How Processed Food Took Over The World

Ever since the first human put meat over a flame, food has been processed. The use of fire, air, and salt to prepare and cook food, along with the development of preservation methods like fermentation, has enabled the evolution, adaptation, and growth of our species. However, industrialization has revolutionized the nature, extent, and purpose of food processing.

To understand how ultra-processed foods came to dominate entire diets around the globe, we travel to Natick, Massachusetts - population 36,630. Nestled on a quiet peninsula 20 miles west of Boston, the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center looks like a sleepy college campus. But inside, it houses one of the most advanced food research laboratories in the world.

Natick Labs, as the researchers call it, was born out of wartime necessity. When the U.S. entered World War II, it was woefully underprepared. Troops were still outfitted with gear from the previous world war. And because of isolationist sentiment, military planners assumed future combat would take place on American soil.

“We could fight in Minnesota in the winter and Florida in the summer, but that was it,” Army historian Steven Anders told the LA Times.

Now facing the beaches of Normandy, military officials brought in Georges Doriot, a former Harvard business professor, to lead a massive overhaul. When the war ended, Doriot lobbied for a centralized research center. Pentagon officials reviewed 278 proposals from 40 states and decided to build the lab in Natick.

Napoleon Bonaparte said, “An army marches on its stomach.” He knew one of the greatest challenges in conquering Europe was food. If the French troops were going to make it to Russia, they needed rations they could carry with them for months without spoiling. He offered 12,000 francs to anyone who could figure out a new preservation method. This spurred confectioner Nicolas François Appert to invent canning.

“The military could only fight as far out as supply chains,” James McClung, chief of Natick Lab’s Military Nutrition Division, told Atlas Obscura. “So when Napoleon’s Army finally figured out canning, sterilization, and pasteurization, the supply chains went further out. It revolutionized the military.”

The scientists at Natick Labs clearly agree with Bonaparte. Once the doors opened, they set out to develop methods to feed troops quickly, cheaply, and in transit. Their innovations - canned meat, powdered eggs, freeze-dried coffee - revolutionized combat logistics. In doing so, it also revolutionized the way the world eats.

After the war, these technologies didn’t vanish. They were repurposed for consumers. Canned foods are now ubiquitous. So are air fryers, M&Ms, freeze-dried foods, and dozens of other innovations consumers now take for granted - all of which are the direct result of U.S. military funding.

In the post-war era, convenience was no longer a mere necessity. It became an aspiration. In the decades that followed, processed food spread far beyond army rations. American supermarkets are filled with TV dinners, boxed cereal, and Tang. Food grew increasingly disconnected from anything grown in soil.

During the Cold War, processed food took on a new role as soft power. The U.S. began exporting freedom, capitalism, and high-fructose corn syrup. Nutritional science, industrial agriculture, and geopolitics converged. In global food aid programs and development efforts, the U.S. exported a whole vision of modern eating. Government-subsidized products flooded low-income countries under the banner of progress.

One example is the foods developed for young children. The USDA, USAID, and NIH teamed up to develop “blended foods,” a concoction meant to alleviate child malnutrition in the Third World. When introduced in 1966, blended foods consisted of corn and wheat soy milk. They were enhanced with protein, aligning with a prevalent view of child nutritional deficiency at that time. But America’s goals weren’t entirely altruistic. These products were also meant to promote common U.S. agricultural surpluses.

In the 1970s, the U.S.-centered food regime used structural adjustment and lowering wage costs to dump cheap food onto the market. Détente was marked by massive U.S. grain shipments to the Soviet Union, opening the door to an escalating trade war with Europe. By that time, Europe had achieved self-sufficiency by producing surpluses of butter, milk, cereals, and beef. The U.S. saw agro-exporting as a “green power” strategy.

But it was in the 1980s and ’90s that ultra-processed food truly went global. Neoliberal economic reforms dismantled protections for local agriculture. Under pressure from the IMF and World Bank, countries slashed food subsidies and opened their markets to foreign competition. Tariffs fell. Multinational corporations like Nestlé, PepsiCo, Kraft, and Coca-Cola moved in. They didn’t just sell snacks. They reshaped taste. They redesigned mealtimes. They changed entire food cultures.

In Latin America, Asia, and Africa, traditional diets of rice, beans, yams, and fermented vegetables gave way to soda, instant noodles, packaged breads, and snack cakes. In Brazil, Nestlé sent branded carts into favelas to teach low-income mothers how to make baby food with condensed milk and powdered cereal. In Mexico, Coca-Cola became so central to community life that in one village, it replaced water at religious ceremonies.

The success of UPFs wasn’t just clever marketing. It was structural. As governments pulled back from food programs, corporations stepped in. Ultra-processed foods filled the vacuum - cheap, shelf-stable, and profitable.

Now, in many middle-income countries, ultra-processed foods account for over half of daily caloric intake. In Colombia, 80% of households drink sugary beverages daily. In South Africa, 70% of children’s snacks are industrially processed. In Brazil, sales of UPFs are rising five times faster than those of unprocessed food.

The loss isn’t just nutritional. It’s cultural. With each shiny wrapper and cartoon mascot, industrial food began to displace traditional meals: the grandmother’s pot of beans, the community market, the slow-simmered stew. Fast food didn’t just speed up eating. It rewrote what a meal looks like.

What if “junk food” isn’t just a guilty pleasure or health hazard? What if it’s the aftershock of a global economic strategy - one that prioritized profit over people, and in the process, changed not only what we eat, but how we live?

In the next part, we’ll travel to Brazil, where one public health researcher watched this transformation unfold in real time and decided to name it.