Food Industry’s System Structure and Misaligned Interests with Public Health
1. Food politics: The interests of the food industry are misaligned with those of public health. Explain this misalignment. Does the structure of the industrial food system present an instance of "moral hazard"? Defend your answer.
2. Food security: Do people have a (moral) right to food security? Explain what food security/insecurity is. Explain the "principle of preventing bad occurrences". How does Singer use this principle to argue for supporting the food insecure? What objections might we raise for this argument? Are any of these objections convincing? Defend your answers.（choose 1）
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Food Politics
Introduction
The food industry has introduced a fierce competition for consumers’ money through aggressive advertising efforts and their display of products on supermarket shelves. The fierce competition imposes poor diets worldwide, characterized by immense consumption of ultra-processed packaged food products manufactured and marketed by a diverse selection of companies known as the food industry. Several factors such as health, social, cultural, and environmental concerns influence the commercial perspective about the food industry fueled by fears of food security, obesity, labor practices, and food aid that affect consumers. While the food industry aims to provide foods to consumers, there is a misalignment between their interests and that of public health in their primary objectives, research, and supporting regulatory policies, thereby presenting instances of moral hazards in the production and packaging of foods.
The misalignment of the food industry’s interests with those of public health
One of the ways the food industry and public health’s interests are misaligned is the primary interest each wants to achieve. Public health aims to promote good health and the prevention of preventable illnesses. The department achieves this by pushing and promoting healthy eating practices that include consuming a balanced diet, healthy foods, fruits, and vegetables, and avoiding processed foods and drinks. The discovery that dietary risk factors are a crucial contributor to deaths and severe health conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and heart diseases, due to increased consumption of excessively processed and packaged foods informs the goal. Contrary, Sacks et al. (1-2) argue that the food industry’s primary goal is to make significant profits for its shareholders. These industries achieve this by producing attractive and addictive foods, aggressively marketing them, and influencing the political environment to pass regulations that facilitate their market power without caring about their implications on people’s health.
The misalignment of the food industry and public health’s interests are in research about food. The food industry is heavily involved in food and nutritional research in different capacities, such as funding research, employees being part of the research team, and developing research. Also, they participate in providing expert information that helps nurture the relationship between them and public health experts for mutual understanding of the two. However, according to nutrition researchers, the food industry participates in such research to increase the marketing opportunities of their products that may be harmful to people’s health. Also, they do so to improve their perceived credibility and mutual interest in the public’s health and reduce criticism leveled against them by nutrition researchers and public health experts (Fabbri et al. e9-e11). These interests in nutrition research contradict public health’s interest in research about food, which aims to establish a connection between the food consumed by the public and diseases they develop and develop the appropriate diet for citizens to achieve optimum health.
Another way the interests of these two entities are misaligned is in regulatory policies. According to the World Health Organization, unhealthy dietary practices are the primary contributors to obesity and obesity-related non-communicable diseases (Steele et al. 4-5). The WHO recommends various health interventions to reduce these issues, including identifying low-cost healthy foods that all people can buy. Additionally, policymakers introduce regulatory policies that govern the food marketed to people to ensure it is healthy and ban ...