other refined starches and sweeteners, without independent safety review. The two men, along with the author Michael Pollan, discussed the issue at length in a 60 Minutes segment that first aired in February 2026 and was updated and rebroadcast in August; Kessler told correspondent Bill Whitaker that over the past several decades, American biology has been confronted with something it was never built to process. The Consumer Brands Association, the industry's leading trade group, countered in a statement to the program that there is no single agreed-upon scientific definition of "ultra-processed food," and that member companies follow FDA-established safety standards.
Whatever the precise definition, the scale of the shift is not contested. Federal data released by the CDC in 2025 found that ultra-processed foods account for an average of 55 percent of total calories consumed by Americans over the age of one, which is nearly 62 percent for children and teenagers, and 53 percent for adults, a modest decline from the mid-2010s but still among the highest rates in the world. A comparative study of supermarket staples published on the preprint server medRxiv found that ultra-processed products make up roughly 60 percent of caloric intake in the United States, compared with a range of 14 to 44 percent across several European countries, and that even basic staples like bread, canned goods and yogurt were more likely to be ultra-processed on shelves at mainstream American retailers than at their European counterparts. None of this is entirely new territory for network television: in 2012, 60 Minutes correspondent Sanjay Gupta reported on research suggesting that added sugar was contributing to a raft of American health problems, in a segment built around pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, who told Gupta he considered added sugar a public health crisis. CBS re-aired that 13-year-old segment in February 2026, a small sign of how long scientists have been raising the same alarm relative to how recently it has broken through.
The health data attached to that alarm has, meanwhile, kept accumulating. Research has linked higher ultra-processed food consumption to increased risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers, though scientists are still working out how much of that risk comes from the processing itself versus the nutrient profile. They’re high in sugar, sodium and refined starch, while being low in fiber and lacking needed daily nutrients, all while often being high in calories. With this, consumers are often left not feeling full while the brain is triggered by highly saturated flavors and additives, making them addictive, thus leading to overconsumption and consuming these higher caloric foods in excessive quantities.
Separately, and for reasons researchers are still investigating, diagnosed food allergies and autoimmune conditions have both been rising in the United States for decades: CDC survey data shows food-allergy prevalence among children roughly doubled between 1997 and 2018, and other federal and industry-funded surveys have tracked similar increases among adults. Researchers caution that changes in diagnostic awareness, hygiene, and other environmental factors are also plausible contributors, and the science connecting these trends specifically to ultra-processed food remains an active area of study rather than settled fact.
Cuts at the Agency
Overlapping with all of this is a rockier few years for the federal food-safety apparatus itself. Beginning in 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services eliminated roughly 10,000 jobs, including cuts of about 3,500 positions (which are nearly a fifth of the workforce) at the FDA, and roughly 2,400 at the CDC. The National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which had helped set pathogen guidance for produce and poultry, was disbanded in February 2025, and the CDC scaled back the number of pathogens tracked through its FoodNet surveillance system. State-level "rapid response" teams that move quickly during outbreaks saw budgets cut by roughly 60 percent, according to advocates tracking the changes, and produce-inspection funding fell by about 40 percent in some states. A long-planned food traceability rule, meant to help investigators trace contaminated ingredients back to their source more quickly, was postponed from January 2026 to July 2028 after lobbying from the grocery industry.
Since then, 2026 has brought a string of high-profile recalls and outbreaks: a multi-state Cyclospora outbreak tied to shredded lettuce from Taylor Farms that sickened thousands of people and killed at least two in Michigan; recurring salmonella outbreaks tied to shell eggs; a listeria scare involving ready-to-eat pasta; and dozens of smaller recalls for undeclared allergens and contamination. Food-safety advocates, including several who worked at the FDA and CDC before the cuts, argue the reductions have degraded the government's ability to detect and respond to these problems quickly. But the picture is genuinely contested rather than one-sided: independent fact-checks by outlets including Poynter found that, so far in 2026, the raw number of FDA and USDA recalls is running at roughly half of last year's total and is broadly in line with the past several years, and some longtime food-safety officials argue that a rise in investigations can reflect better detection rather than worse safety. It is also true that the FDA's own fiscal year 2026 budget request included a modest net increase (roughly $65 million) for its Human Foods Program specifically, framed around the administration's "Make America Healthy Again" agenda, even as the agency's overall discretionary budget fell. Both things- deep staffing cuts to inspection and surveillance programs and a White House rhetorically committed to overhauling food safety and additive policy- can be and are true at once. And many experts disagree sharply about how they net out.
Food Deserts by Design
None of this lands evenly. Roughly 19 to 23 million Americans live in what the USDA classifies as "low-income, low-access" neighborhoods; areas where a significant share of residents live more than a mile from a supermarket in cities, or more than ten miles in rural areas, according to the agency's Food Access Research Atlas. Nine of the ten states with the largest share of residents in these neighborhoods are in the South; Mississippi tops the list, with roughly 30 percent of its population living in a low-access area, followed by New Mexico and Arkansas. The pattern is not race-neutral. Researchers have repeatedly traced today's food deserts back to twentieth-century redlining and "supermarket redlining.” This is the practice, documented in cities from Hartford to Memphis, of chain grocery stores withdrawing from Black and Latino neighborhoods even as they expanded into white suburbs; one widely cited example found that eleven of thirteen chain supermarkets left Hartford between 1968 and 1984, an 85 percent decline in less than two decades. Multiple academic studies have found that predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are several times more likely than comparable white neighborhoods to lack a full-service grocery store, leaving residents more reliant on convenience stores and fast food outlets that disproportionately stock the ultra-processed products now under scrutiny. Some public-health advocates have taken to calling the phenomenon "food apartheid" rather than "food desert," arguing that the newer term better captures the role of policy and disinvestment rather than implying the scarcity occurred naturally.
The Missing Class and Blind Trust in Our Education
Compounding the problem is a quieter, decades-long retreat from teaching Americans how to cook in the first place. Home economics, also sometimes called "family and consumer sciences" in most states after the 1990s, was once a near-universal part of American secondary education. It is not anymore. According to a National Center for Education Statistics survey, only about a quarter of U.S. high schools still offer a dedicated home-economics or FCS course as of the mid-2020s, and enrollment in the field fell by roughly 38 percent between 2003 and the early 2010s, according to figures from the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences. Education researchers attribute the decline to a combination of forces: the rise of standardized testing and STEM-focused curricula in the 1980s and 1990s, chronic budget pressure on elective classes, and a lingering, outdated association between home economics and mid-century gender roles. The effect, nutrition researchers argue, is a generation of Americans who reached adulthood having never been taught basic cooking skills, portion sizes or how to read a nutrition label, at precisely the moment the products on grocery shelves became more engineered and more heavily marketed than ever.
How the (Dinner) Tables are Turning
There are signs, however, that the traffic is not moving in only one direction. A 2026 trend report from the marketing firm NOURISH Food Marketing described a broad consumer swing toward what it called "the return of real.” This is a sort of rejection of what it termed artificial perfection in favor of transparency and recognizable ingredients, and cited rising public skepticism toward ultra-processed products as a defining feature of the current moment. Cooking-focused creators have become one of the more durable categories on TikTok and Instagram, with millions of people following home cooks who walk through ingredient labels, teach basic knife skills, or promote whole-food grocery hauls; the same platforms that once amplified processed snack marketing now regularly amplify home cooking and whole-ingredient content. The 2024 Kellogg boycott showed that this skepticism can translate into consumer action, however briefly, and grocery executives and food scientists alike have described a customer base that is more willing than it was a decade ago to read an ingredient list, ask what "natural flavors" actually means, or simply buy less from companies whose executives have become punchlines.
What remains unresolved is whether that shift in sentiment can outpace the economics that built the current system in the first place. Ultra-processed foods are, by most measures, cheaper and faster to produce than fresh alternatives, which is precisely what made them so appealing to a mid-twentieth-century America eager for convenience, and remains what makes them the only realistic option in neighborhoods without a nearby grocery store, or for families with neither the time nor the training to cook from scratch. Untangling those constraints from a regulatory system built in 1958, to acquisition patterns that have consolidated the industry for thirty years, to a school system that stopped teaching food skills a generation ago, to a federal food-safety apparatus now stretched thinner than it was two years ago, will likely take longer than the moment of public attention currently trained on it. But for the first time in years, that attention seems to be sustained with anger, enthusiasm, and real demand for change. Whether it’s starting with individual education and dieting at home, demands at the local Government halls, or within larger communities virtually and in person, it is happening. And the American government knows this.
Let This Be a Warning
They are weaponizing food against the American people. Do not back down. There is already so much at stake when it comes to our safety, financial security, and overall well-being, but we have to be healthy in order to have the strength to fight for all of these rights. Food is a basic necessity, and the American people have every right to demand access to affordable, high-quality, nutritious food.
In a country so heavily influenced by corporations, our spending habits can be one of the most powerful ways we create change. Of course, access is not equal. Many households face limited options, financial hardship, or situations where simply putting anything on the table to feed their children is the priority. But if you have the ability to make more conscious choices, ask yourself… do you really want to keep allowing this to happen to you, your family, or the families in your community?
If there is any way you can help create greater access to better food, whether through your purchasing decisions, supporting local initiatives, or helping provide nutritious options within your community, then now is the time to make that effort. Real change will require all of us, and the health and well-being of the majority should not be treated as a privilege.
Whether it’s protesting the grocery aisles with your wallet, sharing informative videos of evidence of quality of food, writing congressional letters demanding change, or publicly questioning our food sources and seeking ways to educate ourselves at home from what has been withheld in our schools and mainstream media; it all suggests that the conversation about what happened and is happening to food in the United States is no longer a fringe one.
Healthy food leads to healthy bodies and minds. Healthy bodies and minds mean sticking around longer, motivation for change and revolution, and the willingness to fight for all that doesn’t serve us as human beings and controls us. Food really is that deep.
