Almost everyone alive eats from the food industry, and a third work in farming
Unless you grow everything you eat or live by hunting and gathering, you depend on the food industry. That web reaches from seed makers and tractor factories to lorries, warehouses and supermarket shelves. One person in three worldwide works in agriculture, yet farming contributes only about 3 per cent of global economic output.
Defining the industry is surprisingly hard because it touches so much. Britain's Food Standards Agency sums it up as everything from farming and production through packaging and distribution to shops and catering. The US Department of Agriculture prefers the phrase food system, a network that includes the makers of farm chemicals and equipment, the banks and hauliers serving farms, and the processors, wholesalers, retailers and restaurants that link fields to plates. Its biggest players are sometimes called Big Food, a label coined by the writer Neil Hamilton.
Most of what people eat still starts on land: about 83 per cent of human food comes from terrestrial agriculture, with fishing and fish farming supplying much of the rest. Turning raw ingredients into products follows a few basic patterns. A wedding cake is a one-off, made to order. A bakery baking a set number of cupcakes works in batches, guessing demand. Chocolate bars and canned food roll down mass production lines, while a sandwich shop assembles each order on the spot from ingredients kept ready.
Selling changed dramatically in the twentieth century, when the supermarket became the industry's defining shop, gathering tens of thousands of products under one roof all year round. In urbanising parts of Latin America and Asia, supermarkets increasingly buy straight from farmers or favoured suppliers, and traditional wholesale markets have lost ground.
The environmental bill is large. Agriculture accounts for somewhere between 14 and 28 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and one estimate puts the food industry's yearly carbon dioxide output at almost 19 times that of commercial aviation. A 2020 review for the European Union put the combined environmental cost of food production at around 12 trillion dollars a year.
Source: Food industry
