It must be weird working for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). As the UN’s principal agency dealing with food and agribusinesses, with oversight of the entire global food system, everything it does looks a bit like laying its very own minefield through which it then has to find safe passage.

As in its annual State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) report. Having belatedly embraced the methodological rigor of true cost accounting last year (assessing both direct and indirect costs of food production and consumption), its 2024 SOFA report bristles with controversies and contradictions. Get your head around this headline: “Agri-food systems generate benefits for society but also have over $10 trillion in hidden costs for environmental, social, and economic sustainability globally.” That is not a small number! The biggest component of that $10 trillion is “unhealthy dietary patterns"—what the world's citizens are eating. “Unhealthy dietary patterns” drive $8 trillion in annual hidden costs caused by the global agri-food system. And who exactly is responsible for shaping those “dietary patterns?” The same global food and agribusinesses that are the FAO’s principal stakeholders! So, tread carefully here.

Please don't think that just because they're "hidden," these costs don't really matter. Just a week after the publication of the FAO's 2024 SOFA report, we discovered exactly what that looks like here in the UK. A report from the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) published new research from Professor Tim Jackson at the University of Surrey showing that the UK's addiction to unhealthy, ultra-processed foods (oozing fatty, salty, and sugary ingredients) is costing the country £268 billion a year.

I know all these big numbers can lead directly to ‘psychic numbing'—but this one is quite easy to get a handle on. Total spending on the National Health Service here in the UK comes in at around £220 billion a year—i.e., less than the costs of this vast addictive dietary malfunction! Let's break that figure down a bit. Dealing with the direct health impacts of these unhealthy diets costs the NHS around £68 billion, social care around £14 billion, and welfare services around £10 billion. The rest comprises the indirect costs of lost productivity through diet-related illnesses and premature death.

How could they not be as part of a Labour government? And we're often told how problems like obesity and diabetes pose a huge threat to medical services. But we rarely hear about the principal cause of these chronic, non-communicable diseases, let alone any indication that those ministers intend to address this crisis through much harsher regulation. As one of the report’s contributing authors put it:

This £268 billion shows us that we have a food system that privatizes the profits and socializes the harms from bad food. It puts a price on the failure of governments stretching back over 30 years to regulate Big Food.

I imagine that this mismatch between powerful global multinational companies and weak, ‘captured’ governments will sound somewhat familiar. It's exactly the same with the fossil fuel industry, which continues to insist on its right to extract huge profits from its oil and gas assets, even as the planet burns. Just as Big Food makes huge profits from selling chemically enhanced empty calories, devoid of any nutritional value, to increasingly addicted citizens—even as their governments look on ineffectually from the sidelines. These two vast global industries continue to prosper in this way precisely because governments allow them to make war on the planet and on their own citizens. This is what extractive, neoliberal capitalism looks like in the 21st century.

That said, breaking these perverse dependencies will not be easy. ‘Cheap gas, cheap food'—criticize these at your peril in today’s economy. If governments forced Big Oil and Big Food to internalize the cost that they currently impose on people and planet, both fuel and food would be much more expensive! The FFCC’s report demonstrated how problematic that would be. So many people now rely on unhealthy, ultra-processed food in the UK that households would need to spend an extra £38 a week (or £57 billion a year across the economy as a whole) to follow the kind of healthy eating guidelines in the UK Government's own Eat Well program. Not good for inflation. Not good for the cost of living crisis. And not good for mainstream politicians struggling to keep populist political parties from increasing the foothold they already have in all western democracies.

As regards the US, will all this look any different under the new Trump administration—especially with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. heading up the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the powerful Food and Drug Administration? Well, intriguingly, big US food companies have been in a state of panic ever since RFK was invited by Trump to help him “Make America Healthy Again.” Putting to one side RFK's dangerously unscientific conspiracy theories about vaccines, he's also campaigned for rigorous controls on ultra-processed foods, food additives, the use of pesticides, and the US food industry's dependence on corn syrup—all of which are strongly supported by many progressive environmental and health NGOs in the US. If he was to be successful here, this would completely transform the US food system.

RFK has got a particular concern about endocrine disruptors (chemicals in our food and water that can interfere with the body's hormonal balance), convinced that the ubiquitous and poorly regulated use of these chemicals can affect fertility, sperm counts, and reproductive development. As so often with RFK, some of his opinions can often sound pretty ‘off the wall’ (as in his belief that the pesticide Atrazine is a major factor in the growing numbers of young people affected by gender dysphoria), but more and more mainstream health experts now agree that this ‘chemicalization’ of our food and environment (reaching right back to the fetus in the womb) has had a major impact on issues like sperm counts and the early onset of puberty.

In terms of political risk, taking on big food is second only to taking on big oil. If I were a betting person, I wouldn't reckon on RFK being in post for more than a few months—not least because he has a penchant for a lot of weird stuff that makes him easy prey for Big Food’s ‘attack dogs.’

However, there must be one ‘scenario’ on their risk registers that puts the fear of God into them: the possibility that RFK and Elon Musk become best buds. Amongst the many bots buzzing around in Elon’s brain is the fear that humankind is heading towards extinction—primarily because average fertility is falling around the world, especially in those rich, white nations on which the future of human civilization so obviously depends (his view, not mine). He's a passionate pro-natalist, and having fathered at least 12 children (with three different women), he's clearly up for putting his sperm where his mouth is. (He has, disappointingly, denied offering sperm to strangers at random dinner parties.)

He blames this all-but unstoppable demographic trend on woke, progressive liberal ideas, and particularly on feminism itself. Pronatalism today has some truly scary overlaps, not just with ‘incel’ misogyny but with latter-day eugenics. So, imagine being a fly/bot on the wall when RFK manages to sit Elon down for a serious talk and tells him that declining fertility is not down to toxic feminism but to falling sperm counts in young (and even middle-aged) men. And that those falling sperm counts are down to toxic chemicals in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink.

Elon seems to be a bit (how can I put this?) ‘ambivalent’ when it comes to the importance of robust scientific evidence. But if RFK plays his hand right, he could have Elon eating out of it in just a few minutes. Evidence of the chemical assault on human fertility mounts by the month (detailing how male sperm counts have been more than halved over the last 40 years), while Shanna Swan’s 2020 best-selling “Countdown” provides critical background reading for Elon and his fellow pro-birthers. RFK might even persuade him to give up on his relentless auditioning for a starring role in President Trump's own special production of The Handmaid's Tale, allowing women the world over to breathe just a tiny bit more easily.

In such strange ways and places do we need to seek out some comfort in these troubled times?